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What exactly is a non market wage? The lowest bidder settles with the highest asker. It’s called supply and demand.

Not in the case of H1B's. It's more like a form of indentured servitude. If you google a little bit you'll find everything you need.

Companies abuse the system like this:

They come up with a job description intentionally mangled so that no Americans can apply for the job(i.e. 5 years experience for a technology that has only existed for 3 years).

They advertise the position in the states and give some courtesy interviews, coming up with excuses not to hire an American.

Then they hire a guy from India/China who costs them >20k less than an equivalent American for the same job and they have complete control over the poor sap(Don't like working 80 hour weeks? Ooops then we can fire you and send your butt home, hope you like going back to $10,000 a year).

If we really cared about the H1B system we'd do two things:

First, we'd have some sort of independent metric for job postings(i.e. you need a Foo programmer? he should be able to do X,Y,Z. I'd imagine it'd be something similar to the way we certify regular engineers). You'd also need some form of independent metric of how many available engineers of that type you had available. That way you really could be sure that *if there were qualified Americans available* you could hire them.

Second, make the H1B not tied to employment status. If a foreign worker(now presumably better qualified than the current bunch) came over and doesn't like his job he should be able to quit and find another one(which presumably would be easy, a true H1B should be a star). Which would get rid of the indentured servitude aspect.

Of course employers would never go for it. They'd prefer cheap slaves that don't talk back even if they're less talented.