At the same time that kinda cripples the ability to hire highly-skilled foreigners, isn't it? It's artificially limiting the pool of viable candidates.

Just imagine a PhD (or even a Master's degree holder) from Europe, a leader in their field. With this system they are at a huge disadvantage and so are companies that would like to hire them.

As someone mentioned this system will just lead to straight to masters degrees. Those "body shop" outsourcing companies just need their candidates to attend any (does online count?) US-based masters degree and then business as usual.

Having a Masters from "some" university doesn't make anyone highly skilled.