Re: The principle makes economic sense to me...
Yes, I read that. So it sounds like they are not doing an "auction" for these H1-B's, but there is a government policy that states if you are a programmer and want an H1-B, you have to get paid this much, or so much for an IT analyst.
I was not aware that the government sets targets for individual occupations within the H1-B program. I'm not sure what I think of that. I guess you don't want all the visas going to a couple occupations, but I would rather prefer an auction process of some kind, during which the compensation paid for the H1-B applicant is listed, and if there are 200,000K applicants and 50K visas, the visas go to the 50K highest-paid applicants.