The current H1B system of limited visas has far more demand than there is supply, but it's easier to abuse by certain kinds of firms. For an American company trying to hire someone off the street that is living in the UK, the math is so bad few would try: In the real world, companies tend to only try with people that are already working for them. So if, say, Google had someone working off a UK office, and wanted to move them to the US, it's relatively OK if they don't do well in the lottery that year, because they still have an employee.

The abuse comes from companies built entirely on this: Imagine we are running a contracting company from some cheap country. We have 6000 consultants we'll be able to bill higher from the US. So we ask our US subsidiary to just file said 6000 applications. Only 2000 got accepted? Who cares! those 2000 people get moved to the US, and are now working for us, and then we contract them out to normal Enterprise companies at relatively low rates. It's not hard to claim this is abuse, as ultimately one wants to make applications for anyone with a pulse.

Some commentators are definitely overplaying it, but any way you look at it, the system is not necessarily working all that well, precisely because the cap is relatively low, the number of random Indian contractors that would like to move in is very high, and those intermediary companies are rarely great, but they have a big advantage in the system compared to a small company that just really wants to hire one guy, or wants to keep someone that came in with a student visa, and has been doing practical training.

Unfortunately there are so many competing interests that any kind of sensible immigration reform isn't going to happen, as getting the majority of the house and 2/3rds on the senate to agree on something this contentious is almost impossible, especially when one of the parties has people whose idea of the perfect number of immigrants is zero.

It's both. A few companies have most of the H1B allocations through basically fraud and they hold it over those workers heads because they need a sponsor or lose their visa. https://www.livemint.com/news/world/us-says-some-companies-c...

They should reduce the probability for entries, that are submitted multiple times. So, if you apply to several companies, you still have the same chance as if you apply to one company.

Or just make companies to pay to win a slot ;)

> Is H1B abuse real or are are American HN's commenters way overplaying it?

Yes and yes.

The long and short of it is that many companies don't want to pay market salaries, or have unreasonable expectations, and the H1B system basically lets a company hire at a lower salary than market salary.

The H1B system also impacts immigrants' job portability. An H1B employee is less likely to leave a bad job for a better job, thus H1B employees are more desirable because of the lock-in.

Edit: The other half is that a lot of people "age out" of tech for various reasons and like to point a finger. Working in tech at 40+ years old is very different in an industry that typically hires people in their 20s and 30s.

In the broader industry, I've never seen anything that I would qualify as abuse but abuse is very real at certain firms that specialize in hiring H1Bs.

Surely what's relevant is the number of H1B workers in the U.S., not how hard the process appears to be.

Former H1B here. The abuse is real, but what many people assume incorrectly is that it's perpetrated by FAANG companies. Those are actually pretty good places for an H1B to be, generally speaking (subject to the usual caveats wrt hostile management etc) - they pay the same they do to citizens, and it's very rare to see revocation of status used as a threat.

But if you look at the overall visa numbers from a few years ago, they are dominated not by FAANG, but by "consulting" companies like Infosys. Those are straight up sweatshops who squeeze everything they can out of their H1Bs while underpaying them (and thus also undermining the local market).