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Perhaps a better idea would be to improve your job skills, lower your asking price, or find a new line of work, instead of relying on government intervention for your livelihood.

Spoken by someone who knows nothing of the IT situation.
Improve the job skills -- "Jack Wilson" indicates he has been doing Oracle/SQL work. That is current - there is a large Oracle market out there.

Let me set out a few facts.
1st, it does not matter in the slightest how current your job skills are - if you have ever worked as a "senior manager", "director", "principal", or "VP of anything" -- forget getting a hands on job. It doesn't matter how qualified you are because those titles are code words for -- this guy is too old.
2nd, if you have more than 10 years of experience on your resume, again you are too old for 99.99% of positions.
3rd, you can leave salary and price per hour blank - doesn't matter. They base decisions to interview on whether you have less than 10 years of experience and never have a senior title in your resume.
4th, I don't care if you are the master of RUP, UML, XML, SQL,J2EE, EAI, ERP, CRM, SCM, and every other acronym in the book -- if you are over 40 you are screwed. You can't even get a job as a contractor. Heck, you can't even get an interview.

5th and finally - the H-1B situation was caused by direct government intervention into the market place. In no other country do they make it easy to go over there and get a job. Heck, try to get a job in our neighbor to the North, Canada. Hah! But here the government made it easy for a bunch of folks (about 1/2 million) to come over and get jobs. Result - net loss of 1/2 million American IT jobs.

I attend various interest group meetings around town, and I notice that the vast majority of attendees are over 40, and most of them still have jobs, of course they are almost exclusively contractors. I don't understand why age would be a factor in hiring a contractor if the company doesn't have to worry about the contractor's benefits.

You speak the gospel truth, and you know what? If the GOP doesn't get its collective head straight on this dynamite issue (re: greying IT generation), they're going to find their political legs cut out from under them. I won't support any politician who supports an open ended, non-controlled H1 (NAFTA, et. al.) immigration policy. Do we need to keep the H1B door open? Certainly. However, at the moment, there is no door at all. If ol' Ulsamma and his buddies want to get into the USA, the shortest, quickest way is to put "Programmer" on their application.

It's not just the workers coming into the country, it's also the work going out.

Contract with the consulting arm of an American Big8 accounting firm to implement your next computer project, and the heavy lifting will be done in India or Pakistan. A crew of Americans works with the customer, defines the specs, and the coding is all done overseas. MultiMillion dollar projects.

The Internet gives, and it takes away.