My very high level wish is that immigration basically gave a free pass to anyone earning more than mean salary, since that by definition makes the nation wealth

My very high level wish is that immigration basically gave a free pass to anyone earning more than mean salary, since that by definition makes the nation wealthier. I think you can derive generic and robust definitions of “exceptional” like this too; eg anyone that is getting paid $1m/yr is clearly exceptional. This is robust to Goodhearting because again, net contributor to the wealth of the country. (1m is an arbitrary number for discussion, obviously you can tune it to get the count you are looking for.) Trouble is, “exceptional at art” is fundamentally subjective and won’t show up in salary. Similar salary concerns with “exceptionally talented PhD”. I think you need per-industry considerations here. Top N most-cited AI researchers should get a pre-filled green card sent to them. Personally think we should be allowing any PhD or med school graduate from top institutions to stay indefinitely; so many talented researchers come to the US to study and then get kicked out. We want to keep these people.