> I have a hard time believing it does much more than depress the wages of American white collar workers.

It makes it viable to keep white collar jobs in the midwest.

The company I work for announced they are no longer using these "IT body shops," as you put it. The local pool of workers is totally exhausted, so they can't find enough people to hire, and have decided to close up shop in the midwest and will be moving development to an ultra-high COL tech hub.

Officially, only developers are getting the ax. But I have to assume the rest of the staff are in line. The developers managers should probably be co-located, and if all the dev and managers are co-located, then so should the product managers and their teams. PMs and sales work pretty closely, so it's not hard to imagine those positions will move, etc, etc.

People love to throw out econ 101 supply/demand stuff here, and claim that obviously more tech workers = lower tech worker salaries. But that does not appear to be the case. Regions with more tech workers also pay higher salaries; there's a clear inverse relationship going on.

So, in my interpretation of the empirical evidence we have, suggests that more H1-Bs would raise developer/engineer wages, not suppress them.

P.S. It's clear that IT staff do face downward wage pressure from offshoring. But they also face the same from automation of their jobs (cloud services, SaaS, etc).

>The majority of H1-B holders are the IT body shops

That's not what the data says in the article you linked.

It also lists companies such as Apple, Google, IBM, JP Morgan, etc. as part of the majority. Consultancies like Cognizant, Infosys, and Tata are not even close to the majority of H1B holders.

Infosys and TCS together received 7,504 approved H1B visas in 2014-15, which is only 8.8% of the total approved H1B visas, says Nasscom

http://www.livemint.com/Industry/pHkRcTtIoKd8MkTkBNdtSN/Info...

Seems the numbers in the graph and article don't are not easy to match up. In the graph, the sum seems to be over 100k for those top 20 companies, while the article states that 40-80k visas were granted.

I do agree that I think those outsourcing talent shop should be limited. You shouldn't have majority of your workforce on h1b.

As a counter point I don't think Google, Apple, Microsoft etc are not out of line. Also many startups that are founded by immigrants (50%) and often also hire international talent (since there isn't enough local one). Also startups are not able to compete on salaries like larger companies. If the article is beloved, 63% h1bs go to other than these top companies.

The OP comment still holds that I think startups and hiring international talent does contribute to the US economy and it's just not for "depressing white collar wages".

My point is that the system as it currently stands is depressing white collar wages. There are better systems we can adopt to hire entrepreneurially-minded folks or developers who are particularly skilled from other countries.

Trump is not gutting the H1-B system (currently). All they did was start asking companies to prove that the H1-B was going to an applicant who actually meets the requirements of the visa. If companies are worried about the change that's pretty clear evidence the program is being abused.