[codys]

> All of this costs something like $20K at the minimum.

So they only need to be cheaper by $20K over a couple of years for it to be worth it?

That seems like a fairly small cost to overcome.

And if there isn't very much demand for H1Bs, even with "bidding" we'd expect the cost to companies to stay the same.

It isn't clear to me why prioritizing the value of an employee (as measured by how much they are paid) would not be an effective way of prioritizing H1B visas.