Previous threads we've done: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=proberts.
Do you have any thoughts on that? Is this one of those "why don't they just..." type of ideas that people with first hand knowledge know is majorly flawed?
I would also argue that prioritizing the highest paid jobs makes displacement of US workers less likely. It would raise the bar for everyone.
Also there are a lot of parties involved in gaming the complex system whose services wouldn't be needed if the solution was that simple. I think Upton Sinclair's quote applies here. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-ge...
We saw similar things with previous "investor visas" where there was no intention to start a business and the USCIS had to stop issuing them for many years because of the pervasive fraud on both sides of the equation. I can guarantee that some creative lawyer out there was already thinking about how to game the US "startup visa" when that was proposed a few years back.
The process is completely divorced from reality.
The questions and requirements are meaningless.
To my eye, there is zero rationality in the process.
As far as I can see, the and the only effect of the visa programme is that there is a limited number of visas, and so this acts to prevent businesses from hiring the people they want to hire, and that's not freedom; and in the process of doing so, causing untold disruption to lives and businesses and direct and indirect costs to businesses, individuals and economy as a whole.
The only difficulty I see is that salary isn't necessarily proportional to a person's usefulness to the economy or the country. A person can start a company and pay himself a million dollars a year while the person and the company does nothing at all. Sure the IRS gets to collect a bunch, but at that point we might as well create a class of visas that are sold in an auction.
But ironically it's also the only thing that prevents the number of international students from truly exploding. It's already a travesty that many big name public universities have more people from Shanghai or Mumbai than the next town over. Universities are behaving like corporations in trying to maximize revenue
So if you want to reform things you need to construct something less simplistic which can't easily be gamed. (What you're describing is like Canada's Provincial Nominee Program, which is ~35% of their economic admissions, but it grants permanent residence, not just a work visa.)
Anyway a less-discussed backstop solution to prevent abuse in H1B is to shorten (legislate) the maximum time to acquire (employment-based) Green Card - it originally used to be <6mths, now it can easily be 10+ years (from the date the employee first arrived on F1/H1B/L1, not the date the GC petition was finally raised, which can itself be 5+ years after that if the employer drags things out, which happens).
If Indian IT consultancies abuse the system, maybe the US should try to understand why there's such amount of unmet demand for cheap IT labor that cannot be offshored.
The United States is not an economic zone that belongs to the world in short.