I am somewhat surprised that the US immigration system has not already been combined with the stack ranking philosophy to create the ultimate dehumanizing meat grinder.

My solution to the US immigration problem is to bypass portions of the existing system with a simpler labor law. Federal minimum wage for all workers inside the US is raised to the US Census median household income, divided by 2080 hours of full-time employment ($28.39/hour). If you pay your worker more than that, no one cares where they came from or how they got here. Anyone paid more is, by definition, adding value to the US economy. If the worker pays all applicable taxes on that level of income, about the only thing they can't do is vote.

If you can document and verify that your worker is a US citizen or permanent resident, you are exempted from the blanket minimum wage, and can go as low as the US Census poverty threshold for a 2-person household, divided by 2080 hours ($7.92/hour). Instead of showing your tax receipt to receive government services, you show your government-issued ID.

If you can document and verify that your worker is a non-resident non-citizen, entered legally, with a valid visa, you are exempted from the blanket minimum wage, and can go as low as the US Census poverty threshold for a 6-person household, divided by 2080 hours ($16.23/hour). Instead of showing tax receipts or ID cards for government services, you show your stamped passport.

This largely eliminates the incentives to displace domestic workers with lower-paid foreign workers, for the lower end of the income scale. At the upper end of the scale, worker mobility and competition encourages companies to pay foreign workers the same as domestic workers. Once they are on site, they can easily go to work for anyone else that pays more, so you can't use them to resolve the "labor shortage" that occurs whenever a company pays too little for the work.

To round it all out, you put an outflow duty on remittances, transfers, and cash posted or hand-carried out of the country, to encourage immigrants to bring their family with them, and stay (and spend) in the US, rather than sending their earnings back "home". To this end, a working immigrant can sponsor a number of nonworking immigrants commensurate with their income, and maybe even earn a subsidy for converting some of those sponsored individuals to workers. "Chain migration" is what we want, economically. It is better for the money to stay close, and circulate locally. Ideally, all the best and brightest in the world decide to come work in the US, they bring their closest dependents, and spend all their earnings on local businesses. In doing so, they provide jobs for domestic workers, because most low-skilled service businesses cannot afford to pay the premium for foreign low-skilled workers until those wages are bid up by an actual shortage in available workers.

And the best part is that you no longer need to police millions of people. Police only tens of thousands of businesses, and allow economic forces to take care of most deportations and illegal entries. The US could go back to its golden age of immigration, where the major motivators were whether the immigrants could support themselves, and whether they were carrying any contagious diseases. People that can support themselves by working will support their communities by spending.