Reply to H1b visas. Anyone else work in technology and see the issues with this program and outsourcing?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]H1B has NOTHING to do with filling skilled labor.

2 questions I challenge folks to answer ...

1. how could we have a skills shortage for over 36 years?

H1B was created by Bush Immigration act 1990 to address a mythical skills shortage, but that was the propaganda, it really was created to reduce salaries for US workers with Masters and PHds.

see -&gt; https://users.nber.org/~sewp/references/archive/weinsteinhowandwhygovernment.pdf

2. why are H1B visas allocated randomly, why not allocate visas based on salary, since the higher salary would be for the most desired skills?

this was recommended and almost implemented in 2021 but the industry roared about this, and it was ignored by Biden/Harris. The law needs to require that aliens be paid 150% of the normal wage for any of these jobs.

[/quote]
Repeating my post:

1. I've worked in the tech sector in SV for 20 years.  In the 90s, there was absolutely a shortage of IT workers. I was able to get a job in IT even without formal training (but I picked it up reallly quickly) because companies were so desperate to find IT workers back then.  My salary doubled in 2 years from $45K to 95K (again, back in the 90s). That's how desperate companies were to keep IT talent.

2. Today, the landscape is totally different.  We are more global; remote work is a lot easier; these foreign countries like India, Poland, Philippines now have a more educated workforce even as their col is still pretty low. The US now has more IT workers, probably a glut of them.

so, yea, we don't need H1 workers as much today but they are cheaper, and companies seek profit and lower expenses. They don't care about American workers.  Trump raising feels will reduce some visa workers but it will just hasten offshoring, not to mention that he will approve the thousands of visas for his tech financiers like Bezos and Ellison.[/quote]

The U.S. tech sector keeps insisting it cannot find talent, but the data shows the opposite. The United States is producing more STEM graduates than the industry is willing to hire. The National Science Foundation reports that only about half of U.S. STEM graduates work in STEM fields. The Economic Policy Institute has repeatedly found no evidence of a broad tech labor shortage, and wages for many software roles have been flat or declining after inflation. If there were a real shortage, wages would be rising, not falling.

At the same time, the number of H1B applications has exploded. USCIS data shows that petitions jumped from 200,000 in 2019 to more than 750,000 in 2023. That is not a sign of a shortage. It is a sign of companies chasing cheaper and more easily controlled labor. Multiple studies, including research from the National Bureau of Economic Research, have documented that firms use visa programs to reduce labor costs and weaken worker bargaining power.

This has real consequences for the United States. American tech workers face longer job searches, more layoffs, and fewer entry‑level opportunities. Students see this and adjust. Computer science enrollment growth has slowed at several universities, and surveys from the Computing Research Association show declining confidence among U.S. students about long‑term career stability in tech. When young Americans decide that STEM is not worth the risk, the country loses future engineers, researchers, and innovators.

There is also a growing disconnect between the U.S. education system and the tech industry. Universities invest heavily in training domestic students, but companies increasingly bypass them in favor of offshore teams or temporary visa labor. This breaks the pipeline between American institutions and American industry. It also undermines the long‑term national interest. A country cannot maintain technological leadership if its own citizens are discouraged from entering the field.

Dialing back H1B abuse and offshoring is not about shutting out global talent. It is about restoring balance. The United States needs a tech labor market that rewards domestic training, encourages students to pursue STEM, and ensures that companies invest in the workforce of the country they operate in. Without that, the U.S. risks hollowing out its own talent base while pretending the problem does not exist.[/quote]

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