The administration had been making some cautiously encouraging noises about fixes to this system. I wonder now if those voices were drowned out or the administration is just schizophrenic and this is the work of another part of the administration.

This right-to-work for H4s isn't the problem. Don't get me wrong: it sucks for those affected and it's arbitrarily capricious but it's not the problem.

Oh and BTW the US immigration system as a whole is arbitrarily capricious. This is some combination of "they're stealing our jobs" and an effort to discourage immigration in general, psychologically lumping those that sneak across the border with highly-skilled workers into the same bucket.

Some examples:

- If your green card is lost or stolen it costs $400 to replace it but, worse, it takes 8-12+ months at current queue times to get a replacement. The US government can get a US citizen a passport in a day if it needs to.

- Lose it while overseas and you're in for a world of hurt to re-enter the US (and then go through the above process to get it replaced).

- Your Labor Certification ("LC") can get audited. This sounds fine but it's really not. USCIS has a stated goal of not having applicants figure out their auditing criteria so they RANDOMLY audit a some applications. The total number of audited LCs is estimated to be ~30%.

- If your LC is audited, this just randomly adds 12-18+ months to your process depending on how many times USCIS can send you Requests for Evidence ("RFEs"). Yes this can happen more than once. Personally I know of one case where there were 3 separate RFEs for a FAANG engineer that added >2.5 years to the process.

- Green cards have quotas by country of birth. H1Bs do not. This, primarily, is the cause of the massive logjam particularly for India but, to a lesser extent, also for China, Mexico and the Phillipines (depending on the visa category).

- It is common for applications at various stages to get stuck where nothing happens for months for no real reason. This is so common that there is a procedure for dealing with it: writing to your local Senator or congressman and having their office file an inquiry with USCIS. Not everyone knows this but this tends to unstick things within a week. Why it gets stuck in the first place is a mystery.

- Once your case is assigned to a particular examiner, you're stuck with that examiner. They will process their applications on a FIFO basis and one examiner may be particularly slow compared to another for no readily apparent reason. Worse, different examiners will apply the same rule differently in that in a given situation one will ask for an additional form where another wouldn't. And yes that adds another 3-6 months to the process as your updated submission goes to the back of their queue.

- There are several time windows you need to be aware of. With sufficient delays some of your supporting documentation may be out of date. And bingo, that's another go around.

- Getting married on a green card won't really help your spouse at all. There are years long delays for sponsoring your spouse and they'll enjoy no relevant status before then. The general advice is you'll start this process and finish it probably after naturalization (which is a far quicker process).

So what is the core problem that needs to be fixed? Easy. The abuse of the system by Indian IT outsourcing companies. For these companies, the 10+ year delays in getting a green card for Indian-born people is a feature not a bug because that's longer they can keep them in what is not that far from indentured servitude.

These people aren't highly-skilled and aren't highly-paid. They're taking spots that could otherwise go to highly-skilled and highly-paid people at FAANG type companies.

Other commenters are right in that a simple minimum pay could have a lot of loopholes. Being "total compensation" with inflated values on "benefits" is just one way. Another is, say, overcharging for services that are described as optional but really aren't, like food or accomodation.

Want to see examples of how desperate people are trapped by these sorts of "fees" into essentially perpetual debt? Look no further than India's brick kilns [1].

[1] https://www.antislavery.org/what-we-do/india-debt-bondage/