The companies sponsor them in the US and they work for a number of years at 50-75% of the wages of a comparable US citizen.
Once the visa holder has a green card and is on track for citizenship, they either get a big raise or move on to a better paying job.
This ploy was pioneered by the Silicon Valley tech companies to recruit foreign Stanford, Berkley and other grads s cut rates and it has fueled the tech industry ever since.
These H1B visa holders are some of the most talented and productive members of our country and a huge fraction of the Silicone Valley elite stated their careers as H!B indentured slaves, doing the technical work American college students were too lazy to study for.
The reason America has a tech shortage is that American college students have historically been too lazy to study for.
Science and Engineering students often spend their Friday and Saturday evenings hitting the books, not the bars, while Gender Studies students are out at the bars studying gender with free government supplied contraceptives .
H1Bs are primarily used for foreign students graduating from US universities? That’s news to me!
I have worked with a ton of H1b’s on my 25 years is semi design.
They are not brilliant, they are cheap and vindictive when proven wrong.
The “father” of H1b was a Sr Marketing Eng working for Intel on the original Pentium.
Even to this day, he calls himself “Father of the Pentium” even though he never worked on the design side.
To protect his job and stock options, he covered up the floating point flaw and lied to the CEO.
After he left several other companies, he landed back in India and started an outsourcing company.
Last I heard he is hiding from India gov on corruption charges.
“The reason America has a tech shortage is that American college students have historically been too lazy to study for.”
Dead-on. Our video game society makes it NEXT TO IMPOSSIBLE for most kids (especially boys) to sit down with a book and actually THINK. Sure, some fall through the cracks and actually get a good education and do well, but most land just where the feminists always wanted them - drifting around in their 20s, going to some night classes, trying out one career after the next. Basically useless.
Of the people that I work with, some of their kids did well (kids of immigrants), but EXACTLY ZERO of the kids of native-born Americans did well (other than mine, of course). Your comment seems to blame the kids...but it’s much deeper than that, it is the parent that proudly displays the picture of his kid in a football uniform, rather than graduation gown - it is the parent, that grew up in the US, that thinks public schools, or society, for that matter, hasn’t changed in 40 years. Immigrants, to their credit, know American culture MUCH BETTER, and do not want their kids to have anything to do with it, at least until they’ve finished their education.
(and by immigrants, I’m speaking generally about non-Hispanics, although there plenty of Hispanics that I work with, also with successful kids)