I'm pretty sure that already exists in the form of an O-1 visa. However I doubt the vast majority of programmers who get an H1B come close to meeting the standards for an O-1 visa.

So yeah, if you are a really great programmer and the rest of the world knows this, then any employer in the US can help you get an O-1 visa based off of that. If your programming prowess isn't well demonstrated, then yeah, you have to go through other channels.

No it isn't. For great programmers, the O-1 visa is basically a hack that we use to get in the US. It was not intended to be used that way for programmer (you can note that the criteria fits more for profile of a reasonable successful working in entertainment industry, athlete etc.)

You will need to be something like a top 1% programmers, working on things that are semi-public to qualify for the O-1, but any decent (top 25%? I'm pulling number out of my ass) fashion models can probably get in.

If the O-1 is already admitting the top 1%, then we're already closing in on solving the ostensible problem.

At least inside an order of magnitude (1/5) at a naive guess, but probably much closer, in fact, if we run with two assumptions this piece rests on:

(a) The small top portion of a given talent pool have exceptional intrinsic abilities that give them a power-relation advantages over the rest of the pool when it comes to productive enterprise.

(b) Taking a small highest portion of a very large talent pool is going to give you the largest source of power-law productive talent.

If (a) is true, one would assume the top 1% of external programmers is going to be as much better than the next 5% as the top 20% is than the next 80%.

If (b) is true and we're already looking at the worldwide market, the top 1% is already a huge boost to the pool, almost certainly bigger than the number of open jobs on the market (if 5% of the top 1% of the world's smartest are programmers, then that's a number bigger than the ~4 million unfilled positions of any kind in the US). The top 5% is redundant.

It's a bit more nuisance than that. As I mention, I was pulling numbers out of thin air. The main point I was trying to make is that criteria for O1 isn't applicable as a good measurement for hackers. We don't have any award for what we do, and the nature of the work is that there isn't much publicity most of the time (it's even the reverse, people who works on really haRd stuff have to be silence about them). And that's no fault of anyone, we barely know how to judge good and bad programmer ourselves.

Another point to be noted is that if you try to get the top 1%, you might get 1% of that pool (1% of 1%). As many people noted, not everyone want to come to the US. You might as well trying to get all of them