But it would also filter out most of the people outside of the Bay Area, New York and Chicago. In Missouri, for instance you aren't paying 100K to someone that isn't pretty darned senior: 65-70K is a competitive salary right out of school around here. So a recent foreign graduate would have to move to the bay.
We also have to understand that consulting companies are pretty great options when you want to get a green card (although not necessarily the big ones): If you are a consultant, and you work for a company doing layoffs, your consulting firm won't drop you like a rock, and might be interested in getting you another gig. If the same thing happens to you when you are working directly for a company, you have a much smaller clock before you should leave the country. When a Green Card wait can be 10 years, the chances you'll work for a company that has a few rounds of layoffs are very high.
That's a good point. It would obviously need to be a more complicated system. I think it would be good to prioritize companies like Google, Facebook and the likes but good, honest consulting companies shouldn't be excluded. Factors like innovation, skill scarcity and wage/cost of living can be weighed in.
That happened to me. I actually was at Zynga when they closed studios and I needed to start my green card application from scratch.
It doesn't need to be complicated. Just a rule that the employee must be paid a minimum of the median average wage of any similar domestic employees in the company, or the market average if there aren't any.
I hear you. Although, I believe that's one of the loopholes that companies like Infosys exploits. They pay just above market average and they have a really high number of H1B employees, bordering on the limit. Also, market average fluctuates a lot between regions so it can be circumvented as well. Hard problem....
We also have to understand that consulting companies are pretty great options when you want to get a green card (although not necessarily the big ones): If you are a consultant, and you work for a company doing layoffs, your consulting firm won't drop you like a rock, and might be interested in getting you another gig. If the same thing happens to you when you are working directly for a company, you have a much smaller clock before you should leave the country. When a Green Card wait can be 10 years, the chances you'll work for a company that has a few rounds of layoffs are very high.