Fearing Tighter US Visa Regime, Indian IT Firms Rush To Hire (moneycontrol.com)

From a report on Reuters: Anticipating a more protectionist US technology visa programme under a Donald Trump administration, India's $150 billion IT services sector will speed up acquisitions in the United States and recruit more heavily from college campuses there. Indian companies including Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, and Wipro have long used H1-B skilled worker visas to fly computer engineers to the US, their largest overseas market, temporarily to service clients. Staff from those three companies accounted for around 86,000 new H1-B workers in 2005-14. The US currently issues close to that number of H1-B visas each year. President-elect Trump's campaign rhetoric, and his pick for Attorney General of Senator Jeff Sessions, a long-time critic of the visa programme, have many expecting a tighter regime.

Comments

Trivial to stop the abuse

[tempmpi]

It seems trivial to stop the abuse: Stop the lottery and replace it with a list ordered by salary and give the visas to the applicants with the highest salaries. This would make hiring H1Bs expensive and limit their use to hiring rare very talented foreigners.

At the moment H1Bs are broken: The lottery often prevents bringing in highly talented people, while it doesn't matter too much for companies that just want a random cheap semi-skilled person. They just fill a lot of extra applications to get enough H1Bs granted.