While working at Google I worked with many many amazing H1B (and other kinds) visa holders. I did 3 interviews a week, sat on hiring committees (reading 10-15 packets a week) and had a pretty good gauge of what we could find.
There was just no way I could see that we could replace these people with Americans. And they got paid top dollar and had the same wlb as everyone else (you could not generally tell what someone’s status was).
But wanna use it as a way to undercut American jobs with 80-hour-a-week laborers, as I've personally witnessed? Nah.
My criticisms against the H1B program are completely against the companies who abuse it. By all means, please do use it to bring in world-class scientists, researchers, and engineers!
But, for existing teams they wanted (reasonably) to avoid splitting between locations. So you need someone local.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jamesfobrien_tech-jobs-have-d...
I felt enormous sympathy for my coworkers here with that visa. Their lives sucked because there was little downside for sociopathic managers to make them suck.
Most frustrating was when they were doing the same kind of work I was doing, like writing Python web services and whatnot. We absolutely could hire local employees to do those things. They weren't building quantum computers or something. Crappy employers gamed the system to get below-market-rate-salary employees and work them like rented mules. It was infuriating.