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so you found a problem in the data. Maybe this company has sent some h1b's home since getting them. Companies are perfectly free to import an h1b and then decide not to use them, at that point the h1b must go home. Can you imagine how they get people to compete for the job if they're in the habit of sending back 50%? Also, it might be that they brought the h1b person in and then arranged to farm the person out to someone else, maybe they somehow transferred 'sponsorship' to someone. Maybe the law is written in such a way that if they understand it, then they can import people systematically and in essence sell them to someone. That's how things work, fancy laws are made and those who read and understand the laws can do unusual things to rake in dollars.

But we know for sure that congress did approve 195,000 h1b's per year. Government also says that in recent years they've been actually bringing in 165,000 or so per year. The total who have received h1b and are in the country now exceeds one million.

Read Matloff's research for the best picture. He focuses in on one guy who came to america from India about 20 years ago, he became a programmer, he worked for years and now he can't find a job. He says that 3 times he went through the job interview process for big companies and was right about to be hired when they asked him if he was eligible for h1b status. He said 'no, I am US citizen' and that was the end of the conversation in each of the 3 cases. This is a fellow who is convinced that because he's ethnic Indian the companies were after him, then when they found out he couldn't be h1b person, they dropped him.

We've created a surrealistic job market in software. It is insanity, there is a mountain of evidence to show this.

First off, to me it was an aside, not that big a deal, something worth noting and moving on. If other people insist on tilting at windmills that's not my problem.

But your attempt at an explaination doesn't make sense either. It's a matter of scope, the alleged applications in question are for 3120 programmer/analysts working in America but not born here. According to the info FL found the company has 300 engineers (which since they do software as well as hardware is probably a group that includes but is not restricted to the programer analysts) in their entire opperation, in America and otherwise, born in America and otherwise. By any form of logical analysis that second group should be the larger of the two, and definitely not 1/10 the first. The only way it makes sense is if they've laid off at least 90% of their enginneering force inbetween when the filing was made and now. Or something is being heavily misinterpretted.

I've seen the stats, I'm not impressed. So there's 1 million H1Bs in the country, and we have what 150 maybe 180 million working Americans. Just not impressed. Now I've admitted that in certain states, which are mostly places I'd never live any way, it IS a problem. Just not nationally, and not the run around and panic crisis so many people insist it is.

Also note that the VAST majority of the H1Bs AREN'T in software or tech. They're all over the place, scattered throughout the job market.