alt Hacker NewsGenuinely curious: why do we need H1B visas for artists? My understanding is that H1B visas are meant to cover highly-skilled work that can't be done by locals, and "art" doesn't seem like a field with a shortage of local candidates?
Replies
Interestingly, there's a whole category of H1B visas just for fashion models. H-1B3, which is for models with "distinguished merit and ability".
A famous supermodel can most likely get an O1 visa, for people of extraordinary ability. But agency models more commonly work on H1-B. Melania Trump is a famous example. These visas are tied to an employer and there's less portability. It's a two tier system.
Personally I think that there is some harm here. Agencies bring in young women from relatively poor countries and they are put in conditions where abuse, even sexual assault, is common and can face pressures to tolerate conditions and shoots that a local person with a safety network would not.
this also holds true for chemical, biomedical researchers, mechanical engineers working in deep tech, software engineering is such an anomaly that it's hard to do income based lottery without overindexing on swe market
You're not genuinely curious because it's obviously stupid that we'd need H1B visas for artists.
If their art's got enough value to be valuable in the real sense, they're well above all this. Otherwise they're nothing.