I think it’s mostly built around trumped-up nonsense from corporations. It’s about controlling what might be an unruly set of people - engineers starting to demand better pay and hours and having too much autonomy. Many of those visas go to software engineers. I don’t buy for a second that companies cannot source those skills locally.

In the rare case where that is actually true - I say put together a program in which companies can seek and hire foreign talent, but they are given citizenship status, with no strings attached to any company.

Indentured servitude should not be a thing, but this is what regulatory capture gets us, I guess. Companies whine they cannot find anyone (for the right price and willing to put up with all their toxic bullshit, they mean) so the corrupt government sets up a system to exploit foreign labor AND native labor.