Its imposing a positive skew to the salary distribution.
Many aspects of the H1-B suck. The same is true for their European and Asian counterparts. Just eliminating non-immigration visas would not solve the problem in a highly-integrated world-wide economy - it would make things worse.
This.
The H1B program is essentially indentured labor.
Surely if a company says they want to employ a specific person, and that person is the best for the job, that should be enough?
Do you trust a government minion to competently assess either A) this highly specialized person's skillset, or B) the forthrightness of the applicant company's statements?
Sometimes an emperical "good enough" on the international scale is the best you're going to get. In the case of H1B visa program, from the host country's view, lowering the bar will increase the administrative overhead in a system where one could instead apply any increase in administrative capacity toward the already largely exluded applicant pool with high caliber credentials.
However, only one of the reasons. I did not necessarily want to stay forever, just like I didn't want to stay forever in London (no restrictions for an EU citizen).
Also, I just don't see the wage-depression, at least not in any of the cases I am aware of (and there were quite a few at the companies I was working for in the Bay Area). I remember one smarty-pants ranting about H1B wage-depression after an otherwise fun EE380 session. I challenged him to guess my salary. He was off by a factor of three.
And not for lack of trying, IBM, Google, Microsoft, and many other tech giants have subsidiaries here in Brazil for example.
Yet, everytime you hear about a brazillian that achieved something great recently, was NOT inside Brazil.
I can tell you, my personal reasons why I don't even applied to MS, IBM, etc here in Brazil: You have all problems of working in a big corporation, yet the pay is still terrible.
But I DID applied for US MS for example, because although it obviously has the same problems as working in BR MS, the pay is much, much higher (inside MS itself the US pay is about 4 times the BR pay for a entry level position).
Thus the best talent from Brazil (or India, or China) don't stay in their countries, they end leaving their countries, even if to work in companies that do exist in their countries, seeking a better life.
Now, why MS US and MS BR has so drastic pay gap? Basically, because of the things that made the US a great place to create startups in first place: much less regulation in general, much less corruption, and better infrastructure, in Brazil the mininum costs of running a company, without counting the employee wages, is so high, that not much money is left to actually pay the employees, we call this here "Brazil Cost".
Some examples: Brazil is the country in the world that is most complicated to pay the taxes, as result is the country where companies use a largest portion of their money paying accountants and tax lawyers.
Brazil has second highest taxes of the world (first place is Sweden).
Yet Brazil security, roads, etc... suck, to the point that most big companies in Brazil are concentrated in a private-built city named AlphaVille, companies and rich people living in AlphaVille built with their own private money their streets, guard stations, walls, electricity lines, etc... and pay with their own private money for cops, schools for their children, firefighters, etc... And STILL pay all the taxes normally too, as you can expect, running a business there (or living there) is crazy expensive.
Yet running our business there, is a necessity, when you have people assaulting business in São Paulo and Rio using heavy military weapons (even Bazookas were witnessed), you have no choice but to run your business in a private ran fortress, and pay everything doubled (once in form of taxes, and once in form of private contracts that actually solve your problem).
Obviously it's a complex topic, but why are you so sure?
Why is the competition "unfair"? If it's unfair because we don't offer "social programs such as free higher education", then the solution ought to be offering those programs, not hamstringing US companies.
There'd be a one-time cost to creating a campus in India, but honestly, it would be more than compensated for by the fact that they could almost certainly pay Indians in India a considerably lower wage than Indians in the Bay Area.
The reason they don't make their major campuses in other countries versus the US is because they feel that they have talent that is determined to stay in the US and which will not cross-pollinate well with physically remote offices, not because they think that it is cheaper to employ foreigners in the US than it would be in their home countries.
The H1B visa program only serves to depress wages, take advantage of foreign workers, and eliminate the high-tech advantage that the US has developed over decades.