[nine_k]

The foreigners with special skills for which it's really hard to hire someone in the US, even for a lot of money. Maybe if you agree to pay $1M / mo, you'll have them leave their current jobs and flock to you, but will your business still stay profitable?

Hence the idea of prevailing wage, and paying somehow above that.

This of course creates an avenue to game the system, because prevailing wage for basically any work in SF or NYC is likely higher than on average over the entire US. You can undercut local markets a bit by bringing in smart people from abroad, and paying them less than they would make in SF or NYC if hired as locals, but more that the country-wide average.

(Smart, hard-working, educated people from underprivileged places get a chance of having a better life while working to improve the US economy! What's not to like?)

[remarkEon]

I'm a little confused with your logic here. You're saying that businesses are looking for these allegedly rare skill sets, which do exist in the US but only at excessively high wages (your "$1M / mo" hypothetical/exaggeration). So the solution is to bring in H1Bs and pay them less (or what's affordable for the company).

How does this not, by definition, depress what would otherwise be the prevailing wage for these "rare" skill sets in the US?

[rayiner]

> Smart, hard-working, educated people from underprivileged places get a chance of having a better life while working to improve the US economy! What's not to like?

Lots of things if people thought about it for more than 10 seconds. Why do you think the US has such uniquely bad work life balance even in white collar sectors? And those educated people are in the top 1-2% of their home countries. What’s it going to your country to import a bunch of foreign elites with chips on their shoulder?

If what you care about is maximizing profits for Fortune 500 companies, then yeah, maybe it’s a good thing.