Because if a tech company wants to hire a foreigner, the visa process (regardless of skill^1) is basically worse than a coin toss. Which means companies have a much more limited pool of applicants. And let's be real, this country doesn't have nearly enough STEM professionals to meet demand.
1)Exceptions: Master's degree (another lottery), extraordinary ability (pretty tough).
Rank H1B Visa Sponsor Number of LCA Average Salary
1 Infosys 16,397 $75,154
2 Wipro 7,178 $76,920
3 Tata Consultancy Services 6,732 $64,350
4 IBM 6,502 $83,883
5 Deloitte Consulting 4,727 $98,264
6 Microsoft 4,075 $109,546
7 Larsen & Toubro Infotech 3,793 $59,408
8 Accenture 2,653 $72,704
9 Ernst & Young 2,353 $86,380
10 Satyam Computer Services 2,310 $70,495
*updated table formatting
Rank H1B Visa Sponsor Number of LCA * Average Salary
1 Infosys 16,397 $75,154
2 Wipro 7,178 $76,920
3 Tata Consultancy Services 6,732 $64,350
4 IBM 6,502 $83,883
5 Deloitte Consulting 4,727 $98,264
6 Microsoft 4,075 $109,546
7 Larsen & Toubro Infotech 3,793 $59,408
8 Accenture 2,653 $72,704
9 Ernst & Young 2,353 $86,380
10 Satyam Computer Services 2,310 $70,495And speaking about "lazy government" - how one gets an LCA certified under 60K or even 70K in hi-tech?
When we talk about positive case for H1B we talk about MS-like situation while it actually happens to be less than 10% of the total, with the rest of 90% looking like a "cheap labor" situation that H1B opponents talk about.
h1b needs a reform asap :(
... at current salaries.
Two points:
1 - plenty of stem surveys (lumping all of stem together, as you did) show plenty of available candidates as calculated by the percentage of domestic stem graduates working in stem post graduation. see, eg,
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2014/09/15/stem-gradu...
2 - if you wish to limit the discussion to sf/valley type jobs, a honest claim is there aren't sufficient already trained engineers who wish to live in sf/valley at the prices employers wish to offer who already have the desired skills. There are lots of ways to address it: pay enough so that living here isn't a financial disaster (compare housing prices in sf/nyc (much cheaper than sf!), seattle, chicago, boston, etc), solve transport problems making san jose and sf essentially separate cities, figure out remote employees, hire women (and even retain them!), train engineers, etc.
2b - even a smidge of economics will tell you it's very hard for an actual shortage to exist; there's a clear lack of evidence of wage increases (over cost of living increases) that would accompany an actual tightening of the labor market
Higher salaries and higher employment levels seem to correlate with higher, not lower, housing prices.
> solve transport problems making san jose and sf essentially separate cities
How would you even address that? It's run by public agencies controlled by three counties (San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara). You need to get financial commitments from all three counties, railroad unions, state agencies like CalTRANS, etc. They're bringing BART to San Jose, so maybe things are already slowly progressing in that regard.
Compare the housing prices of what a three bedroom condo in sf (what a 2 child family wants) vs the other cities, plus the ability for mothers to take a couple years off work. Losing 15 to 20% of your salary to save 50% or more of housing costs is often a great deal.
So if all us engineers' salaries went up, it wouldn't help. We'd just end up spending even more to out compete each other. (Well, I guess it would help push non-engineers out of the Bay Area, but is that really what we want?)
I'd guess the answer is, marginally, hiring people is still good for companies. But combined with the lack of housing development, it's slowly but steadily making life worse for everyone in the Bay Area who doesn't yet own a house.
If it continues this way, eventually people won't move here without ridiculously high salary offers, and companies will be forced to expand in cheaper cities instead.
But new immigrant salaries are as good as american salaries in terms of how much they can push prices up; so hiring H1-B is essentially similar to a pay cut for people (same $$, higher housing costs); following this pay cut some existing engineers will leave.
In the end you just end up with replacing some old engineers with new ones through a costly lengthy process.
This is the kind of absurd logical games one has to play in order to not acknowledge basic economics of supply and demand.
And on the other side, NIMBY's in low-density areas like Menlo Park and Atherton killed the restoration of the Dumbarton Bridge Rail (also victim of a mysterious arson recently) and are delaying electrification of the Caltrain. The Dumbarton Bridge, for example, would allow people to live on the East Bay and take direct rail into Palo Alto, Redwood City or Menlo Park, and up and down the corridor.