I share your desire to see a more equitable distribution of work visas across multiple industries.

There should be a cap on H-1Bs in order to regulate the number of skilled workers coming in from overseas. But there should be a clear delineation between categories such as IT, health care and other professions. It doesn’t make sense if the applicants are from such diverse walks of life as programmers, biologists and fashion models and yet they are bracketed in the same H-1B category. It is unfair not only to applicants who are not software professionals but to non-IT American industries as a whole.

The second gross imbalance in the present system affects foreign students who undergo expensive university education here only to be left to battle with overseas IT applicants. Students who get their degrees in America should be exempt from the cap. If not all students, then definitely graduate students getting their Master’s and Doctoral degrees. Of the 150000 applications that inundated the USCIS on April 2nd, only 13000 had Master’s degrees.

Reform should address the following bullets:
1) Foreign students who get their degrees in America should not be subject to the cap.
2) Applicants with Master’s and Doctoral degrees should not be subject to any cap.
3) The cap itself - I’m unable to comment on whether the 65,000 cap should be increased or not. I’m not in the IT industry and I cannot comment intelligently on the dynamics of recruitment and requiremnts of the industry. Bottomline is, these overseas applicants should be separated from in-country applicants based on the degrees they hold and the industry they will serve eventually.

I would correct it by eliminating the E-3, cutting F visas to less than 2,000 per year, capping the L-1 at 25K per year, and auctioning off 83 H-1B visas per month to the highest bidders. The bids would be the amounts of total compensation to be paid to the guest-workers, and would be on top of the $25K fee for background investigation and $2K fee for processing the paper-work.

Short of that, employers should have to prove that they’ve made a good-faith effort to recruit US citizens by handing over receipts and ad copy for at least a dozen newspaper ads for a month, a few trade publications, and at least a dozen web site ads (on sites not owned in whole or part by the employer, parent firm, subsidiaries, or affiliates). The government is rotten at setting up job boards, and the odds are they’d have guest-workers do it with even worse results. The ads must contain at least one contact name at the company, that person’s voice telephone number and e-mail address, an offer of reasonable relocation assistance for US citizens within the USA, and an offer of reasonable new-hire training.

In return, employers should be given tax write-offs for costs of interviewing, relocating, education and training US citizens, and they should be adjusted to keep up with rapidly rising tuition and fees.