Suppose that is true. How do you know that are "companies are screwing the US" employees? Perhaps, it is the other way around --- the U.S. employees are trying to screw the rest of us (companies) by demanding wages that are not worth their keep? Outsourcing prevents them from doing so.
As for H1-B, it's kind of tiring to hear programmers' whining that they, with barely any education, cannot make $150,000/year any more. Great many H1-B visas go to college and university faculty. Go count how many American-born faculty are professors in major universities. Then ask yourself, why? The check how well Americans read and write in their native language, how many of them have even basic quantitative skills, how many have even basic awareness of different times and countries. The truth is, Americans don't want to do this hard work as they used to; they do not want to become professors of mathematics, engineering and business administration. Foreigners do. They get H1-B visas.
So how badly are you screwing your employer?
What a fantastic generalization... is it cause or effect they do not want to do this "hard work"?
I wouldn't want to bust my ass for 40k a year as a senior programmer, working 60+ hours a week, does that make me lazy or stupid or both? Does it make any difference how much money a company earns or saves from a programmer's efforts or is it always about saving $20k annually per employee?
I've had the "privilege" of working with H1-B and offshore "programmers" and I can tell you they have been woefully under skilled and lack the independent drive of their US counterparts. They lack imagination and have no commitment or loyalty to the contracting company. Add to that the piss poor abilities of management to understand how to manage remote groups or identify under skilled developers and the net productivity loss is astounding.
When they move to the next contract you risk losing your intellectual capital to a competitor because they normally stay within the same business domain and can command a higher salary from knowledge gained at your expense.
Corporations are about to learn a powerful lesson, "you get what you pay for".
Going cheap is really just deferring costs at the expense of productivity and inventiveness throughout the development life cycle. But what the hell, they are getting their bonuses now and will be gone in a few years anyway and will not have to deal with the ramifications of their actions. They got the money and it's getting close to time to run.
It would be amusing to to see a bunch of foreigners brought in to do whatever it is that you do, undercutting your salary by 30 or 40 percent.
You missed the entire point of the article. To put it simply the current definition of an H-1B visa is that it is supposed to be used for one purpose only - to satisfy the need to hire workers when their is a "shortage".
Nothing in the legislation defines shortages based on what a company is willing to pay. So lets be honest about what an H-1B visa is as it is currently being used. It is simply a way to change the supply and demand ratio for a specific worker in this country thereby changing what the rate of pay is. It has nothing to do with shortages which is the way it is being defined and hence being passed via Congress.
Which is the point of the article.