The hb-1 visa does require the same salary same as norway
http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/h-1b-employers-what-w...
http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/h-1b-employers-what-w...
In other words, some shops will gladly pay a senior software engineer $60K a year, claiming they are something else like tech support. There are plenty of examples of other methods some companies use.
Yes, you may find some prevailing wages are lower than what Google pays, but that shouldn't be surprising since high paying tech jobs don't represent the average wage.
If you have programmers being paid anywhere from $80K to $150K for a given skill set, the average is going to be lower than what the top companies pay.
The only way around that is to create another subset of programmers that only look at the highest wages.
And if an employer is found to have abused the system (hired someone for a lower position and then made them do higher-level work, e.g., call them "tech support" when they're really a senior engineer), then force the company to pay the H1-B the equivalent of 100 years' salary and put any employees found to have been complicit in this in prison.
Aren't there jobs whose prevailing wages are closer to the minimum?
The required wage is the higher of prevailing wage and “actual wage,” which is what other employees with similar duties, experience and qualifications are paid.
The separate $60,000 minimum is often misunderstood and not accurately reported in the news media. There is a rule that “H-1B dependent” employers (employers with a certain number or percentage of H-1B workers) need to make a number of attestations, including that they do not displace US workers and try to recruit US workers before hiring an H-1B worker. These are not generally required for H-1B petitions, which normally only require a specialized occupation and a certain wage.
But if an H-1B worker is paid at least $60,000 or has a master’s degree or higher, those attestations are not necessary, and the general H-1B rules apply.
Requirement to advertise for US workers first? No Problem, just advertise where nobody looks, like the physical local newspaper's classifieds. Advertise for a different lower-paid job title, even though the coding duties will be exactly the same. Hire via an outsourcing company whose entire operation is to game the system, and the costs are still less than a US programmer.
The worst part is the sponsorship structure -- when you hire an H1-B worker, you are "sponsoring" his or her presence in the US. they have only the right to work at your business, and nowhere else. They lose that job, and they will have to leave within days (60?). They would not only have to find a new job in that time, but a new job willing to sponsor them and capable of getting their H1-B approved in that time -- very unlikely. This means that the H1-Bs will take all kinds of abuse and lower pay without complaining, as complaining is the quick ticket home.
The simple change of allowing H1Bs to be a 2-year visa, and they are allowed to change to any job after 6 months would go a long way to clearing out the abuses, since the sponsoring company would need to treat them at their full worth to keep them.