Immigration Legislation for Dummies

Authors note:
This is a chapter of a larger thesis concerning the Globalist mantra of "the free movement of human capital, " and "full employment is assumed."

How do we allow highly-skilled guestworkers without detritus, or harmful effects to the domestic workforce?

Highly-skilled guestworker permits are labor subsidies granted to employers. When addressing highly-skilled guestworkers, it is reasonable to address the resolution of the following problems:

The purported labor shortage
Over subscription in certain occupations
The free-market wage system
Guestworker caps – housing
inflation - wage stagnation
Guestworker repatriation

The purported labor shortage
Labor shortages must be resolved domestically, the permanent cycling of guestworkers does not address the core purported labor shortage. Employers must subsidize the resolution of the labor shortage through educational grants. This educational subsidy should increased with each annual renewal per guestworker.

Economic incentives (incrementally ascending work-permit costs per guestworker) would motivate the employer to either sponsor the employee for citizenship, or replace the guestworker with a domestic employee as soon as possible.

The behavior of guestworker employers must be modified through an ascending education tariff to deter long term guestworker dependence.

Over subscription in certain occupations
Computer-related occupations represent 41.7% of all 2001-2005 initial employment H-1B approvals. Computer-Related payroll occupations represent 3.09% of the 2005 Full-Time wage and salary earners

The H-1B visa lottery system does not ensure that the best talent is approved for employment and many occupations are short-changed because the "Computer-related occupations" employment category is oversubscribed.

The free-market wage system
The value of American citizenship is now in question, excessive immigration diminishes the value of American citizenship; without immigration caps, American citizenship becomes valueless and living standards cannot be maintained. The scarcity of guestworker visas ensures that these visas retain value – the "brightest and the best" will no longer have interest in migration when the work-permit loses value.

Replacing the lottery system with a free-market system:
Each highly-skilled guestworker visa, should be evaluated in terms of the highest salary offer within each occupation where a visa is petitioned.

Similar to the method that professional sports teams draft college athletes, each team (occupation) would take-turns bidding for talent. The highest bidding firm, within the occupation, would win the "first-round" guestworker approval – ensuring that the most competitive salary offers "win" the guestworker approval within each industry.

By rotating through all of the occupations desiring guestworker visas, the over-subscribe occupation(s) would be last in line for approval and subject to the highest salary selection criterion.

Guestworker caps – housing inflation - wage stagnation
One important economic indicator for overall immigration caps should the availability of rental housing. Immigrants, our children and many wage-earners are entering a hostile rental housing market which has 636,000 fewer occupied rental units than in 1999, while growth in the Civilian noninstitutional population (16 and over) was 21,236,000. (1999 – 2006 Census and BLS data.)

(The 1997 "Second Home Mortgage Deduction" should be revisited, as millions of housing units are now listed as "Vacant Year Round.")

Support:
America's Rental Housing: Homes for a Diverse Nation
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/hvs/prevann.html
http://data.bls.gov/PDQ/outside.jsp?survey=ln
Out of Reach

Guestworker annual caps would be some fraction of the (rental housing based) overall immigration caps.

America can no longer afford to allow housing inflation to cause inflation in salary-requirement. Affordable housing is the key to America’s global competitiveness. Reducing the wage-earner’s housing costs would in effect increase the wage-earners disposable income without a salary increase – wage-stagnation can be defeated by lowering sustenance costs.

Guestworker repatriation
To encourage guestworker repatriation, guestworkers from countries without retirement totalization agreements should have the option of being refunded the employee paid Social Security withholdings at the U.S. consulate in the country of origin.