Peg the minimum to some sort of standardized wage / poverty / CoL metric. Salaries being paid to H1-Bs rise overly much, quota increases. Salaries fall, quota shrinks.

It's not overly hard to design a compensation-based system that guarantees use for only extraordinary talent, because the current abuse is solely because low salaries are still possible.

what is going to prevent even further off shoring then? Software development, support, and even project management, are all easy candidates for off shoring and with ever improving conferencing tools, change management, and similar, its bound that there will be more competition.

So either the cost come down because they live and work here or the costs drop faster as the work simply goes off shore.

Far too many in the tech industry are first to jump at competition in their areas of expertise but mock those concerned about workers similar to those at Carrier whose jobs are moving to Mexico as either progress or being non competitive

The quota is set by Congress. It was 65K for many years, but I hear during the bubble it was temporarily increased.