Whereas some interests aligned with employers in industries using H-1B workers wanted to increase or even eliminate the caps on number of visas, others, specifically a vocal minority in Congress, as well as labor unions and the White House, were opposed to such expansion due to concerns about the effect on native wages and employment opportunities.
One of the ideas considered and rejected during the process was that of imposing a requirement for all H-1Bs to show that efforts had been made to recruit a native worker with the same qualifications.
ACWIA sought to correct their perceived problem by laying out explicit penalties, in addition to the extra attestations required by Section 412.
Rather, only those who were deemed to be H-1B-dependent or had committed willful violations of the law were required to attest to good-faith efforts to recruit American workers.
[2] A paper by Lindsay Lowell at the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies in May 2000 attempted to estimate the population of H-1B temporary workers and how it was likely to change with the passage of ACWIA.
[7] A paper by the Brookings Institution in 2013 proposed changes to the ACWIA to better align H-1 visa fee revenues to local workforce needs.