[NovemberWhiskey]

No; they're already in the country, that's really the whole point. They'd still need to meet the requirements for H-1B visa.

Say you're a STEM graduate; you first got an F-1 visa to study, then you spend four years at school in the U.S. You find a job with a great firm for your OPT, and that firm immediately starts to enter the H-1B lottery on your behalf.

Based on the amount of oversubscription, there's a significant number of people who are just not going to get selected before they time out on their OPT and have no option but to leave the U.S. after seven years living here, amounting to perhaps their entire adult lives.

The fact that such people have no preference in a random lottery with others that have no investment in the U.S. at all is utterly perplexing.