The Talent Visa

The problem

Proposal № 003 argued for a generous, honest door for people who want to come, work a few years, and go home richer, with no pretence of citizenship attached. That covers most of the people at the border, and it is deliberately not about permanence.

This proposal is about the opposite population: the small number of people the United States should be actively trying to keep forever, and currently treats worst.

The H-1B visa is capped at 85,000 a year, a number set in 1990 and essentially unchanged since. Registrations in recent years have run to several hundred thousand for those slots. The allocation mechanism is a lottery. A neurosurgery researcher, a semiconductor process engineer and an entry-level programmer are entered into the same random draw, and the country's skilled immigration policy for the year is settled by a random number generator.

The permanent side is worse. Employment-based green cards are capped at about 140,000 a year, and that figure includes spouses and children, so the number of actual workers admitted is roughly half of it. On top of the cap sits a 7 percent per-country limit, applied identically to Iceland and to India. The consequence is a backlog of roughly 1.8 million people, in which an Indian national in the employment-based queue can face a wait measured not in years but in decades, and in some categories longer than a working life.

These are people already in the United States, already employed, already paying taxes, whose employers have already attested that no American worker was available. They are simply waiting, for a period determined by their country of birth.

While they wait, they are tied to the sponsoring employer. Changing jobs risks the petition. That is not a minor inconvenience; it is a structural suppression of bargaining power, and it is the reason the strongest critique of the H-1B programme, that it holds down wages, has real force. The problem is not the immigrant. It is the leash.

Meanwhile the United States educates roughly a million international students, many in exactly the fields it says it lacks, and then provides no reliable way for them to stay. Canada, the UK, Australia and France have all built fast, points-based or startup-specific routes, and have been explicitly marketing them to people in the American queue.

Roughly 55 percent of American startups valued above a billion dollars have had at least one immigrant founder. The country has no startup visa at all.

The proposal

Uncap the top, unleash the tied, and end allocation by lottery and by birthplace. A high bar, applied quickly, leading to citizenship rather than to a decade of waiting.

How it would work

1. Exempt advanced degrees from the cap. Graduates of accredited US programmes at master's level and above in fields on a published shortage list are exempt from the H-1B numerical cap, as are holders of comparable foreign credentials meeting the same bar. We spend public money educating these people and then deport them on graduation, which is the single most self-defeating sequence in American immigration policy.

1. Replace the lottery with a wage-ranked queue. Where a cap still binds, allocate by offered salary relative to the local prevailing wage for the occupation, highest first. This does two things at once: it directs scarce slots to the highest-value roles, and it kills the low-wage-substitution use of the programme, which is the legitimate core of the objection to it. An employer seeking a cheap junior developer stops winning slots immediately.

1. Abolish the per-country cap on employment-based permanent residence. Birthplace is not a skill. A queue that makes an engineer wait 40 years because of where they were born and 2 years otherwise is not a policy, it is an accident of a 1965 drafting choice.

1. Do not count families against the cap. Count workers as workers and admit their spouses and children alongside them, roughly doubling effective skilled admissions without changing the headline number. Spouses receive work authorisation on arrival.

1. Portability. The visa attaches to the person, not the employer. A holder may change jobs freely within the qualifying category without restarting anything. This is the item that converts the programme from a source of employer leverage into an ordinary labour market, and it answers the wage-suppression critique more effectively than any cap ever has.

1. A startup visa. A route for founders who raise a qualifying investment or reach a revenue or employment threshold, with permanent residence conditioned on hitting employment milestones after several years. Every peer country has one.

1. A hard bar, and a real one. None of this loosens vetting, and the standard rises rather than falls: security screening unchanged, the wage floor genuine and enforced, employer attestations audited with penalties that bite. This proposal makes the door faster, not lower.

The numbers

Effective skilled admissions today: roughly 65,000 to 70,000 workers a year through the employment-based permanent categories, once dependents are netted out of the 140,000.

Under items 3 and 4, the same statutory cap admits about 140,000 workers, an immediate doubling with no increase in the headline number Congress set.

The backlog is 1.8 million people. Clearing it over a decade requires roughly 180,000 additional admissions a year on a temporary recapture basis, and there is precedent: unused visa numbers from prior years, lost to administrative failure, have been recaptured by Congress before and run into the hundreds of thousands.

