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> I also think that the impact on American workers in this salary range from H1B is pretty low. Many companies with salaries in this range are always hiring provided you have the skills.

Actually most companies that you are referring to want tech salaries to decline. One of the best weapons against high tech salaries are H1B visas and offshoring.

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Do you have any empirical evidence that H1B is an effective "weapon against high tech salaries" in the income range that Google pays?

I think that whatever is going on in the lower end of the market, there is still a substantial shortage of labor in the higher jobs that cannot be made up domestically anytime soon. Higher end jobs tend to have a much less elastic labor pool because fewer people can do the work.

Whatever the impact is for tech workers, for the general public it is definitely a bad outcome to have perpetual labor shortages at tech companies; it just means that they get their products/features/bug fixes/other improvements more slowly.

Anecdata, Google is in the process of long hiring freeze. The recruiter told me that there isn't a shortage of candidates, there is a shortage of slots to accommodate them. Several other companies as well, big or small. There might not be a substantial labor shortage that you might assume. Things are changing.

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