[stone-monkey]

yeah - you could see in prior years how most h1bs were allocated to WITCH companies.

https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/h-1b-employe...

Since h1b is a lottery system, these companies flooding the system with their applicants at lower salaries was directly impacting the chances of employees at other companies. I anecdotally knew a coworker at a FAANG who failed to get his h1b consecutively for two years in a row, with his OPT expiring the next. Looking at the data from the latest year though, it seemed as if they had already started addressing the problem.

[rurban]

You are mixing that up with the Greencard, which is a lottery system. H1B must not be a lottery system, and it must not be a way to offload expensive domestic labor to cheap imported labor. Which the well-known Indian H1B cheating companies did. The minimal wage is mandatory to exclude those abusers of the H1B system, so they it is not overloaded anymore. But 200k is definitely too high for the rest of the US, which needs highly qualified workers also. It should be dependent on the region.

Agree with your post totally.

[athms]

You are confused.

There is lottery for the Diversity Visa program, but that is not the only path to permanent residency and there is no cap on the number of applications for permanent residency.

The H1-B has always used a lottery when there are more applications than visas. There is a cap on both visas granted and applications. There are three caps: Regular, C/S (treaty obligations with Chile and Singapore), and US Master's (US master's degrees or higher). The USCIS will publish a memo when enough applications are received, closing the application season (normally six months) until next year.

Applicants with a US master's degree (or higher) have two chances to receive an H1-B visa. A lottery is held to award the visas available to master's degree holders, and those not selected are entered in the regular lottery.

[sjg007]

H1b is a lottery.

[rurban]

I am H1-B and it is definitely not. You might be too late, there's a cap. The latecomers are not being let in by luck.

Greencard is a lottery on the other hand.