The Department of Homeland Security has sent a proposed rule for review to the Office of Management and Budget as a first step to reforming America’s H-1B visa program for specialty occupations. The change would end the current lottery approach and use instead a wage-based selection algorithm — in other words, employers who offer higher wages would be considered first. Selection would move down the wage scale until the annual visa limit is reached.

This would be a vast improvement on the current system, which is too random to correspond in any way with the merit of the applicants, and too easily gamed. The practice now is for canny employers to hire “body shops” — staffing firms that flood the lottery with duplicate applications, using shell companies to hide their behavior. These employers exploit the H-1B visa program to bring in foreign workers to work at below-market salaries. Another, stranger abuse is the practice of “benching” H-1B workers. That is, a company will bring in a foreign worker on this visa but have the employee do no work while either charging a third-party client for the use of his labor, or not paying the laborer at all.

An H-1B system that favors the highest salaries would favor the most valuable skills. It would incentivize employers to offer top dollar to highly skilled workers. That would make it all but impossible to use the system to undermine the American labor market, which provides a quality of life that Americans want to maintain and enhance, not lower.

The only substantive criticism of this reform is that it would dramatically favor mid- and late-career workers and make it less likely for foreign students who have decided to be educated in the United States to find legal employment here after they obtain their degree. This may be true, but the H-1B lottery system was not designed to give an advantage to students, either. Congress, if it so chooses, could make broader accommodations for student visa holders.

America’s immigration system is broken because it has been too lax about enforcement and negligent in the process of selection of legal immigrants. Reforming the H-1B program so that these visas are awarded only to the most valuable potential employees is a necessary first step to aligning our immigration policies with our nation’s interests.