Immigration Lottery Design: Engineered and Coincidental Consequences of H-1B Reforms

Abstract

In 2005, the U.S. Congress legislated that the H-1B visa program create 20,000 annual slots reserved for advanced-degree applicants. Since then, the U.S. Customs and Immigration Service (USCIS) has used visa allocation rules that comply with this legislation. Following a directive in the April 2017 Buy American and Hire American Executive Order by President Trump, USCIS tweaked its H-1B visa allocation rule in 2019. While remaining in compliance with the legislation set forth in 2005, the USCIS estimated that the 2019 rule change would increase the number of higher-skill awards by more than 5,000 annually at the expense of lower-skill awards. The rule change was explicitly engineered for this objective. In this paper we characterize all visa allocation rules that comply with the 2005 legislation and use this framework to analyze the rules that have been deployed in the interim. Despite specifying rigid caps, we show that the legislation permits a range of rules that can change the number of high-skill awards by as many as 14,000 in an average year. Of all rules that comply with the legislation, the 2019 rule adopted by the Trump administration maximizes the rate of high-skill awards and minimizes the rate of low-skill awards. However, two previous and relatively unknown changes to the H-1B visa allocation rule resulted in more substantial changes to this distribution. These earlier reforms, however, were motivated by logistical considerations, potentially without understanding of their distributional consequences.

Triage Protocol Design for Ventilator Rationing in a Pandemic: Integrating Multiple Ethical Values through Reserves

“…Within medicine, specific resources like vaccines and plasma therapy may require additional considerations which differ from ventilators. Outside of medicine, our results are relevant for immigration visa allocation in the United States (Pathak, Rees-Jones and Sönmez, 2020a), affirmative action in school choice systems in Boston, Chicago, New York City and Chile (Dur et al, 2018;Dur, Pathak and Sönmez, 2019;Correa et al, 2019), affirmative action for public school and government positions in India (Aygün and Turhan, 2017;Baswana et al, 2018;Sönmez and Yenmez, 2019a,b), and diversity plans for college admissions in Brazil (Aygün and Bo, 2016). We leave explorations of these connections to future research.…”

“…Sequential reserve matching rules were first formally introduced by Kominers and Sönmez (2016) in a more general environment with heterogenous units and multiple terms of allocation. Although not life-and-death situations, reserve systems are widespread in real-life applications including the implementation of affirmative action policies in school choice in Boston (Dur et al, 2018), Chicago (Dur, Pathak and Sönmez, 2019), the implementation of reservation policies in India (Sönmez and Yenmez, 2019a,b), and the allocation of immigration visas in the U.S. (Pathak, Rees-Jones and Sönmez, 2020a). As shown in these studies, the processing order of reserve categories is a key parameter with significant distributional implications.…”

“…The total number of ventilators awarded to essential personnel is 40 and the total number awarded to other patients is 20. On the other hand, if the reserve category is processed after the unreserved units, then the 30 unreserved units will be split evenly between the essential personnel and other 13 The U.S. Customs and Immigration has a reserve system for the H1-B immigration visas, and since 2005, it has deployed four different allocation mechanisms, sometimes unintentionally (Pathak, Rees-Jones and Sönmez, 2020a). Boston Public Schools had a reserve system in its school assignment plan in which half of each school's seats were reserved for students from the neighborhood.…”

“…While our primary application is pandemic rationing of scarce medical resources, in this section we provide a more general model which has several other applications including affirmative action in school choice (Pathak and Sönmez, 2013b;Dur et al, 2018;Correa et al, 2019), college admissions (Aygün and Bo, 2016;Baswana et al, 2018), assignment of government positions (Sönmez and Yenmez, 2019a,b), and diversity in immigration visa allocation (Pathak, Rees-Jones and Sönmez, 2020a). Despite this generality, the terminology is tailored to our main application.…”

Immigration Policy Levers for U.S. Innovation and Startups

“…There have been some legal challenges to the proposed change, and others have argued against the switch in lottery order by noting, for example, that it would de-prioritize applicants with doctorate degrees from non-US schools. 14 Pathak et al (2020) provides an extensive analysis of this rule change and its optimality under the existing H-1B structure.…”