See my EDIT above. I am no economist to parse all this information, but in my experience and people I know the wage argument for "genuine" H1B applicants is hyperbole.
I am not an expert. I also do not have time to understand the data. That is why all I am comfortable saying is, my gut instinct is that H1B visa's dont drive down salaries (more than adding more workers affects salaries) but I dont know for certain.
The next best thing we can do is look in the literature for someone who has done this analysis. I like scholar.google.com.
If we dont even have time for that, I guess its just not that important and we just go through life not knowing, hopeful that the day will come when we will see a reddit link to a blog post about a behind-paywall news article summarizing an academic analysis.
C'est la vie.
3.6m software engineers in the US; if even half of h1b holders are devs that's a sizeable increase. Even under modest demand elasticity assumptions you can back of napkin estimate a large influence
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2483690/it-careers/indi...
Wait a minute, I re-read my initial statement, this is what I said:
> "I am replying to those who make claims that H1B workers are being paid below market rate, hence driving down salaries."
I mention specifically about H1B workers are not being paid below market rate. So the salaries of H1B workers is not the cause of the driving down the wages.
To your argument, will an abundant supply of labor cause the salaries to go down or stagnate? Yes.