[fra]

Whether 65,000 is the right number or not isn't the important bit. While it may seem unpalatable on its face, granting the visa to the candidates with the highest paying offer is the simplest, least prone to abuse way I can think of to bring about the stated purpose of the H1B visa.

[lazaroclapp]

Except this leaves out any organization that pays below market rate for exceptional talent. That might sound like a good thing in the face of it, but consider such organizations include: national labs, early stage startups, software foundations, etc.

Also, unless you cap it in a per industry basis (which makes the whole thing very inflexible to changes in the economy) you just created an insurmountable problem for those firms that want to hire, say, a Catalan interpreter. Required skill uncommon in the U.S.? Check. Easy to get a foreign worker with that skill? Check. But now you need to pay them a software engineer salary or higher.

As a matter of fact, given how small the cap is, you could conceive that the only software engineering jobs that would be hiring internationally would be in high frequency trading and other such areas of the industry that pay higher salaries. Or, software engineering, but just in the bay area (other places pay less because of adjusting for the cost of living). No matter the rest of the considerations associated with why someone chooses a particular job.

[hocuspocus]

Academia, publicly funded research labs, non-profits... are already cap-exempt.

Other than that, you're absolutely right. This would mostly benefit software companies in the Bay or NYC, and the ones that pay way above average at that. I'd argue it'd be better than current situation though. Indian employees are effectively tied to their employer due to the Green Card backlog. It's significantly less true for the H-1B holders hired by Facebook, Google, Amazon and the like.

[lazaroclapp]

Thanks for the info. I didn't know about cap-exemption for national labs. I knew academia didn't face an H1B problem, but tenure-track professors can go through EB-1 immigration anyways, so I always assumed that was the difference. But now that I check, apparently even if you are a lab technician or hired developer, you should be cap-exempt as long as you are working on publicly funded science of some sort.

[DrScump]

<Academia, publicly funded research labs, non-profits... are already cap-exempt.>

And there are other skills-specific visa categories. For example, a professional hockey player on a North American roster from wherever is never denied a visa because of any other visa quota (H-1 variants, L variants, etc.)

[davidw]

Without a number, there is no scarcity, and if there's no scarcity, there's no bidding. So with a bidding system, you absolutely do need someone in power to pick a magical number.

[kyllo]

Conversely, without a magic number, you don't need a bidding system. So what do you need?