This is my own opinion here. I think if you increase the price of H1B significantly then jobs would just move to Bangalore, Dublin or Vancouver. There is a high

This is my own opinion here. I think if you increase the price of H1B significantly then jobs would just move to Bangalore, Dublin or Vancouver. There is a higher limit to how much you can jack up the prices of a H1 visa and that higher limit should be set taking into account what the companies are willing to pay and still keep employing people in the US, assuming they have an option to hire people elsewhere in the world. If its too high, you might just have incentivized a behavior that stops companies from hiring people in US and instead hires them in other countries, these are the reasons why this will happen - Companies increasingly have a global presence, almost all Tier 1 (AMZN, MSFT, GOOG) and Tier 2 (CSCO, JNPR, HP) firms have an office in Bangalore, Dublin and Vancouver these days. - Work can be done from anywhere really. At least the kind of work that H1B's are hired to do. A majority of these roles are not client facing. And you can always fly in and back on business visas when you need some face time with the team in US. - And you don't have the hassle of dealing with a non working immigration system. I can hire a guy from anywhere in the world and have him working at my Dublin office in a month. It takes a year of planning to get the same person in the US if I am lucky. I won't even consider it if the prices are too high. - As a precedent, Almost all of the Tier 1 companies and most Tier 2 companies, move workers from US to India, Ireland and Canada routinely if they cannot secure a H1B visa in the US. If the prices are dramatically increased this will just become the default behavior.