>H-1B is used to lower wages.

Everything is used to lower wages. Uber, waymo, doordash, LLMs, etc. all reduce wages. There is no requirement in the statute that it should not lower wages. Congress considered the tradeoff and decided that it was worth having the program. It is a minuscule number, btw. 85k per year, which given the size of the US economy should not even register anywhere in any discussions. In any case, these econ 101 discussions are beyond the scope here.

Congress did that for when skilled jobs couldn't be filled. It wasn't primarily meant to just onboard people and fill jobs. I don't think ~85k per year is minuscule. I think that is substantial and the cap has regularly been exceeded and this is annually for decades.

That brings us to

    Americans are too dumb to get these jobs so we still need it: 

If that's true, which I doubt, I am not sure why this isn't a higher priority problem of ours to solve.

    Americans are not too dumb but we need H-1B anyway for reasons:

:|

>the cap has regularly been exceeded and this is annually for decades.

The cap is 85k, which is never exceeded, as that is a statutory limit. There are other cap exempt categories for non-profits and universities.

>That brings us to

It doesn't bring us to any of these conclusions. The vehicle for the change you seek is the legislature. Lobby Congress to change the law. You have a house rep and 2 state senators. Talk to them about your concerns.

Those are exactly the two conclusions it brings us to. If a skilled job can't be filled the question becomes why the skill gap exists or if it even exists at all and I have never seen someone suggest every single job given to a H-1B holder provably could not be filled by a citizen. There's almost no bar at all besides putting a notice in the lunch room or something equally frivolous.

>the vehicle for change you seek is the legislature

I never argued the fee was legal for reference. And oop must've forgotten that Congress cared about my concerns, thanks for the tip!

You are building up hypotheses and theories in your head that have no basis in reality. There is no requirement that a job is opened up to H-1B if a citizen cannot do it. That does not exist. You are starting with this flawed assumption and then reaching some absurd conclusions. H-1B exists because it is nice to have and provides positive value. The fact that it may displace other citizens' jobs is fine too and permitted by the statute. Uber doesn't exist because no capable taxi drivers could ride a cab. Your grievance stems from a flawed premise. You wish there were protectionism, but there is no protectionism in the law. So again, talk to Congress. And Congress knows very well how to do protectionism. See Jones Act.

You know what? You might be right. The wording doesn't seem to specifically state anything about reasons indeed implying that "H-1B exists because it is nice to have and provides positive value". The lore about requirements doesn't appear. This means the law was never intended to fill shortages and the law isn't really being gamed because there's nothing dishonest about the intentions. This saddens me greatly. Truly the only fix is through Congress.

I don't know if protectionism is the right word.

85k per year plus their families and all concentrated into specific sectors of the economy