I think given Tata, Infosys, Disney and Edison electric's behaviour is plenty of reason for people to be critical of how we have setup H-1B. Illegal immigration is illegal so that is a purely indefensible position to have to be in support of illegal immigration. We have democracy and laws such as H-1B which allow us to bring people into the country on our terms (laws which require scrutiny from time to time). Any migration reform should be done through legislation not willful ignorance of the laws. Otherwise what use is the state if they cannot even do what they say they are going to do?

I didn't expect anyone to be in favour of illegal immigration - what I'm asking about are efforts to curtail illegal immigration and deport existing illegal immigrants? To the extends that laws around H1Bs aren't working, surely the laws around illegal immigration are working even poorer? The population of illegal immigrants is many time higher than the population of H1Bs.

The forces that support the broken and easily abusable H1B system are the same forces that support illegal immigration: the large, entrenched business and banking interests who want to keep wages low (and thus keep their profits high). These forces spend a lot of money lobbying the government to do nothing to curtail illegal immigration, fix the visa system, or punish the abusers.

I'm not sure if you're expecting to get a reply that encapsulates all of HN's users position on this, but probably the reason that you see more H1B talk here is because this site caters to people in the tech industry - affected by H1B's more than the industries that are more affected by illegal immigrants from Mexico.

>what I'm asking about are efforts to curtail illegal immigration and deport existing illegal immigrants? To the extends that laws around H1Bs aren't working, surely the laws around illegal immigration are working even poorer?

No I don't advocate anarchy, I advocate we enforce our border as any state does, in fact its one of the few things I actually think the state is suppose to do. If we cut out just a small fraction of all the stuff the state does which I do not think it is suppose to do this job would be done, and done well and would allow only higher quality individuals into our cities and communities (e.g. not drug dealers and criminals).

>The population of illegal immigrants is many time higher than the population of H1Bs.

Why does this quantity matter in the context of H1Bs, you are confusing two different issues. In one case the law is not enforced, that clearly just needs to be dealt with. H1Bs on the other hand is a legal system which requires refinement at the legislative level, or litigation.

They are both problems, but with different characteristics. One is an abuse of a law involving fraud and large-scale white collar crime. The thing about white collar crime that makes it especially dire is that amount of money involved, and the damage done, is almost always much greater than low-level street crime.

The other involves illegal border crossings by individuals from a neighboring country or visa-overstaying mostly from South America.

I've personally witnessed a kind of overlap of these problems that went way beyond H1-B fraud and went way into human trafficking and organized crime. In that case a high-tech company was being used as a front for illegal immigration from an Asian country, with no-show workers and other amazing stunts more typical of a corrupt government or union operation. But that was an exceptional case.