My foreign friend recently joined Amazon. Her PERM process (where an employer has to advertise a job to Americans before they can green card an employee) was instantaneous, no 3 months, no cooldown. Why? Amazon currently has multiple open positions for her position, that they can not fill, and she was able to fill one of those positions that had been on the market for months. The PERM process is already complete, multiple times over, with honest advertising. At a ludicrous salary, at that.

What you are saying is absolutely true for parts of Amazon, and I'd bet good money on it being true for the others.

I work at amazon and I’m pretty sure I’m the only American in my whole org

I get solicitations from Amazon on a monthly basis.

I don't even bother answering them because I've already dealt with the process and am not interested, based on the amount they're paying for the (awful) work conditions for which they're known.

This is like many companies in my area. Word gets around.

So the point is, these companies set their salaries, interview process, and work conditions explicitly low because they know they can just use foreign workers if they're not good enough to attract enough Americans at the skill levels they need.

It's a self fulfilling prophecy. They use tons of indentured servant Indians whose green card they promise to sponsor, pay them low, burn them out, and then cry they can't find Americans who don't want to work for similar pay and conditions, but don't need the green card.

> The salaries these companies pay is really competitive.

They might be paying good salaries, lot of companies dont. Even if the salary is good the company knows the employee is not going anywhere since switching jobs on H1B is not easy and their is 10+ year wait for Green card applications from Indians and Chinese.

That would have been relevant if they did not use "contractors" on their premises. "Contractors" work on their, FAANGs premises, report the bosses employed by FAANGs, but are technicaly hired by likes of Tata, Wipro, HCL etc. They bring their employees at the lower rates from India, or hire at lower wages Americans, who is willing to work for less, such as recent graduates. So yeah, curtailing H1B abuse, and then, extending the program if necessary is right thing to do. In any case abuse of laws should not be tolerated, even if you believe the law is outdated. It either has to be repealed on kept and enforced.

You're assuming that the contractors will always be on premise. With covid-19 (and even before), most of these companies have established bases in Canada. The only obstacle has been management resistance to remote work. With covid-19, that's not going to be an issue.

What I'm trying to say is that just because h1-b's are curtailed it won't result in contracts not going out to these companies. The contracts will still exist because the rates are extremely attractive. The workforce will just be filled up in Canada.