It has everything to do with it! I’m an engineer in Silicon Valley with 30 years of experience. When I was in school (A Cal State..) 95% of my class were US citizens. Now it is likely 20-30%. So the pool of graduating US engineers is already mostly foreign born.
At the same time - for most of my career, I felt that the US was the main benefactor, i.e. we attracted the best and brightest from other countries here. I still feel that way.
So I’ve got mixed emotions about the H1B limits. At the same time, there are OTHER types of Visas (simply don’t remember the number) that ARE really abused by some employers. I had one employer that DID bring over Indian workers and farmed them out to US companies. They lived together in a company owned apartment and collected Indian level wages. The Visa they were on was suppose to be limited to training.
Those are the guys I object too!
I agree with you. I share an office with a guy who is corporate counsel for a company that does some sort of very technical computer consulting services. The owners of the company are from India and they have an office in Mumbai along with their U.S. headquarters, and they have consultants all over the country that have to move around a lot from job to job. They brought over 80 people from India last year, I think 98 the year before that, and so on. They do have some American employees but they really can't find people here with the kind of specialized training they need. The people they get from India had to take tests as young teenagers to see whether they were going into vocational programs or into a pre-university program. Then they weed them out from there. Their math and sciences programs are tough from an early age and relatively few make it through to get masters degrees in highly technical areas of study. Most of these people have masters degrees, and are top students from the top schools in India. They can write code in their sleep. They're extremely sharp and they are willing to go wherever the company sends them. The lowest paid are making at least $60k a year, and some are making over a couple of hundred grand a year. Americans would work for that, but they can't find qualified applicants, and the few Americans out there who can handle the job generally aren't willing to move a lot like these people are required to do.
We don't have that many people coming over on H1-B visas and generally they are very sharp people, productive people who contribute a lot to our society, the kind we want to bring in. Some will end up getting green cards and some will end up becoming citizens eventually. I have no problem with that at all. Maybe we need some reform in the H1-B program, but on the whole it would be a bad idea to stop taking the best and the brightest from around the world.