> Does it mean it costed the US of potential opportunities? I don't think it made any difference in the US. But it surely helped in his home country. Our immig

> Does it mean it costed the US of potential opportunities? I don't think it made any difference in the US. But it surely helped in his home country. Our immigration service hands out N visas a year. You reject one, someone else will pick up that slot. On an average it should not make a difference either for US or the other country unless they are so small their number of visas doubled or something because of this one reject. > In the long term, does it make a difference in US if it doesn't bring talent across the world? Yes it does make a difference, but fixing that has other impacts. In the 90s when the H1 visa regime started (or got big), if someone in Ceylon wanted to write software for an American company, they probably could not do it, at least in the early 90s. They did not have too many other options so US not acquiring an available talent did not impact them. Nowadays such un-acquired talent can do anything - set up a company, work for Russia (or choose any other name who you would rather not have acquire talent, maybe an oil company). However, the fix is not so simple. To acquire all the talent pool would require upping our immigration intake many fold, and that is not going to happen for various reasons (politics, cost, limits to how much immigration can you absorb).