Were the most innovative people actually "lost" or did they just switch to something like the O1 Visa which isn't subject to quota, and highly innovative people should qualify for?

drafting specific, targeted policies in the hopes of achieving a targeted outcome (without any unintended consequences) is very difficult - it's almost as if human minds are not smart enough to consider all possible outcomes, and all possible ramifications!

That's why i dislike gov't intervention - in most cases, these policies are drafted by vested interests, to the exclusion of some other group (who often then bear the brunt of the externalized cost of such a policy).

I doubt it was due to network effects. I’m probably one of those top quartile potential H1-B holders that never applied. My main reason for not applying is that the random nature of the lottery reduces the RoI on finding a US job so much that it becomes rational to stay in Sweden and focus on local / remote consulting opportunities. As I understand it the way those Indian IT firms get around that is that they hire locally in India and send in applications for more staff than they want visas for. So they can get around the lottery dynamics through collective action, something I can’t do.

Everything is a red herring to billionaires and corporations not being taxed/given unchecked power.

Half the people complain about H-1B and the other half complain about outsourcing. Neither of them makes sense to me, but the outsourcing angle even less so. It's just labor cost arbitrage for knowledge work. And soon that arbitrage opportunity will perhaps shift from humans to llms. What is the issue with that?