The H1B program has been severely abused. I’ve heard DJT is changing some of its worst features. However, as it was a couple of years ago, it was a giveaway shared between corporations and foreign workers at the special expense of STEM Americans trying to get into the workplace.
The original idea, of allowing people with unique skills to come here, was probably OK. But after 30 years, serious problems have emerged. I’ll just hit a couple, informed by the experience of one of my boys, a real techie who had mastered out of a physical chemistry PH. D. program due to university politics, and was working his first couple of jobs as a scientific programmer.
Basically, he said that the H1B workers at the lower end of the scale were indentured servants. The original idea was to set the H1B wage high enough that the program would only apply to highly skilled and highly paid foreigners. So, for a Masters or PH. D. level person, it was set at something like 65K per year—in 1989 (more or less). It wasn’t changed since.
Now—if you are an H1B employee, you don’t have a Green Card. If you lose your job, you are supposed to leave the country. But, if you work for some period as an H1B, four years, IIRC, you can get a Green Card. That means that unscrupulous H1B shops can work these people 70 or 80 hours a week, because they NEED to keep that job. That’s a very hard and unjust thing for an American entering the STEM workforce to compete with, especially one with loans to pay off.
The second thing that happens in H1B dominated shops is that Americans are unfavored minorities—effectively foreigners in their own country. My son worked at one place that was Chinese dominated, and another that was Indian dominated. Some of the bosses were decent, others were not. But, there was a very strong tendency to favor their countrymen where promotions or desirable assignments were involved.
It seems that a number of the big Silicon Valley firms are very pro-H1B. At the higher end of the skill scale, 200K to 300K salaries, there may be some unique positions that are difficult to find Americans for. But, at the entry graduate level, that is definitely not the case. It is so discouraging to try and climb the ladder over the H1B barrier that word gets around, and many bright American students avoid these professions.
One might say that offshoring production de-industrialized the United States industrial base. Onshoring excessive H1B labor deindustrializes the US intellectual STEM base.
Spot on. Granted, yes, there are companies that don’t abuse the program. But many do.