Not so. From https://cis.org/Miano/Primer-Reporters-Looking-H1B-Program:
H-1B Is Designed to Allow Employers to Pay Foreign Workers Extremely Low Wages
The first problem in the system is that the employer determines the prevailing wage and the employer can use nearly any source for that determination. Prior to 2005, employers used this combined with the restrictions on enforcement to pay H-1B workers low wages. However, in 2004 Congress explicitly changed the law to allow employers to pay H-1B workers absurdly low wages.
Pettifoggers will tell you that H-1B workers are required to be paid the higher of the prevailing wage or the wage paid to similar workers. And golly gee willikers, it says just that right at the top of 8 U.S.C. § 1101(n)(1). That's enough information for the willful ignorami writing the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
But scroll down to 8 U.S.C. § 1101(p)(4). There you will find that the Department of Labor is required to take an existing wage survey and divide it into four skill level prevailing wages. Notice there is no requirement that the employer pay the H-1B worker at his skill level. Even if there were such a requirement, it would be unenforceable because skill is a subjective measure.
Under this system, employers classify
Notice that H-1B workers are "highly skilled" when industry wants more of them, but those very same workers become low-skilled when determining what they have to be paid.
Also notice that if the H-1B program excluded aliens paid less than the actual prevailing wage, the quota would not come close to being reached.
For example, in Silicon Valley the prevailing wage for a programmer is $93,891. However, an employer can legally pay an H-1B worker $57,179. An employer can save $36,000 a year by going H-1B. It is no wonder that H-1B workers are concentrated in high-wage locations of the country.
But my daughter is a chemist. Chemist lab workers and software testers are full of Indian and Pakistani H1-B workers who flood the market and undoubtedly lower wages in both areas.
So you see how H-1B betrays its professed intentions.
I hired H1-B workers for 30 years. For the past 20 years I was often paying them more than local workers. The department of labor assigned the wage. We needed to petition the role to get the H1-B worker accepted for a visa. That often included a masters degree. The better we made them look, the more we would be forced to pay them. The Department of Labor then had a chart and assigned each worker a place. And we were forced to adjust their salary, always up.
Now we were hiring programmers. And in fact we hired extremely good programmers. It was rare to find an American that could pass our test. More than three quarters of our programming staff were foreign born. And at the time of my departure 5 years ago, 80% of those were making over $100,000. And some were making over $150,000. I assume they are probably making $50,000 more than that now.
That being said, we were forced by our parent company to hire an outsourcing firm for testers. I did not want them, but I was overruled. They came in very cheaply. We paid around $40 per hour for them. And they could be fired at our whim. We did hire some of them permanently, but those were extremely good. I hated this practice as it was like watching a sweatshop. Many of these people were from Pakistan. They are family members of others who already had green cards or H1-Bs. I don’t know how they were able to work in the US until we sponsored the ones we did hire.