India and China each graduate many times more software engineers each year than does the US. Many, perhaps even most, would love to work and stay in the US.
With a massive influx of engineers in a short span of time, I can't see how wages would remain where they are now in areas like NYC and SF. This is probably exactly what the Facebooks et al want, I guess.
Not really.
Competent devs are not cheap anywhere. In order to noticeably lower wages in the US you need to bring a lot of software developers from other countries.
But the supply of software developers is quite limited.
Besides, as soon as wages start to move downwards, software development products start going down in cost (or go up in quality). That increases sales of software and increases demand for more software developers.
I have seen most of my fellow programmers change their career since having 15 years of experience is bad thing because we are not willing to work for 60K.
Is it to management of lower skilled developers?
How? They can only be approved if they're getting paid the same or more than existing software devs.
Ha. Look at some writeups of the SoCal Edison outsourcing, for example. U.S. citizens making $95K were replaced with H1-B workers earning $60-65K, and that's generously estimating the lower salaries. Tata and Infosys might pay their workers closer to $40-50K.
They're currently under investigation for violating the immigration labor laws surrounding the H1B [1].
It's a different problem than the cap or the problem in the article. You're always going to have agencies trying to abuse a system regardless of whether there is a cap or not, and they will be investigated and penalized accordingly.
http://www.natlawreview.com/article/commentary-tata-consulta...
Meaning if there was a cap (or no cap), there would still be enforcement making it a non-issue.