I would be surprised if it didn't, as other parts of the immigration system also warp post graduate education. EB-2 provides a much easier immigration route tha

I would be surprised if it didn't, as other parts of the immigration system also warp post graduate education. EB-2 provides a much easier immigration route than EB-3, and EB-1 is easier still: Arguably the only road you can call easy if you come from countries that hit the per-country cap. The most reliable way to EB-2 is post graduate education. For EB-1, as listed here, will be patents and publications after a Ph.D. So now you go look at your typical STEM department at a good US university. As you go into masters and Phds, the percentage of foreign students goes up. This isn't because most international students love academia: It's because the immigration system, as described earlier, just makes the piece of paper they hand you so much more valuable that it'd be for someone that is already a US citizen. And since it's especially valuable for students from visa-capped countries, guess what? Students from those countries are disproportionally going through that route. If we cut the visa limits, and said that a STEM degree and some STEM employment after was a guarantee for a green card in 2 years, I'd expect the number of international students that pick that route to plummet. The disparity between the demand for green cards and the visa limit is so wide, every year the incentive to study longer just increases. If none of those numbers change, I'd expect that the patent route will just be pushed further. So just like the visa caps are a subsidy for post graduate degrees, this rule clarification will be an implicit subsidy for patent attorneys. Then we'll have yet another set of people with a lot to lose if we raise the visa limits, or stop the per-country quotas.