I spend a lot of this newsletter criticizing how the H-1B program gets run, so credit where it's due: the FY2027 cap season used, for the first time, a wage-weighted lottery instead of a flat random draw. Registrations now get entries scaled to Department of Labor wage tiers — Level I through Level IV — so a job paying senior-engineer money gets more shots at selection than one parked at the bottom of the prevailing-wage scale.
The results are the interesting part. Properly submitted registrations fell from 343,981 in FY2026 to 211,600 in FY2027 — a 38.5% drop in a single year. That's not workers losing interest in America. That's the low-wage, high-volume registration strategy — the one staffing shops used to run by flooding the lottery with cheap-labor entries to maximize their odds — suddenly losing to a game where volume no longer beats wage level. The system selected 40.2% of registrations this cycle, and the ones that got through skew toward the roles actually worth defending: the specialty positions genuinely hard to fill domestically, not the commodity-rate placements that were the real complaint all along.
This is what I mean when I say the fight isn't "H-1B, yes or no" — it's whether the program selects for scarcity or for cheapness. A random lottery was always going to be gamed by whoever could file the most registrations at the lowest possible wage, because volume was the only variable that mattered. Wage-weighting doesn't ban outsourcing shops from playing, but it makes the game more expensive to win, and that's the correct lever to pull.
I'd like to see this paired with real enforcement against the willful-violator firms that still dominate the lower wage tiers — the ones this reform makes marginally harder to game, not impossible. But a policy change that shows up in the actual registration numbers, in one cycle, without a single new law passed, is rare enough in immigration policy that it's worth saying plainly: this one worked as designed.