These days H1B is strictly a wage suppression tool and filled with low skill workers from India based degree mills and body shops. Actual skilled workers are coming in on L-1 or O-1 visas.
without H-1B america would not have Elon (for better or worse)
The issues are complex - but one of the side affects are indeed artificial suppression of wages for citizens.
We have software titans bursting at the seam with imported labor - yet our domestic universities are also churning out more CS graduates than ever before. Some of these graduates are indeed from foreign countries - but not all.
It's very hard to believe companies need to import labor for commoditized software engineering positions when there are plenty of available workers already here.
We should be importing top-tier talent - the types of folks that are working in complex fields, inventing new fields, developing things that haven't been done before, etc. We should not be importing basic CS graduates and filling basic SE jobs.
H1B's are often cheaper to hire, and do not enjoy the same mobility freedoms a citizen does. In some ways, they are beholden to their sponsor company, and whatever wages that company offers - which may not necessarily be market wages.
Oh wait.
I don't claim that H1Bs have the effect of increasing pay, but rather that their effect on pay is non-obvious, and any assertion that they do depress wages should be backed up by evidence.
That seems like some wild calculus. Fewer people willing to accept lower pay and be stuck at a specific company = higher pay. There's no other way to make the math work, particularly for extreme-demand positions like SE.
The H1B game, as it's played today, is a relatively modern invention, and was not used to build startups into mega corps anyway.
Especially Americans working at John Deere, Dow Chemical and all the food processing
if you carefully look at silicon valley companies (even large ones) - most of product R&D and IP and innovation comes from immigrants. Native born americans are mostly working in admin jobs like HR, Admin, Sales, Operations, Finance, etc
If you look at your Googles, your Facebooks, your Microsofts, you will find a glut of H1B's working regular SE jobs, such as maintenance and feature development. That's exactly who H1B's are not supposed to be for - and that is the issue.
Mega corps laying off huge engineering teams while simultaneously importing more H1B's tells you everything you need to know. Follow the money, as they say.
but it is not the reason to get rid of the entirety of H-1B program, as some people advocate here.
Would love to see your source for this fact, genuinely curious.
Also you can check names on patents files by google or other tech firm
It's also bogus to say that H-1B is more problematic than L-1B for body-shopping: all the well organized body-shops do massive amount of intra-company transfers.
btw these indian body shops are already abusing O-1 and L-1 visas en masse as well, so your latter statement is also not 100% true