It's clear you've never been on the employer side of an H1 petition let alone a green card, or spoken to an immigrant before.

H1s cost $6000+ and are available 4 days out of the year in April, and even then you have a 33% chance of getting one. And should you get one you can't start until the new USCIS fiscal year in October.

What about that makes you think they'd rather hire a foreigner? The green card burden is years and many more thousands of dollars. Those people are probably just really good.

Also, your statement about H1s getting paid way less isn't usually true, they're required to be paid the prevailing wage for the job they're doing in their geographical area.

Now if you're talking about body shops, well that's a totally different conversation and needs to end but if those people were sponsored directly by your employer there's some good reasons. And if your employer is using a body shop you should be mad at them not USCIS -- for this, there's plenty of other reasons to be mad at USCIS haha.

>Also, your statement about H1s getting paid way less isn't usually true, they're required to be paid the prevailing wage for the job they're doing in their geographical area.

That's easy to game and not enforced very well.

>there's some good reasons

Often that good reason is that if they're fired and can't very quickly find another employer, they'll have to leave the country. And if the company is sponsoring a green card, depending on where they are in the process if they change employers, they'll be moved back in priority.

Employing a workforce full of H-1B visa holders means you have a workforce with drastically reduced mobility. That alone is worth the price for many employers. Add to that the fact that it's relatively easy to get away with something like hiring someone for QA and making them do development work (to bypass prevailing wage requirements) and H-1Bs are a lot more attractive than you seem to think.

I agree on many of the points you made. This is the reason h1b needs to be abolished and replaced with a high skilled immigration system like Canada's. it'll give true mobility for the immigrant and less power to the company to abuse, which would in turn lead to less or no wage disparity among immigrants and citizens of US.

I agree with both of you

+$6000 is nothing when you're paying, let's say 60k instead of an American that would want 90k

The H1Bs I know are good, but Infosys/TCS etc they don't care, they just apply in bulk and whoever wins the lottery gets in. Because they don't care who they're getting they just need people to fill in seats (and yes, their - these companies - quality of service is low)

India and China have over 1bn people. Their countries are inferior to he US in so many ways. Of course they want to come here, and if there was no cap on the number, they would drive the wages down to rock bottom.

They will always be cheaper than US labor. And there are other advantages like employer loyalty because they cannot easily change job, which means employers can push them very hard and they won't quit - because its complicated to shift to another employer and they have to restart their green card.

I think behind all this is the feeling that the best opportunities are given to foreigners who then rise up the ranks, opportunities which could have been given to Americans.

Regarding immigration in general, the left continuously argues to keep low-paid foreign workers here to the benefit of large corporates. The justifications of "all of Silicon Valley companies support foreign immigration" makes perfect sense for these companies, but not for the nation. Silicon Valley is a bubble.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name MOTHER OF EXILES. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

That was before all the land was settled. And most likely meant for Europeans.

What matter does it make if it was originally meant at Europeans rather than Indians? People also used to consider Catholics (Irish, Italians, Polish) as not white.

The US is still very sparsly populated, especially for a country with so much arable land & relatively mild climate.

Ever been to the Netherlands or Belgium? They are quite lovely. Both also have a population density well in excess of 10x the US's.

Lots more people can fit in the country without negative effects.

I hear this about the US all the time - open the gates, plenty of land left.

But the areas that have seen job growth in the last 20 years are highly concentrated in areas that are about as packed as most of Western Europe: LA, SF, Boston through DC, and about a dozen other massive metro areas. The vast majority of available land (from the Mississippi to the Pacific and Alaska) is uninhabitable or agricultural and without jobs.

All I know is that where I live we already have way too much traffic, lack of affordable housing, and the lowest labor participation rate in decades. So by what metric does increasing population help those of us who live here (besides companies who love cheaper labor)?

So by the same measure do you also support legislation to disallow rural Americans from moving to the cities? How about those from sparser cities into denser ones?

    So by what metric does increasing population 
    help those of us who live here

Not everything is about helping you. Why do people in HN complain about zoning/density restrictions in SFBA? Keeping real estate restricted/expensive is beneficial to people who already own a house there!

   areas that are about as packed as most of 
   Western Europe: LA, SF, Boston through DC,
   and about a dozen other massive metro areas.

http://www.newgeography.com/content/002808-world-urban-areas... - only 2 of the top 20 metros are in the US and they have the lowest density (table 1). Also from that page: "the least dense urban areas with more than 2.5 million population are all in the United States."

