My favorite move in tabletop strategy when doing disaster recovery is finding the most important person at the table and going 'Bang, you died driving to work, you can stay but you cannot help anyone'
You only get this line if you're a US citizen as justification as to why H1B visa quotas need to be increased. If you're here on an H1B visa, you get reminded daily that your replacement is waiting back in your home country, you can be replaced with a single phone call, and you better have a plan to get all of your things and family back to your home country quickly when you get bounced.
No offense, but that doesn't make any sense. Right now, there's a lot of paperwork and the H1B lottery that means it's non-trivial to get a new H1B worker into the country. Increasing the quota would make it easier for the employer to act like H1B would be replaced on a whim, and actually create the scenario you're complaining about.
> ...and you better have a plan to get all of your things and family back to your home country quickly when you get bounced.
Knowing a lot of H1Bs, this is the real reason H1Bs can be exploited and bullied. Their visa is tied to the employer, which gives that employer way more leverage over the employee than over a citizen or permanent resident.
The real way to fix these problem is to keep the quota, but remove the control the employer has over work visas (by making them easily portable). That way, the employer can get the talent they need if there's really a shortage, but they'll have to pay market salaries and provide reasonable working conditions to the immigrants.
If I had to guess based on my friends/family, first jobs are horribly abusive for 100% of med school graduates, 90% of law graduates, and 20% of software engineers. That 20% is common enough that we hear about it all the time, but it's still much less frequent than other high-paying jobs.
When product managers and CIOs don’t have anything to show, we get tossed under the bus. I’ve never been a fan of the dev unionization movement, but I’m becoming more of a fan it by the day. I think of how I feel after having given my all to my career, and I can’t imagine how young H1B professionals feel when the abuse they put up with is far worse than what I’ve dealt with.
We're expensive, sure. Difficult to replace, absolutely. But you know that sooner or later you will be, and in the meantime you only get limited privileges.