No, the Visa you are referring to is the O-1 Visa, it is much more difficult and expensive to obtain, but it is not subject to Visa CAP (I know it well, I'm on O-1). H-1B is for specialty worker, and they are not defined by exceptionality but by the fact that they possess a qualification for a specific job, there's a shortage of US Citizen for that job, and they receive market rate salary.

We could agree that the behavior of consulting companies like Tata or Infosys seems like cheating (basically, send thousands of application hoping that a good percentage succeed). But they are hiring for positions that require a degree people qualified; it is difficult to hire for that kind of position (primarily because you could make more money with the same qualification in different companies); and they are paying market rate salaries (or at least, that's what it is certified!).

I could agree that the current H-1B Visa system is broken, but I'm not sure that fixing it just for the perspective of highly paid Silicon Valley Bro is the best solution for the US as a whole. What I'm saying is: are we sure that this kind of cheap specialty labor is not useful for the US society as a whole? E.g.: are we sure that, if System Integration companies have to pay engineers a much higher salary, they will be able to provide prices low enough for other company to pay it? And if few companies could pay for their services, this wouldn't impact their efficiency on one side and the B2B software market on the other side?

I'm not defending the violators nor supporting the "cheap H1B" practices. Just saying that the world is a little bit more complex than that.

>there's a shortage of US Citizen for that job, and they receive market rate salary

That's not quite right. If you can't hire somebody at salary $X, then $X is not the market rate for someone in that position. The language I've heard is "prevailing wage", which can be less than the "market rate" if workers aren't making full use of their bargaining power.

This doesn't make sense to me, CS skills aren't a big fungible set that allow people to move around freely. I have a particular set of skills that I've honed over several years. These skills make me valuable at my specific job, but completely unemployable as a databases person, or an SRE, or a distributed systems specialist. It doesn't matter how much money they offer, they can't hire me because I don't have the skills. It's perfectly possible for subsets of the market to grow demand faster than the population responds by training for these skills (say by new targeted degree programs in school).

You're left with the choice of offering other native employees a pay bump to do something they don't have the skills for or want to do, or bring in foreign talent that is trained and interested, this is not a hard call at all. The problem is that "STEM" is a ridiculously broad classification to try and capture this need, clearly not all science/tech jobs are spiking in demand. At the same time, it's probably a bad idea to have the government specify sub-quotas within, say, software engineering. Government intervention like this, letting bureaucrats make arbitrary decisions on things they don't have expertise about is how you get bad rules.

> E.g.: are we sure that, if System Integration companies have to pay engineers a much higher salary, they will be able to provide prices low enough for other company to pay it?

If you can't sustain your business without illegal (or in this case legal, but certainly exploiting loopholes which shouldn't exist) hiring/salary practices then why should your business be allowed to exist. This type of thing only hurts workers.

I could contend that the shortage of engineers qualified for that job is due to scarcity created by the US immigration policies. And then I'll ask you if you can't have your super high salary without exploiting the current system, your salary shouldn't exist.

Again, I'm not saying what they are doing is right or ethical or desirable. Just challenging the different point of views.

Who sets the quota? And how do we ensure the quota isn't lobbied to be resized to the point where it allows cheap labor?

Peg the minimum to some sort of standardized wage / poverty / CoL metric. Salaries being paid to H1-Bs rise overly much, quota increases. Salaries fall, quota shrinks.

It's not overly hard to design a compensation-based system that guarantees use for only extraordinary talent, because the current abuse is solely because low salaries are still possible.

what is going to prevent even further off shoring then? Software development, support, and even project management, are all easy candidates for off shoring and with ever improving conferencing tools, change management, and similar, its bound that there will be more competition.

So either the cost come down because they live and work here or the costs drop faster as the work simply goes off shore.

Far too many in the tech industry are first to jump at competition in their areas of expertise but mock those concerned about workers similar to those at Carrier whose jobs are moving to Mexico as either progress or being non competitive

The terrible experiences that companies are having at offshoring? I mean, there's a reason why they're bringing in the H1Bs, or paying Tata, Infosys, et al for those consultants instead of doing the offshoring in the first place.

The quota is set by Congress. It was 65K for many years, but I hear during the bubble it was temporarily increased.

Sounds like a 'magic number' to me. What's it based on?

It's Congress's work, so it's likely a compromise between parties.

Which means it's entirely a number pulled out of someone's ass rather than anything related to reality.

http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-optimal-number...

A number that sounds good. There isn't much in the way of reasoning behind it.

65K open to everyone and 20K for those who possess US masters degree or higher.

> to bring in extraordinary talent that is not present in the US

I don't think that is the standard.