H1B PROGRAM IS AND ALWAYS WAS AN ABSOLUTE SCAM!!!
H1B is to skilled workers what illegal immigrants are to the unskilled.
Its a complete FRAUD! Government should mandate a $100,000 fee per H1B approved. If these companies TRULY cannot find an american that can do the job (which is how its supposed to work) then they’ll have no issues paying to get a person who can do this highly specialized work they need done by a foreigner.
You do that, you’ll see H1B’s dry up tommorrow and all the lies that there aren’t american’s able to do the job myth go away in a heartbeat.
I just got pushed out of IT as a middle manager (and ager) as the company pursues outsourcing at the hands of a foreign VP of IT they brought in.
My wife’s former company was owned by a Dutch couple who used this as a way to bring over friends from NL. Fire the American and then say that no one could do the bookkeeping and admin except another cheese eater.
We did hire a number of engineers who were in the country on H1B visas, but reasonable efforts were made to hire US citizens first.
When the business opportunities didn't work out as planned, and we had to lay off engineers, they laid off all of those on H1B visas first, just like they were supposed to do. We actually lost a very talented engineer that had skills that no one else had, but my boss asked if someone else could learn to do her job. When we gave him an answer of probably, he said that meant he had no choice.
None of the people we laid off were out of work for more than a few weeks, including those on H1B visas.
There was a genuine need for H1B visas, and it wasn't just a scam.
The need is obviously considerably less now, though considering that I have several head hunters that keep contacting me, it appears that the job market is still pretty tight around here, at least for the kind of work that I do.
I'm sure there are other less technical jobs which are getting flooded with H1B visa applicants to an excessive degree, and salaries are being deflated to the point where they cannot find a US citizen willing to work at that job.
However, with the unemployment rates as low as they are, it would seem that except in relatively rare circumstances the main problem is wage deflation rather than not enough jobs being left for US citizens.
Government should mandate a $100,000 fee per H1B approved. If these companies TRULY cannot find an american that can do the job (which is how its supposed to work) then they’ll have no issues paying to get a person who can do this highly specialized work they need done by a foreigner.
That would result in there being a huge tax that would destroy startup companies. It would put us back in the situation where we simply don't have close to enough technical people to fill the opportunities available. It would seriously hurt our economy.
I'm not opposed to a fee for H1B visas, but $100,000 is far to much. Make it more along the lines of 15% - 20% of the salary for the job, and it would make it far less appealing to hire someone on a H1B visa, but not be completely prohibitive.
However, the problem with having such a fee is that H1B visas then become a source of revenue for the government, and the government has even less incentive to investigate abuses.
The best solution is to actually investigate abuses of the system.
You do that, you’ll see H1B’s dry up tommorrow and all the lies that there aren’t american’s able to do the job myth go away in a heartbeat.
Look at the unemployment rates versus the number of current H1B visas. The numbers contradict what you are saying.
Outsourcing is likely a far larger cause for lower wages in technical jobs than H1B visas, at least for jobs that can be outsourced reasonably easily.
I would be opposed to increasing the number of H1B visas, and I support enforcing the laws regarding them, however doing away with them completely would be extremely harmful for our economy.
If you create to much of a shortage of technical workers you also end up making outsourcing much more cost effective, and you make it so that it is much cheaper to do a lot of development efforts elsewhere. You literally risk harming the United State's technical edge by driving technical work away.
We need to make better efforts at preventing abuses, but if we just go heavy handed on the protectionism, we will inevitably hurt ourselves.