> Wouldn't offering visas to "rising" countries allow us to pick off much of their best talent, thus boosting the US and lowering the other countries?

I haven't seen H1B visa's used like this in my personal experience. At the last company I worked for they were mostly used to fill our testing team with people from India.

Maybe they were all guinness, the problem was all but one of them could speak/write english fluently.

I can also look at my boyfriend's current employer who recently took a trip to india in order to hire a team of indians "on the cheap" only to fire all but 1 within a month after they didn't really get anything productive done.