Wait a minute...didn’t the Dear Leader of Microsoft along with 2 other billionaires claim the US needs to import hundred of thousands additional so called high skilled workers to fill positions????
Yes, and this will open up that many more positions! However, defenders of the layoff have assured us that this will not be used as an excuse to bring in more cheap labor as H-1B hires make as much as any other workers. Regarding that claim, I checked the Labor Condition Application (LCA) data posted online and used it to create the following graph showing the starting wage divided by the official prevailing wage for the 2072 H-1B employees certified in 2013 to work for Microsoft in Redmond.
As you can see, the great majority of them made between 1 and 1.5 times the "prevailing wage". However, Wikipedia states the following about the "prevailing wage":
DOL has split the prevailing wage into four levels, with Level One representing about the 17th percentile of wage average Americans earn. About 80 percent of LCAs are filed at this 17th percentile level[citation needed]. This four-level prevailing wage can be obtained from the DOL website,[69] and is generally far lower than average wages[citation needed].
The "prevailing wage" stipulation is allegedly vague and thus easy to manipulate[citation needed], resulting in employers underpaying visa workers. According to Ron Hira, assistant professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, the median wage in 2005 for new H-1B information technology (IT) was just $50,000, which is even lower than starting wages for IT graduates with a B.S. degree. The US government OES office's data indicates that 90 percent of H-1B IT wages were below the median US wage for the same occupation.[70]
Hence, the wages paid by Microsoft, while possibly better than some of the outsourcing firms, are not that impressive. They may still be hiring some H-1Bs because they are tied to the company and tend to be younger (see the third table and graph at http://econdataus.com/h1binfo.htm).
In any event, I have worked with many H-1B workers and they are generally very good. That's not surprising since only the better foreign programmers tend to get hired and are willing to take the risk of working in a foreign country. However, we still need better rules to ensure that companies follow the intent of the H-1B program to hire the best and the brightest who are more likely to create jobs than to take jobs that would go to Americans. One would be a minimum wage of $100,000 for H-1B workers as suggested by the Programmer's Guild. Another might be to put some sort of limit on the number of foreign workers that a company could hire. According to the census numbers at this link, about half of software developers in Silicon Valley are not citizens, about a quarter are naturalized citizens, and about a quarter are citizens by birth. Hence, the great majority of H-1B visa workers are NOT being brought in to fill unique, special skill jobs.