Comment by kccqzy

A salary-based requirement is a lot less easy to game. After all salaries are reported to the IRS on W-2s. Any fraud in the amount of salary can be easily detected without sophisticated investigation.

The only difficulty I see is that salary isn't necessarily proportional to a person's usefulness to the economy or the country. A person can start a company and pay himself a million dollars a year while the person and the company does nothing at all. Sure the IRS gets to collect a bunch, but at that point we might as well create a class of visas that are sold in an auction.