A lot of things "flood the job market". In 2021, >104k degrees CIS degrees were awarded by US colleges [1]. There's a flood of young people entering the market every year, and they're willing to work for >30% less than experienced engineers because it's their first proper job.

IMO as with all things money, it's all about negotiation. Of course a lot of negotiating power simply has to do with the market supply/demand, but a whole lot has to do with policy and rules. Giving more negotiating power to H1Bs would definitely put upwards pressure on salaries.

Re: construction workers. Same problem, worker's rights. A lot of construction workers are undocumented: an estimated 20 percent [2][3]. Undocumented immigrants have virtually no negotiating power. Allowing this solid 1/5th of the workforce to confront their employer without fear of deportation would go a long way increasing compensation for the industry as a whole.

[1]: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_322.10.a...

[3]: https://limos.engin.umich.edu/deitabase/2024/05/28/undocumen...

First, GP wrote:

    > A problem solved if visas are not associated to employers, because then an employer couldn’t hold onto the employee like this.

Then you wrote:

    > No. Because it still floods the job market with off short talent that is willing to work for 30% less.

In many highly developed countries in the world, visas are not associated with an employer. We don't see people clamouring to post about it on HN. Why? Because the number of visas offered to skilled migrants is relatively limited.

Second, you wrote:

    > Construction workers arent tied to a single employer (usually) and that drops the price of labour across the board even in union dominated markets.

How can you be sure that this is true? Do you have a "natural" experiment where two similar areas in the US have construction workers where area A has workers tied to a single employers and area B not? Else, how can you say this with such confidence?

Yeah it's fair to say that if suddenly a huge influx of people show up causing downwards pressure on wages then that can happen. Though I feel like construction work is a place where there is legitimately more limits to how many people who are willing to work in that industry (even if you paid me double a SWE salary, I'm not working in scaffolding all day) locally.

I do think that if you don't tie the visa to the employer, then it's _less interesting_ for an employer to recruit people from abroad. Especially for companies whose entire business model is "get cheaper IT labor, locked into mandatory service, in exchange for being an entryway to the country".

Like if you despise those shops, then you really should be lobbying to get rid of the employer lock-in.

The simple solution is for the government to put a tax on the visa. For each H1-B the company does, they pay the government an additional $200,000 per year (or some other large, arbitrary sum). If they really need them that badly, they'll pay up. What I think happens is that they discover they don't need them quite so much.