Actually, the state should also be irrelevant. Because if you can't find a programmer in your state then there's the rest of the country. The 150% idea is great -- it would create an incentive to only try to hire the exceptional, which is what PG wants right? I'm unconvinced; it feels like this is just a tech leader attempting to lower the cost of labor as opposed to increasing the quality -- otherwise he'd be promoting maximizing the quality of the 100k already coming in as opposed to increasing tr raw number of entrants. The only benefit to increasing supply is to lower wages. "Finding the exceptional" is a Trojan horse for lowering costs. As I've mentioned before, he's advocating a strip mining approach as opposed to a more surgical improvement in the quality of imports. Perhaps another means is to have a fixed number of visas as we do now, but auction them off to companies. The sweatshop companies wouldn't benefit because it would cost more than it saves and the other companies would then be far more selective, thus increasing the percentages on finding that 'exceptional' developer unicorn everyone seems to be chasing. I don't have the right answer, but I'm certain it isn't "let more people in and hope the 5% are among them."