But it's a lottery that's truly random then there's no reason to believe that those that won the lottery would necessarily be highly skilled, right?
Anecdotally, over the course of my ~15 yrs of experience in the industry, I've definitely met some brilliant people on H1-B visas but I'd put that estimate at around ~30% or so, the rest were just people of average skill / talent doing work that a US citizen could be doing.
Again, just my personal observation, others may have wildly differing estimates based on places they've worked at.
India has 140 million college degree holders, which is less than China and only twice as much as the U.S. China has more graduates but only 12% of H1b. Russia has about 40 million and gets under 1% of H1bs. So India has 3.5x as many degree holders as Russia, but gets over 70 times as many H1bs. Brazil has about 30 million college graduates and again under 1% of H1bs. So India has 5x the college population but over 70x the H1bs. Indonesia has 17 million degree holders but less than 0.1% of H1b. So India has 8x as many graduates as Indonesia but gets 100x+ as many H1bs.
It’s a scam.
The same is true for almost all Europeans: living in the US would be considered a downgrade in quality of life so very few highly qualified workers are willing to move to the US when they can have a good life moving to the more productive Western countries (Sweden, Switzerland, Netherlands, Germany, Austria).
Souce? Because H1B was created specifically for them, post-USSR collapse, so that the US industry would absorb all the now unemployed skilled mathematicians, physicists, electrical engineers that were previously working in the Soviet defense industry, so that their skills now benefit the US private sector economy (SV) instead of some rogue element post-USSR collapse. And many, MANY, emigrated there in the last 35+ years, at least when emigration to the US was still easy.
Also, "cultural beacon" is such a vague BS theater-kid term that fits no argument. Knowing many of them personally, they more identify to the individualist capitalist "big house with lawn and big car" mindset of the Americans, than the socialist/communist "solidarity via let's tax the hard working high-earners and give to the lazy low-earners so we all live in concrete shoebox apartments" mindset of Europeans.
They come to western Europe instead of the US now, because western Europe is closer, cheaper, easier to get to thanks to open borders, and provides most welfare aids to refugees than US, not because the US is not a "cultural beacon" or whatever.
>while it's full of them (software engineers) in Germany, Switzerland, Finland, Austria, Netherlands, etc...
Bullshit. I live in Austria and it's not "full of them" (programmers I mean) because they earn less in Austria than back home. Maybe Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland because there's more US big-tech there with high earning potential, but definitely not Austria, which for me was the indicator that you don't know what you're talking about, and is making stuff up.
This actually changed this year. Applicant gets 1-4 tickets depending on their pay relative to job/area. So $500k Google engineer has quite a bit higher chance than $100k WiPro one.
Of course it still has issues (Google probably has 1-2 possible applicants for that position and would prefer all of them, Wipro has 100 and cares more about what % of them pass).