Last month, the annual cap of 65,000 H-1B visas was again exhausted in just five days, with over 190,000 petitions filed by tens of thousands of U.S. employers. However, missing from the discussion around the annual H-1B lottery and cap is something far more important to our country’s future than a single nonimmigrant visa program. To put it simply, highly skilled immigration to America is a much bigger system and a much bigger problem than the H-1B cap.

Right now, permanently employed foreign professionals working legally in key innovative roles in America are backlogged decades in our outdated immigration system. As a result, the comparatively minor H-1B visa program has become a major systemic chokepoint, servicing not only temporary workers — its original mandate — but also filling key employment authorization gaps in our nation’s most merit-driven permanent immigration program, employment-based green cards.