[Zigurd]

There's the baby, which is highly talented people educated at elite universities overseas. Then there is the dirty bathwater, which is seat warmers hired at the lowest possible wages by "body shops" that bill them out to government and corporate customers. The first does create prosperity. The second, not so much.

There are several possible fixes: Auction visas with a high minimum. Disallow contracting-out workers on visas. Etc. It's a system that would be easy to fix at zero cost, and maybe even could be made into a source of revenue.

[davidf18]

Or would could enforce the law. The H1-B Visa program was intended to fill jobs for which there were no Americans with those skills desired.

There should be some sort of approval process from an institution or firm that does not have a conflict of interest with the firms applying for H1-B Visas.

[Zigurd]

The problem is that the law as written, while it sounds like it should not allow body shops to hire phalanxes of seat warmers, has been lawyered-around (and by that I mean there are lawyers specializing in fitting your favored candidate to an H1-B visa): Post a job description that's impossible to fill, and then arbitrarily accept that the H1-B applicant meets the job criteria. Short of litigating every case, how do you stop that?