The whole consulting business makes me mad. Most people understand the problem but there's so much friction to fixing it and this makes it easy for nationalists to exaggerate the issue and blame unrelated problems on immigration.

Having been through the H1B process myself, I know it's not as easy as a lot of comments on proggit make it seem sometimes. You can't just apply for an H1B and get one. There's a lottery system that skews the whole system towards the people that are abusing it the most, large consulting firms. They are able to swarm the application process every year with 1000s or applications and simple probability suggests they will get what they want. Meanwhile a small company like ours that has put in 3 H1B applications in the 6 years since it started is more likely to not make the cut, even if the applicant has an MS that qualifies them for extra 20k pool.

Raising the salary requirement to $130k or whatever it is seem arbitrary. A mid size game studio in Florida cannot afford to pay a college grad that much (Technically, the bill that proposed that limit meant for that to apply to firms hiring more than 15% of their workforce using the H1B program so it wouldn't affect a startup like ours. My point is that the language needs to deliberately not make it so only the largest companies are able to hire the significant number of F1 students graduating from US universities).

I suspect there's a better chance of change happening under the current adminstration, but I'm not particularly optimistic that they'll get it right.