Part of me wonders whether this is also because of their expectations for a reasonable salary/conditions. If you come from a country where wages are much lower than in the US, even a terrible wage from a tech company must seem like an amazing one.
This then makes the comparison even more stacked towards the H1 worker. Of course they'll 'work harder' for that wage, it seems like a decent one for them and (as mentioned), there's a risk of being sent back. Meanwhile any US based employee you can get for similar money will probably be far below average in terms of skills/mindset, since no one with any real expertise will work for these wages.
A smart graduate from EPFL, Polytechnique or ETH Zurich who interned at CERN and has contributed to the Linux kernel for a software engineering job at a unicorn startup
or
A grad from a second tier "technical college" in India with a visa refusal rate of ~90% for a job doing manual UI testing and QA for a body shop
my only path forward is H1. They'll both be listed as "computer related occupations" and apply for the same visa in the same quota. Does that makes any sense to anyone?
> this definitely creates unhealthy expectations in the labor market in general.
I have always assumed this was the goal; a way to skirt labor laws/protections and overtime normalize overworking and manager worship because American workers are "lazy".
In a similar flavor I never liked it when I worked at $BIGCO and people treated you differently if you were an employee v a contractor. It wasn't a privacy or trust-level thing - it was just social status stupidity.
No, I don’t think H-1B is abusive, it’s an opportunity for hardworking people to prove themselves just as, or more capable than the locals. I don’t think you’re truly concerned about my wellbeing, I think you’d just rather have my job.
I think that complaints of abuse are thinly veiled xenophobia. You pretend to be helping us, but you just want to protect your own overly inflated salaries from market forces.
What you think is "best for you" changes for a lot of people over time. Meanwhile, using my iphone analogy again, you are merely raising the cost of a phone for those who "just want a phone". ie, you are raising the expectations for employers who will expect more people to work for 40+ hours, while getting paid for 40.
If you are from a country with a long waiting time for a US green card, you should really look at a moving to another developed country, or marrying a local.
However, I'm not in favor of the common practice where employers make no attempt to hire a US citizen and instead hire an H1-B employee who is willing to work for peanuts.
That doesn't mean I'm a xenophobe.
Most office job coding work these days is filling out templated layers of indirection via frameworks and APIs.
Google doesn’t have an information advantage. It has a capital advantage. It’s the same old math belying all those algorithms.
They’re trying to sell the idea they possess an information advantage over less developed nations as Americans/westerners don’t buy their story anymore. They’re bored and gonna charge more to fill in the new templates of indirection.