Over the Christmas break there was a little fissure between those who advocate restricting immigration and those who are for maintaining and expanding existing programs to bring in high-skilled immigrants. The debate particularly focused on the H-1B visa, which is hotly pursued and used by the tech industry, a sector in which several titans have only recently come around toward Donald Trump.

I confess I found the debate frustrating. The highest-skilled workers typically don’t come on H-1Bs at all. The restrictions that tie H-1B visa holders to their job are not attractive to those who really have extraordinary abilities. That’s why H-1B is so popularly associated with entry-level computer science jobs, not with, say, chief technical officers.

But it’s a labor subsidy, and it cuts against the traditional Republican Party ethos, which is to equalize labor competition — “free men, free soil” — in order to improve the bonds of our republican citizenship. The supply of H-1B visas is 65,000 a year, plus an additional 20,000 with graduate degrees; many of these spots are taken by people who go through diploma mills. There’s still far more demand than supply. The H-1B is more of a semiskilled indenture program. It may feel important to the tech industry, and it’s certainly cheaper than launching and recruiting more coding bootcamps.

The truly extraordinary seek a better deal, and the U.S. has those. Visas in the EB-1A category are available to those who are on their way to developing an international reputation for their work in any number of fields. The O1 visa allows people who are exceptionally skilled to work in the United States for a period of up to three years, and their families (O3) are allowed to come with them. Many of these seek a “change of status” and apply for green cards, permitting lawful permanent residency, through the EB-2 and EB-3 programs. The visa program typically lets between 6,000 and 15,000 people into the United States annually, followed by around one-third as many visas for nonworking family members. Although even these visa categories are not without their share of fraud, it’s through these and other student accommodations, not H1-Bs, that America takes in extraordinary talent.