Truth is, even "high value" employers like google are up to mischief. Remember that wage suppression no-hire collusion? I don't really trust them with this power, and not just because I generally don't trust corporations with this power. Google and the other participants in this no-hire scheme gave us good reason not to trust them in this regard.

Now, on a practical note, though, I think sometimes principles need fuzzy boundaries. It's bad PR for high tech employers to talk about a critical shortage of workers while firing $100k a year mid-level tech employees and requiring that they train their H1B replacements as a condition of receiving severance and 6 more months of employment as they scramble to find a new job. But in a same vein, it would be bad PR for critics of the H1B program to get too vocal about the "exploitation" of $250k+ a year SSE's at google. That would not play well in peoria.

Honestly, if we set a very high minimum salary for the H1B (say, 200k a year), I think the problems we see with it would largely fade - though I assure you tech employers would be up in arms[1].

100k does seem too low to me - not because tech employees are "entitled" to more than this (nobody is), but because generally, US employers are required to hire from the pool of people who currently have live/work rights in the US - a country with a population of 300 million that takes an additional 1.2 (roughly) legal immigrants into the country every year. We created the H1B visa largely because high tech employers claimed that they couldn't find critically needed highly skilled workers from this massive labor pool, so they needed the power to bestow (and maintain control over!) limited live/work rights in the US on new hires.

So we're talking about a unique and very serious power and privilege accorded to these companies, granted on the agreement that these are rare and unusual workers with high levels of skill who are supplementing, not displacing, the existing workforce. If a corporation wants that power, but then says 100k is too much to pay this worker (in the bay area, no less!), then I pretty much feel we should dismiss that claim with scorn, frankly. Seriously, this is an utterly critical worker to you and the US economy, you need this person to work in the most expensive city in the country, and 100k is too much? Look, sounds like you can compete for the existing labor workforce like everyone else.

Believe it or not, $250k a year isn't an outrageous salary for a highly skilled worker in San Francisco. That's hardly an unusual salary for a lawyer or physician, and many of these critical H1B hires do have advanced degrees in STEM fields, which at the elite level are arguably more difficult to obtain than law or MBA degrees.

But overall, yeah, I certainly wouldn't be arguing as vociferously against this visa if use were limited to people paid SSE level salaries at google. Nor, I suspect, would most of the people who object to it. The only objections you'd see there would be from the heavy users of this visa, especially the body shops.

[1] I do wonder if there's a good strategy in this for google and Facebook, though. Clearly, these companies are frustrated when they can't get enough visas. So far, their approach has been to lobby for expansion of the number of visas, but that is causing a PR problem at this point. If they were to get a much higher minimum salary - even 100k would help, $150 would be better - they would no longer have to contend with body shops snapping up all the visas. I'm honestly very cynical about this at this point, especially hearing Zoe Lofgren starting to criticize the program. But I think what is happening here is that the industry, and their allies in government, are starting to realize that the H1B program, because of the serious abuses, is gaining a very bad reputation, and they're at risk of losing it. It makes strategic sense to get out ahead of this and reform it so that google can still use it but the body shops can't get visas.