H1Bs live in two parallel universes. People in one never meet the people in the other.
The H1Bs who work at Google probably get paid a pretty decent wage (though even then, the restrictions on how and where they can work, as well as the difficult in changing professions, probably does still drag down wages relative to what they would earn if they were totally free agents).
The H1Bs at the body shops are often paid miserable wages, and these visas are used without question to fire Americans and replace them with foreign nationals. Keep in mind that 7 of the top 10 users of the H1B visa are actually Indian Outsourcing companies.
Here's a link to the story about the usage of H1B (the link is msnbc, but the original story was on businessweek)
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17048048/
"infosys was certified by the department of labor meeting the prevailing wage requirement to bring 100 computer programmers in at $9.15 an hour. HCL America got 75 programmers at $24,000 a year."
The real debate is how prevalent the two camps are - Microsoft and Google insist that the H1Bs are exceptional engineers who couldn't be found "at any price" in the US, and who create huge amounts of wealth. They would tend to claim that the abuses are minor, the kind of thing that happens in any complex system.
Opponents, on the other hand, tend to say that the abuses are widespread, and that very talented engineers are a small minority of the H1B workers.
For the record - I believe that talented engineers from overseas are exceptionally valuable to the US and should be allowed in without all the indentured crap. However, I believe that recent evidence demonstrates that the abuses are extremely widespread, and that the H1B has greatly reduced the appeal of engineering careers at a time when the US desperately needs to ensure a steady supply from within its own population.
My first real job (I'm a native-born US citizen) was in such a body shop. Everybody there got paid chicken feed.
In fact, the INS would check that the green card applicants were getting paid market wages. When an employee reached that point in the process, his salary was actually increased as appropriate. But for those of us that had no such immigration issues, we never got such an upward adjustment.
(Things may have changed since then. That was the early '90s, the time of a big downturn in the industry)
I got paid a little extra to do technical interviews for this purpose. A green card applicant had to prove that there were no available US citizens that could do the job, so we'd run an ad in the Times, soliciting applicants for that job. I would then give them technical interviews so difficult that they couldn't pass, thus proving that our employee was the only one qualified.
The H1Bs who work at Google probably get paid a pretty decent wage (though even then, the restrictions on how and where they can work, as well as the difficult in changing professions, probably does still drag down wages relative to what they would earn if they were totally free agents).
The H1Bs at the body shops are often paid miserable wages, and these visas are used without question to fire Americans and replace them with foreign nationals. Keep in mind that 7 of the top 10 users of the H1B visa are actually Indian Outsourcing companies.
Here's a link to the story about the usage of H1B (the link is msnbc, but the original story was on businessweek) http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17048048/
Here's a link to an NPR segment
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1424156...
According to Ron Hira (from the NPR) link:
"infosys was certified by the department of labor meeting the prevailing wage requirement to bring 100 computer programmers in at $9.15 an hour. HCL America got 75 programmers at $24,000 a year."
The real debate is how prevalent the two camps are - Microsoft and Google insist that the H1Bs are exceptional engineers who couldn't be found "at any price" in the US, and who create huge amounts of wealth. They would tend to claim that the abuses are minor, the kind of thing that happens in any complex system.
Opponents, on the other hand, tend to say that the abuses are widespread, and that very talented engineers are a small minority of the H1B workers.
For the record - I believe that talented engineers from overseas are exceptionally valuable to the US and should be allowed in without all the indentured crap. However, I believe that recent evidence demonstrates that the abuses are extremely widespread, and that the H1B has greatly reduced the appeal of engineering careers at a time when the US desperately needs to ensure a steady supply from within its own population.