Ilya Shapiro throws in her two cents on the new H-1B rules over at National Review Online - characterizing them as “Foolish Misuse”, an appropriate label in light of the April 1st implementation date. She explains her personal interest in the changes:

Now, why do I care about this issue so much? Because I myself am a foreign professional. No, not an engineer or scientist — haven’t taken math since high school — but instead, doing as Washingtonians do, a lawyer. Having practiced for a few years and served as a special adviser on rule of law issues in Iraq, I recently moved over to a think tank.

My current employer managed to snag an H-1B for me, but only because I fit into an exemption for workers who have a post-graduate degree from an American university. This exemption has a 20,000-visa cap (all others requesting educational exemptions go into the general pool), which has previously been hit later than the regular quota but this year is also expected to require a lottery.

What has helped me along the way is that I come from Canada — my parents took a wrong turn at the St. Lawrence when we emigrated from the Soviet Union — which gets a special provision of un-capped visas under NAFTA. I had one of these visas when I clerked for a federal appellate judge, and again when working for my second law firm. Still, these NAFTA visas are only good for one year at a time, and I had to maintain the legal fiction that after being educated in the US and living my entire adult life here, I had no intention of staying. Coming from Canada also disqualifies me from the more famous lottery that annually awards green cards — no-strings-attached permanent residence, not to be confused with a work permit — to nationals of countries with low rates of immigration to the U.S.

But at least I get to be here, tenuous as my grasp on the American dream may be. As the H-1B petition statistics demonstrate, there are hundreds of thousands of qualified people with job offers in America who cannot realize their dreams in their home countries.