There are companies who found the absolute best in the world that they have to have. So they need that H1-B to get the job done and hire the best person.
Then there are companies who just want to contract out super cheap labor, so they do thousands of H1-B applications hoping a few hundred make it through, then the they charge a local rate, but pay the employee a fraction and reap the profits.
I’m flooding this thread a bit, but I’ve always been a little confused by the consultancy firms. Is there a clear difference between off shoring and H1B? Or is it mostly the same thing for these companies, with different margins for each.
So the H-1Bs are loss leaders with actual money being made in offshoring instead.
But the client often has their own employees on H-1B visas as well. This is unrelated to either offshoring/consulting.
Eg. Take a company like Apple. Apple hires employees on H-1B visas and pays them well.
But also Apple uses consulting firms (both US-based and offshored) for specific projects/functions. These workers are not Apple employees. They are employees of the consulting company -- or in some cases, there is a chain of contracts where they are employed by one company, which contracts them out to a consulting firm, which then contracts them out to end client (Apple).