From all the people I know around here who're on an H1B, the salaries are quite on par with US nationals. I do admit that I don't know anyone working for the companies named in the article (TCS, Infosys).
The issue that needs more discussion is why not let US-educated non-immigrants have an easier path to Permanent Residency vs. letting them leave the country to start companies back in their homeland.
I would say the pay is same as Americans working along with them.
The reason many companies are off-shoring to India is that there are more people with mix of domain and technical knowledge in India.
From the H1-Bs we employ, I know they receive comparable (and sometimes higher, since we tend to pay slightly below market and H1-B salaries are somewhat inflexible) salaries to their resident/citizen counterparts.
I'm a little bit confused in here. Is it the same 65k visa cap for Europe and India? Does that mean that Tata and Infosys have taken half of it and people who they hired weren't even working in US?
I didn't squeeze into the last year's visa quota and decided to stay in UK (hearing - "if you reapply we might get a visa for you in a year" is not very encouraging). From what I heard, getting H1B is becoming quite of a race against time as the places are getting filled out quickly. I think I know why now.
That's why most people never get PR. The main reason is not to short charge the client, but to give chance to other workers in India, cause most companies pay them only $5k to $14k/per year back in India(That's the market rate in India). There is a rat race where people have to fight to fly to US or other western countries so that they can earn 10X more.
That sounds wrong. The period of the H1-B visa stay is three years.
However, I have had the misfortune of interviewing a number of candidates coming from companies like those mentioned- they are indeed underpaid. However, they're also unemployable, because they are trained in highly specific areas. I interviewed more than one .NET candidate that did not know SQL, for example.
The sad reality is that they are underpaid because they are underqualified. In an ideal world no company would make do with that, but as these employers demonstrate, it's quite possible to get by stringing together a collection of underqualified employees and pay them less.