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by lmm 874 days ago
> So why not just grant H1-Bs to the companies that are willing to pay their talent the most?

Because then the acceptance rate would be x% for people from India, y% from China, and 0.001% for everywhere else, which would be politically untenable.

1 comments

H1B does not have country caps. So the acceptance rate is already that based on the distribution of applicants. You are thinking of green cards, which do have country caps, and that's why this whole set up is quite asinine. It creates a large immigrant population with limited rights and no realistic path to permanent residency.
> So the acceptance rate is already that based on the distribution of applicants.

Currently it's a lottery which you can at least argue is fair in the sense that every applicant has an equal chance. If they made it so that only the highest paid were accepted, that would skew the distribution much further.