I was a H1B before, and I can tell you that I was not paid less, if not more. Most of my H1B peers are well paid as far as I know, you can tell that by how fast they purchase the house and cars and start a STEM-professional new life in USA. The low-paid H1B steals good-quality-STEM-engineer-job theory does not hold water for me.
The STEM shortage is so true, while I agree outsourcing saves money, H1B are most often not, more likely, it's because the company can not hire the right STEM candidates and they have to go through the painful H1B hiring process, while paying for their very expensive immigration attorney bills to keep them.
More high-quality STEMs, less outsourcing, are the real solutions for a booming local job market. When we have more good STEMs locally, the H1B will become a non-issue.
This is matter of statistics, not personal anecdote. All reporting on the matter I've seen indicate H1-Bs in IT earn sub native wages, and employers easily get around the rules to hire cheap foreigners.
Anyway, as a matter of national policy it's remarkably short sighted to import large numbers of skilled workers to a large nation like America. Can't people see that addressing any "shortage" this way perpetuates it? People have got the memo loud and clear: If you are a technical worker you are a fungible commodity of little status. Your prestige and earnings will be attacked with immigration policy, visas, and outsourcing. Why go in for this as a career if you have options? The most able will go elsewhere.
The ugly truth is that, without H1B policy, the big corps will more likely do more outsourcing,which is worse.
I agree some big foreign IT agencies are hiring cheaper H1B, those are normally pure-software jobs, the EE/H1B looks different to me, in that, H1Bs are not cheap, if at all. I am EE.
I checked again and again, the college graduates here fail to do basic math is beyond imagination. I hope STEM can help to better that, in fact I'm leading a local math club as a volunteer to do just that.
Why would outsourcing be worse? The detailed analyses show that bringing people here has large costs externalized to tax payers. People use schools and when eligible chain-migrate low skill relatives.
If businesses feel the business environment the citizenry of America have built up is not worth the costs, well I'm fine with them choosing other places to operate. What they shouldn't be allowed to do is import a new citizenry.
In the long run, the engineers trained via outsourcing will become strong competitors, while USA have nothing to compete against then. USA can not have all the local graduates do architecture-design or marketing/project-management,that will doom the country soon or later.
Usually H1Bs' kids excel at school, and their parents pay tax on that.
For their poor relatives to immigrate 22+ years later(roughly 5 year for greencard, 5 year for citizenship, 12 years for relative immigration waiting period), it's a immigration policy issue, however it's still all legal, at least 10X better than those who came here illegally.
Keep jobs local is vital, outsourcing R&D is so short-sighted, with more STEMs, H1B will be irrelavant.
The STEM shortage is so true, while I agree outsourcing saves money, H1B are most often not, more likely, it's because the company can not hire the right STEM candidates and they have to go through the painful H1B hiring process, while paying for their very expensive immigration attorney bills to keep them.
More high-quality STEMs, less outsourcing, are the real solutions for a booming local job market. When we have more good STEMs locally, the H1B will become a non-issue.