On the fiscal side, the arithmetic is not close. A worker admitted at the H-1B median wage, well above the national median, pays substantially more in federal taxes over a working life than they draw in benefits, and arrives with their education already paid for by someone else. Standard estimates of the lifetime net fiscal contribution of a college-educated immigrant arriving in their late twenties run to several hundred thousand dollars in present value. Multiplied across a doubling of skilled admissions, this is one of very few policies in this catalog that improves the fiscal position of № 023 rather than costing something.

The founder effect is harder to quantify and probably larger. If 55 percent of American billion-dollar startups have an immigrant founder, the marginal value of the founder who went to Toronto instead is not captured by any wage statistic.

The honest objections

"This displaces American workers and holds down American wages." The most substantial objection and it should not be dismissed, because the empirical literature is genuinely mixed and the mechanism is real: an employer who can hire a worker who cannot easily quit has power over that worker's wage, and that power spills onto colleagues. Our answer is that the leash is the problem and the cap is a bad substitute for removing it. Item 5 makes the visa portable, which restores the worker's ability to walk, and item 2 ranks by wage, which structurally excludes the cheap-substitute use case. A programme that admits only workers paid well above the prevailing wage, who can quit on Friday and start elsewhere on Monday, cannot suppress wages by construction. The current programme can, and does, at the margin.

"Why import engineers instead of training Americans?" Both, and № 028 is this catalog's answer on the training side. But the framing contains a false premise: skilled workers are not a fixed pool being divided. A semiconductor fab that gets its process engineers gets built, and it then employs several thousand Americans who would otherwise have no fab to work in. The alternative to the immigrant engineer is frequently not an American engineer; it is the facility being built in another country, with all of its jobs.

"You are stripping poorer countries of the people they most need." A serious moral objection and one this catalog takes seriously, having built № 006 around the opposite proposition. Three partial answers. Remittances from skilled migrants are enormous and flow to exactly the countries in question, exceeding aid flows several times over. The prospect of emigration measurably raises training rates at home, so the stock of trained people rises even as some leave. And № 018 exists precisely to make return attractive rather than a defeat. Partial answers, not a full one: for very small countries losing a majority of their physicians, the harm is real and no amount of remittance flow compensates for it.

"Ending the per-country cap means one or two countries take most of the visas." Arithmetically true for some years, because the backlog is concentrated by country. That is a description of who has been waiting, not a distortion introduced by the reform. The current system does not produce national diversity so much as it produces different waiting times for identical qualifications, which is a strange thing for a country founded on the proposition that birth should not determine standing.

"A wage-ranked queue favours big firms who can pay the most." Partly, and it is the real cost of item 2. Large incumbents can outbid a startup for a slot. Item 6 is the counterweight, giving founders a route that does not run through the wage auction at all, and item 1 removes the cap entirely for advanced-degree graduates, which is where most startup technical hiring actually happens. If the wage ranking proves to entrench incumbents, a set-aside for smaller employers is the obvious repair.

Sources

• H-1B annual numerical cap of 65,000 plus 20,000 for US advanced-degree holders, unchanged in substance since the Immigration Act of 1990; USCIS registration volumes (uscis.gov)
• Employment-based permanent residence limit of approximately 140,000 annually including derivatives; 7 percent per-country limit, Immigration and Nationality Act § 202(a)(2)
• Employment-based backlog estimates of approximately 1.8 million principals and dependents; Cato Institute and CRS analyses (crsreports.congress.gov)
• Immigrant founders among US billion-dollar startups, approximately 55 percent; National Foundation for American Policy (nfap.com)
• International student enrollment in the United States, approximately 1.1 million; Institute of International Education Open Doors (iie.org)
• Comparative skilled migration routes: Canada Express Entry and Global Skills Strategy; UK Global Talent; France Tech Visa
• National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration (2016), on lifetime net fiscal contributions by education level
• Proposals № 003 (The Open Door Compact); № 006 (The Marshall Compact); № 011 (The Citizenship Election); № 018 (The Returner Corps); № 022 (The Turnstile); № 023 (The Debt Covenant); № 028 (The Apprentice Republic)