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Assuming these workers are generating more value than they are costing, it would blow a $100-200 billion hole in the economy to send them home.

I'd say their presence here is COSTING our country billions of dollars per year. They live together in apartments and share expenses while sending a huge chunk of their paycheck to relatives in their native land. That money isn't being spent or invested here in the US. Their taxes are sent back to their native country and are utilized to train even MORE of them so that they can come here to the US to do the same thing...

How many Amercian welfare cases are the taxes on this income supporting?

They don't pay taxes to the US government, so the answer would be zero. I would say that they're CAUSING an increase in welfare cases however, as families of those replaced by H1-B workers still need food and shelter.

How many hundreds of billions worth in higher education did these engineers' home countries export to us?

None, as we are the ones who pay for their education. Additionally, all of those who worked hard to put themselves through school here in the US are seeing that all of that hard work was all for naught.

These are not wetbacks.

Many of them are. The H1-B program is wrought with fraud, and violations of law are overlooked.

Many of these people are compensating for our dumbed-down eductaion system.

Because you might read on FR that TODAYS public schools are dumbed down and that they indoctrinate children to liberal policies, universities still expect a person to successfully complete a rigorous 4 year program for any degree in engineering. Subjects include Calculus, Physics, Chemistry, and of course whatever engineering courses that pertain to one's chosen field. Those courses ARE NOT dumbed down, and the majority of every single innovation in our field is the result of AMERICAN engineers and scientists.

It is very true that many service companies and consultancies abuse H1-B visas to get cheap warm bodies to bill to their clients. But R&D workers on H1-B are a no-lose proposition. It is money in our pockets, and no loss of jobs - the activity that new products generate creates many more jobs.

There is NOTHING to gain and EVERYTHING to lose by hiring H1-B workers. Many are very difficult to understand due to their poor knowledge of English. Their design documents are close to unintelligible, causing much time to be lost in deciphering their writings. Many do NOT have the experience and expertise that they claim, and produce buggy and ill-thought out software. They are not superiour to Americans, in many cases they are sub-standard.

So if we limit H1-B visas, it should be done in a way that enables the highest-value people for the highest-value positions to still come here, while keeping out the seatwarmers at KPMG and EDS.

The H1 program allowed RECOGNIZED experts in their fields to work here. H1-B allows virtually ANYONE to work in the US. We should return to the standard set by the original H1 program.

They most certainly do pay U.S. income taxes, and FICA, and the employer pays their FICA contribution, too, and they cannot be reimbursed for FICA even though many leave after the term of their visas (6 years max - versus 10 years minumum for SS benefits). There are bilateral tax treaties with Canada and some Eurpoean countries that enable H1-Bs to pay into their home SS system. But no treaty with India, and no treaty with Russia, at least when I employed a bunch of Russians.

We get and keep ALL their FICA. More than 10 billion per year.

IANAL, but I'm pretty sure they are liable for U.S. income tax, too. Certainly if a U.S. citizen works overseas, they pay the host country's tax (with the exception of U.N. employees in some places).

I worked with some H1-B programmers in the past, and was not satisfied with their work - however, my background is in fairly specialized database marketing in the financial sector, where business knowledge is more important than technical knowledge. Although I don't like the H1-B program, especially since it puts a lot of American programmers on the street as employers and politicians claim that more tech workers are needed, in the end you really can't do much about it, as companies will generally find a way to get cheaper labor, either here or by outsourcing overseas. The best approach for a technical worker, IMO, is to find a field where business and cultural aspects make it difficult for foreign programmers to compete with you.