To petition for an H-1B professional visa would require that the need for foreign workers be demonstrated with rapid wage growth that considerably exceeds the overall market growth level. I haven't really thought it through fully, but I could envision a system were the Department of Labor certifies that a certain profession had an annual salary growth in excess of whatever the threshold is set at. The Immigration Service could then issue a number of visas linked to that level of growth for the profession. As an example, let's say that overall wage growth for the economy was 1% and the wage growth for "widget maker" was 3% (or 3 times the overall rate, the trigger in this example). Then and only then could visas be issued in this profession. A formula could also be set to determine the number of visas to be issued. For example, 0.1 of the growth rate times the number in the profession. If there were 1,000,000 "widget makers" then (0.1 x .03 x 1,000,000) would allow 3,000 visas for "widget makers" in this example. If the threshold wage growth level continued to be met or exceeded, additional visas as per the formula could be issued. If the wages had leveled off, then visas could no longer be issued in that profession. In this way, industries that truly face a worker shortage and have been paying wages growing at rate considerably faster than normal can continue to do business until domestic supply has caught up. However, workers in a profession where there is no great shortage and wages are not exceeding the threshold growth levels would not have additional workers brought in to depress their wages or take their jobs.
BS. Wages grow rapidly more people get training. It is called incentive. Importing people ruins the incentive.