>There are many, many ways to get around that. I learned all about that in 2002, when I and many other American IT workers were laid off during the 2002 IT slump and over a quarter-million H1-B visas were still issued.
The very obvious solution is to put the minimum salary of 150k on each H1B job. Hard to drive down wages that way.
There is no controlling authority. You could put 15 different provisos and nobody would get in trouble. Like this: You hire somebody at $150,000. One month later they get an evaluation and there salary is adjusted down to $75,000. Easy peasy.
No, that wouldn't work.
Number 1: $150K isn't really a big multiplier over average engineer wage in the Silicon Valley - maybe 1.25X
Number 2: The HR departments would find ways of gaming the system by playing games with pay. For example, they would take away H-1B visa holder health insurance, and make them pay for the program out of their own pocket. That, and other transition of overhead costs to the engineer's responsibility would take care of the cost multiplier quickly. EVEN WORSE: they'd start to apply the same cost transfers to U.S. Citizens, just to "be fair and even-handed".
Number 3: You assume all H-1B visa hiring is done for cost reasons. NO. Many times it is an Indian engineering manager insisting on only hiring other Indian engineers. This $150K minimum would be HEAVEN for them - they'd get to use the same old tricks to exclude Americans from hiring, but then boost up their salary by the aforementioned 1.25 or so multiplier.
The only way to END H-1B visa abuse is to KILL THE PROGRAM. You have no idea how many people out here study all the ways to game ANY program available.