The United States should just go the route of Canada, and give permanent residency to individuals with in-demand skills who meet a high standard for linguistic ability, educational achievement, and work experience. If a person's got the skills, there's no reason for the country to mess around with a temporary visa.

Once this is done, the United States should bump up the numbers of skilled people it can admit by cutting back on the unskilled people it bizarrely decides to admit every year. The over fifty thousand people given permanent residency each year through the diversity visa lottery have no real qualifications other than being lucky. We could replace each and every one of them with someone with an advanced degree and strong work experience in an in-demand field.

Never going to happen, though - not when the government's primary focus is figuring out how to make citizens out of low-skilled economic migrants who've already shown they don't care about following laws.