The current H1B system of limited visas has far more demand than there is supply, but it's easier to abuse by certain kinds of firms. For an American company tr

The current H1B system of limited visas has far more demand than there is supply, but it's easier to abuse by certain kinds of firms. For an American company trying to hire someone off the street that is living in the UK, the math is so bad few would try: In the real world, companies tend to only try with people that are already working for them. So if, say, Google had someone working off a UK office, and wanted to move them to the US, it's relatively OK if they don't do well in the lottery that year, because they still have an employee. The abuse comes from companies built entirely on this: Imagine we are running a contracting company from some cheap country. We have 6000 consultants we'll be able to bill higher from the US. So we ask our US subsidiary to just file said 6000 applications. Only 2000 got accepted? Who cares! those 2000 people get moved to the US, and are now working for us, and then we contract them out to normal Enterprise companies at relatively low rates. It's not hard to claim this is abuse, as ultimately one wants to make applications for anyone with a pulse. Some commentators are definitely overplaying it, but any way you look at it, the system is not necessarily working all that well, precisely because the cap is relatively low, the number of random Indian contractors that would like to move in is very high, and those intermediary companies are rarely great, but they have a big advantage in the system compared to a small company that just really wants to hire one guy, or wants to keep someone that came in with a student visa, and has been doing practical training. Unfortunately there are so many competing interests that any kind of sensible immigration reform isn't going to happen, as getting the majority of the house and 2/3rds on the senate to agree on something this contentious is almost impossible, especially when one of the parties has people whose idea of the perfect number of immigrants is zero.