As it's an actual requirement to publish the salary for an H1B employee as part of LCA disclosures, the data is collated every year, it's no secret what anyone on an H1B earns (if you are on an H1B you can often find your own individual record in here):
My own take; its complicated. From my own direct experiences, there is a world of difference between how large companies typically use the H1B (The Microsoft/Apple/Metas) etc and how say a medium sized fortune 500 company IT department might typically use it. There are absolutely ways to abuse the process and they types of jobs being worked on an H1B very enormously in type, quality and salary - just explore the data above. The larger companies pretty much always do hire on same terms as any other American. At smaller companies, can be a lottery.
Salary isn't the only means of exploiting an H1B hire either, to be clear. Lots of other tricks like slow walking immigration processes, exploiting the fact it is harder for an H1B employee to change job than a citizen. The being skipped over for a promotion to avoid paperwork issues with the LCA etc is something I've seen first hand.
https://h1bdata.info/
My own take; its complicated. From my own direct experiences, there is a world of difference between how large companies typically use the H1B (The Microsoft/Apple/Metas) etc and how say a medium sized fortune 500 company IT department might typically use it. There are absolutely ways to abuse the process and they types of jobs being worked on an H1B very enormously in type, quality and salary - just explore the data above. The larger companies pretty much always do hire on same terms as any other American. At smaller companies, can be a lottery.
Salary isn't the only means of exploiting an H1B hire either, to be clear. Lots of other tricks like slow walking immigration processes, exploiting the fact it is harder for an H1B employee to change job than a citizen. The being skipped over for a promotion to avoid paperwork issues with the LCA etc is something I've seen first hand.