Dr. Matloff has been had by the lie of the mean.

What I see from where I sit in the industry is that H-1B pay is not centered about a mean, it's really a very extreme bi-modal distribution. You have your Infosyses, bringing in ultra-cheap IT labor at a pittance, and you have your Googles and Facebooks, bringing in very highly paid engineers that are earning the prevailing wage (very, very high prevailing wage) for their field.

In other words, "H-1Bs" are not a singular group and cannot be analyzed as such. A large part of the H-1B program does address a very critical labor shortage in this industry, the other part... not as much.

I'd invite Dr. Matloff to actually hang around our industry for some time before laying a claim like: "There is no tech labor shortage." Has he been in the hiring chair recently? Because oh dear God.

It seems also interesting that the only source he actually bothers to cite is the confession of a single former H-1B employer, with the nasty implication that everyone is like Mr. Wadhwa.

I'll just say it: this is xenophobic, anti-immigrant, protectionist bullshit.

Thanks for this post, as a H1B on my to SV it's frustrating to be lumped together with "lowest bid" coders. My employer specifically reached out in a recruiting campaign in Europe because, quote "we've interviewed every possible and willing candidate in the valley". If you look at the money they throw at my transfer it's easy to conclude that they'd rather hire local if it was possible.

This can't be true because usually the applications would be oversubscribed within one day of the new fiscal year. One day! I remember that clearly because it was such a big crapshoot whether you'd get granted a h1b or not.