As someone who went through the process, I can tell you that the mere existence of a maximum annual number was insulting.<p>If I get a job, and my company NEEDS me, and I&#x27;m GOOD at what I&#x27;m doing, I should get IN; period.  There should be no crap involved.  How the hell is it good for a company to be told that it can&#x27;t grow because it happened to petition the 65,001st person out of 65,000 that year?  How the hell is it good for the prospective employee to have to try again later?  And in extremely-fast-moving industries such as tech, even the arbitrary time frame of &quot;one year&quot; is an insanely long time.<p>The <i>only</i> limit that <i>kind of</i> makes sense is a thorough investigation of the type of person you&#x27;re bringing in (e.g. university degrees or other background, some indication of what they&#x27;re bringing to the country as a whole).  It may make sense to force companies to prove that no U.S. citizen can do the job <i>but</i> this system has been gamed for years, as companies produce vague job descriptions just like they post vague patent descriptions.