To clarify one small point: You have to be a US Citizen to be an Air Traffic Controller. But, I understand your broader point.

Before raising the fee to $100,000 this week, the "official" fees one would pay to apply for an H1-B were, effectively, $0. Employers would pay a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, depending on their size. There might be some "unofficial" fees like lawyer and advisor fees to help with the process, but in essence: your "wild idea" was the status quo for 35 years.

At the end of the day, relying on temporary immigration programs to backstop critical job shortages isn't sustainable on the long-term. Its not fair to citizens, and its oftentimes not fair to the temporary immigrant either. The more efficient and feasible solution to these shortages is to incentivize citizens to enter these roles.

I was told the total cost was about 10k or so including filing fees and lawyers, and so on, and O1 closer to 50k or so. Seems like most of big tech will just try for O1 instead now... I've heard some wild stories over the years of how people "manufactured" eligibility, and/or the kinds of arguments their lawyers made.

> The more efficient and feasible solution to these shortages is to incentivize citizens to enter these roles.

If one would purely go by the rules of the free market, the solution would indeed not be immigration, but either automating these jobs away, rationalizing them so you need fewer employees to handle the same workload or raise the compensations and non-payroll benefits to attract more (prospective) talent.

The problem is, it's one thing if you do that for air traffic controllers. Flights are too cheap anyway, making them a bit more expensive to pay for more ATC will also reduce demand which in turn would also have positive benefits on the environment (CO2) and airport residents (noise).

But for stuff like garbage disposal handlers, wastewater facility staff and other jobs on the high-ick, low-pay side of things? These are actually and literally vital for society to survive, but if prices were raised to reflect the fact that you need to pay people pretty huge sums of money to do these jobs? Barely anyone would remain to pay for these services.

In the end, immigration has been used by Western societies as a stopgap to avoid the inevitable conclusion that the wide masses by far do not earn enough money, and now that immigration is drying up - in the case of the US, from the political climate, in the case of Europe including the UK, many people from Eastern Europe going back to their home country during Covid and discovering life there has actually vastly improved over the last decades - the cracks are growing so large they can neither be hidden nor overlooked any more.