> What is the rationale behind this? Or how will this benefit existing citizens? Where do you draw the line for a cap on immigration, and why?
There was no rationale. You keep pointing at Australia etc as a desirable model, and I told you what you'd need to do to make your system more like those countries, and what the result of that would be.
In particular, those countries don't have quotas on skilled immigration. Well, not explicit ones - any point system establishes an inherent limit.
> I would say the first priority is to ensure this system is not being used to drive down wages, and not being used to abuse migrants.
I don't think there are many people who would disagree with you. As an ex-H1B, I don't see anything objectionable about the changes presented so far (and if I still were an H1B, I'd actually benefit from them).
Here are some nice charts here about who's using the system, and how:
https://www.axios.com/h1-b-salaries-2228205505.html
Note that what these numbers clearly tell is that it's not Google, Microsoft, Facebook etc that are a problem wrt wages. It's Tata, Infosys and similar sweat shops. Those are also the ones who get most of the H1B visa quota. Ironically, they're also the ones using H1B as a true temp worker visa - they rarely sponsor their employees for green cards.
In contrast, for most major tech company workers, H1B is a vehicle to green card and citizenship, and the companies themselves do encourage that, sponsoring employees and paying all filing and legal fees, because they are interested in retaining those workers long-term (and are paying well enough that they're not concerned that people would leave once they're no longer legally bound to the company).
So, imposing more stringent lower limits on wages would benefit the Googles of the world at the expense of Tatas, and would benefit people using H1B as immigration vehicle over temp workers.
> Family-based immigration must be done in a way to ensure that we are not creating greater demands on the economy. They should be able to support themselves and not contribute to the decrease in participation rate, and increasing unemployment.
Strictly speaking, family-based immigration already has such requirements. The sponsor must not only demonstrate sufficient minimum income to provide for the person they're sponsoring, but they're also required to sign a legally enforceable pledge making them financially liable for support of that person:
https://www.uscis.gov/green-card/green-card-processes-and-pr...
This remains in force until that person becomes a citizen, which would be at least 5 years after getting green card in most cases (you need 5 years of permanent residency to apply for citizenship normally; 3 if you're married to a citizen).
This all is very similar to Canada.
> This says that there should have some kind of entrepreneurial visa.
There are visas for investors, but they require considerable sums of money upfront. I don't think there's anything for people who are not self-funded in that manner, which likely accounts for most of the startups.