To me, since these workers tend to have grad degrees and are very talented, I'd peg it to a fairly high level law, medical, business, or finance worker. In short, anything less than $250k a year would get you laughed out of the building, and we're probably looking at $400k ore more.
I'm not sure what the percentages are here, but yeah, like you'd I'd guess that the percentage of H1Bs at these salary levels is very low. In short, if the H1B visa were limited to these sorts of workers, my guess is there would be no real discussion or controversy about the program.
Kind of astonishing that we award these by lottery. The whole system is really bad. Then again, it is used cynically by people who defend the program (they trot out the small percentage of very highly paid people and say "what you don't want this guy working in the US?", as if that is the issue or is in any way representative of 97% of the use of the program).
there really is just no comparison.
That's why it's called a (N)ational (I)nterests (W)aiver. Because everyone from the commerce department, to the congress, to the military and intelligence people all agree that we need that guy's brainpower.
Or more precisely... they all agree that we need to deny that guy's brainpower to every other nation on earth if possible.
This can't be overstated enough.
I think the immigration that is critical to the US is the high end immigration, not the low end stuff like H1B.
I'm just afraid that the chanting mobs will want to throw the baby out with the bath water. We NEED the NIW-types, we don't really need most of the H1B-types. So if the political environment is such that we need to cut loose some H1B-types to save the NIW-types... we should do so without hesitation.