-PJ
I remember when the whole H-1B visa controversy began, too.The program was created by the Immigration Act of 1990 and set the initial cap at 65,000 H-1B visas per year. This number exploded to 115,000 in 1998, and then to 195,000 in 2000.
What happened in 1998? The advent of consumer access to the world-wide web, Intel's Pentium II chip (soon followed by the Pentium III), and Microsoft's release of Windows 98.
Microsoft argued that they were behind the curve on people skilled in web browser coding and needed an increase in H-1B caps in order to hire people CURRENTLY skilled in web tech to remain competitive. Existing American coders said it would take them no more than a few months to become proficient in the skills, and six months to become expert. Congress sided with Bill Gates and increased the H-1B caps to let Microsoft hire foreign workers.
It's also not coincidental that the First Browser War between Microsoft and Netscape sped up in 1998.
Market share for several browsers, 1996–2009Ironically, the United States sued Microsoft for anti-trust violations in 1998 when they integrated their Internet Explorer browser directly into the Windows operating system, making it difficult for users to install competing web browsers like Netscape.
The Department of Justice and Microsoft settled the case in 2001. The cap on H-1B visas was reduced to its original 65,000 in 2004, with an additional 20,000 available for workers with Masters Degrees.
With the Browser Wars over and the American tech worker caught up in skills, the reliance on H-1B workers was already established and has not changed. The original premise of the H-1B program as "jobs looking for workers" became "foreign workers looking for jobs" when their original jobs ended and the H-1B worker needed to find new employment or return to their home countries.
This is when the real damage to career American workers began to happen. Displaced H-1B workers were willing to accept lower wages to take new IT jobs if it allowed them to remain in the United States, and American companies began exploiting the H-1B visa system to hire these workers who were already here.
Let me add another point of history into the mix, the expanded use of the L-1 visa.
The L-1 visa is for foreign companies that allows some of their workers to work in the United States as employees of the foreign company. This was heavily used by popular H-1B outsourcing companies like Tata or Infosys that set up offices in the United States to facilitate moving their people into positions in American companies.
With American companies fully bought into the H-1B program, the L-1 managers ingratiated themselves with American hiring managers, essentially finalizing the pipeline of workers from their home staff to the American companies by maintaining a permanent presence in major American cities.
Eventually, these L-1 managers became citizens and then became employees in American companies. Now has hiring managers in American companies, they began biasing their hiring practices towards their own ethnicities, further displacing American workers.