The US is sparse in any meaningful metric.

Shouldn't we help the ones already here first?

Should we solve all problems on earth before attempting a mission to mars? And this is ignoring the fact that allowing immigration is not some purely benevolent sacrifice for helping others, countries generally benefit from immigration as a whole.

That was before there were billions of Africans, Indians, and Indonesians a few hours travel from the United States. Times change.

Also this part is important: "yearning to breathe free" is quite different from "yearning to establish a global Caliphate".

Yearning to establish a caliphate is a boogeyman. The vast majority of immigrants to the US are not Muslim and the vast majority of Muslim immigrants are not schemeing to establish a caliphate.

The "scheming" comment is a classic false dichotomy.

There's a big spectrum of behavior towards a political outcome between "opposed with deadly force" and "supportive with deadly force". Most Germans in 1940 wouldn't personally gun down Jews, nor even directly participate in organizing such a thing. But nor did they didn't oppose it with force, or energetically ensure it didn't happen.

Of course most Muslims aren't "scheming" to establish a caliphate, but they wouldn't oppose it the way you or I would.

This is an obvious reality that people just don't like to acknowledge.

I live in the 2nd-most Turkish neighborhood of the most Turkish city outside of Turkey (Tempelhof, in Berlin), I think I may have more personal first-hand experience with muslim immigrants than you do.

They are for the vast, overwhelming majorly part, just normal people not unlike natives of the same social class. yes, if you compare the "typical" working class muslim to professional yuppies they come across a lot more conservative but not more so than the local-western working class.

And the muslim professional class (the doctors, engineers, lawyers, etc among them) are similarly not very different in this aspect from the local-western professional yuppies.

I think the discrepancy in perspective is that most yuppies don't otherwise notice the native working class.

Worked for a company that was relatively abusive to its engineers, and all but the H1-B's left. They hold a disproportionate amount of power over their H1-B employees.

You contradict yourself.

Body shops take the majority of H1Bs and we all know they game the system.

>I suppose they can pay this person a pittance in comparison.

Totally false understanding of the H1B visa program. H1B employees are not cheap labor, in fact full-time H1B employees are paid on-par or more than American citizens. Employers are required, by law, to file the prevailing wages during labor certification before filing H1B visa.

Employers hire full-time H1B visa holders for only one reason: they simply can't find the people. And the business would suffer if they wait to only hire citizens or green card holders. So they spend exorbitant amount of money for visa and attorney fees and wait for through the whole H1B transfer process. It's not because H1Bs are cheap!

true to certain extent..Indians and Chinese national are discriminated in the allotment of green cards due to country quota limits. The result is green card queues are backlogged for years tied to sponsoring employer.

Some employees don't want to go through this whole process switching a job, leading to few employers taking "unfair advantage" of these employees. They are not offered fair wage hikes or promotions as the employer knows they are stuck in the green card queue for years.

But the thing is nothing is stopping these employees from making a move to a high paying job. They are just lethargic and don't want to take a risk. Employees should not sacrifice their career goals for immigration issues. How I do know? Been there, seen that, did that. I am still waiting for my green card for the last 6 years and I expect to wait for at least another 6-8 years.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/392 can change this. This bill has bi-partisan support and I hope it will be put for a vote.

That's the theory but in reality its gamed by employers and body shops additionally like racism if people perceive it discriminates against native born citizens then it is.

> but I suppose they can pay this person a pittance in comparison.

While I respect your opinions on H1B program because you are entitled to have one, you have evidently no idea how much an H1B is paid if you think its a "pittance" (or have a different definition of "pittance").

E.g. See http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=Facebook+Inc&job=&city=SEAT...

BTW, the salaries mentioned are just base (i.e. cash component). You can safely multiply the amount by 2 to arrive at yearly gross salary after stock grants and misc bonuses (e.g. joining bonus).

Compare to http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=Tata+Consultancy+Services+L...

full-time h1b employees != h1b consultants

Source? I knew a lot of Googlers who were on H1B visa. Not all were Indian. Anecdotally, I know other large companies (FB, etc.) use it as well.

Large companies do this, so it must be good for the country!

Just like tax avoidance!

My point is companies like Google and FB are not a using it to hire low skill workers. Every H1B I met there was very skilled.