TBH I would support throwing away H1B entirely and creating a much more permissive midskill/lowskill immigration visa whose intent is more in-line with the actual use of the H1B. But if you try to get there by reforming H1B, it's never going to work well. So, if we keep H1B, we need to start using it as intended. And then fight for another visa class. I'm just fundamentally skeptical that the H1B will ever not be abusive until we align the original intent and practice of the policy.
We do! The US takes about 1.2 million immigrants legally into the country every year, and they are welcome to become software engineers.
Now, if you ask "so what if we create a visa so that high tech employers can bestow, control, and revoke the US residency rights of people who work in a few narrow fields, including software engineering", I can take a crack at explaining how this can lead to harmful market distortions, to say nothing of labor and basic human rights abuses.
According to the same website India's current employment rate is ~50% (part of this likely due to gender imbalances) and you can bet that wages are much lower. The relevant metric is purchasing power parity adjusted household median income. It's roughly 50 times higher in the United States than in say India (less so for China and Russia).
I don't understand how you can see countries like China or India as presenting more opportunity with local wages. There are of course cultural reasons to want to move there, but I don't think there's any reasonable case that there's more economic opportunity. Some things will be cheaper for sure (rent and labor, namely) but consumer goods, food, electricity, and the like, will not be commensurately cheaper wrt the drop in income.
However, maybe there is an argument that the middle class in a different country is worse off in terms of purchasing power than the lower American class. I'm not sure if that is the case, but either way it would be better to be gainfully employed in an industry of a person's choosing than to be lower class in an industry a person does not want to work in.
The threat of this happening in America, as I perceive it anecdotally, is much more real than the statistics suggest. I could see a scenario where only the top 20% of skilled professionals in major industries survive in the United States, while the demand for the bottom 80% is met by outsourced or off-shored professionals.
By being born to an area you have done something special. You have received the special benefit of local education and infrastructure, you have familial and social connections to the people of that local area. You may even have a shared sense of local obligation to uplift the people you live near.
The problem with importing foreign labor isn't that they can't develop feelings of community or form social ties to an area. It's that someone local is harmed or excluded (after significant investment in them) while a foreign worker is underpaid and overworked in a job that exists because of the local's tax dollars.
We're allowing greed to create a permanent underclass of locals who can not climb the social hierarchy while also importing highly-educated quasi-slaves into the country. The whole thing reeks of economic opportunism and, to me, represents the very worst of capitalism.