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As part of the H1 filing process, employers are required to post an LCA (Labor Condition Application) at the workplace. This is an official-looking document typically stuck on a pinboard around the workarea. Amongst other things, this explicitly lists the prevailing wage/salary at which the H1 is hired. So, in effect there is nothing hidden from other employees or the employee being hired. I have second hand knowledge that LCA placement is in fact audited. In any case, LCA placement has been enforced by the legal department in my last couple of workplaces.

>About half of all H1B holders come from India alone.

Yes, that is true and I'm not denying that. My point is to clarify misconceptions about the H1 Visa program itself being legal slave labor and focusing on highlighting the subtleties that give it this perception.

>As part of the H1 filing process, employers are required to post an LCA

As someone who works in immigration, the LCA is almost never posted. And if the prevailing wage is too high, they will just apply under a different SOC category and job title. There are no real ways for USCIS to enforce these rules.

So, in effect there is nothing hidden from other employees or the employee being hired.

That's not particularly helpful - the only people who see it have an economic incentive to not rock the boat.

The thing to remember about H1B visas is that there are tons of exceptions to the "slave labor" situation. No one sensible believes that every single H1B visa holder is a pawn to keep US wages below fair-market pricing. The problem is that a large number, probably a majority, of them are. Anecdotal contradictions don't disprove the thesis.

> the only people who see it have an economic incentive to not rock the boat

You're assuming that the employee themselves don't have a reason to rock the boat if their filing paperwork lists a salary higher than their effective salary? As an H1 whose paperwork lists a salary higher than my effective salary, there's nothing that stops me from realizing that I'm underpaid and switching employers when convenient.

As an H1 whose paperwork lists a salary higher than my effective salary, there's nothing that stops me from realizing that I'm underpaid and switching employers when convenient.

Do I really need to point out that in the context of enforcement actions, that means nothing?

I guess we're addressing two different issues. You're focusing on enforcement to address the abuse of the H1 program, whereas I'm taking the H1 worker perspective and trying to dispel the notion of indentured servitude.

Yeah, I remember finding it very interesting the first time I saw one of those postings, because the salary on the form was about 1/3 my salary at the time, and lower than my starting salary when I held the lowest-ranking programming position at the company as a new college grad. It seemed to be fairly clear evidence of abuse.

Here's an explanation of how that works - it is a fairly long read that boils down to a bait-and-switch on the job classification.

http://www.cringely.com/2012/10/23/what-americans-dont-know-...

The prevailing wage concept is also ridiculous. Wages should go up when labor is scarce.

Or tech companies (big ones at least) can just open development centers in countries with lower cost talent like India, China, and the Philippines. That is already happening; getting rid of H1Bs would just accelerate the process and the high-end workers that would otherwise come to the states would still be working, they would just no longer be paying American taxes.

That's probably true. Instead of getting rid of H1B's we need to fast-track them to green-cards independent of employer. One thing I've not seen mentioned here is that green-card applications require the co-operation of the employer. The big indian body-shops that hire the most H1B's barely submit any green-card applications at all (e.g. in 2012 Tata (TCS) did 4 out of 7500 H1B visas, Wipro only did 30 out of 4300) and even those who are submitted face very long lead times.

http://www.epi.org/blog/top-10-h1b-guestworker-offshore-outs...

That sounds reasonable. Let's turn on the spigot but get company sponsorship out of the way (it works like this in Oz). The problem is evaluating perspective highly-skilled immigrants without taking into account direct company demand.

> About half of all H1B holders come from India alone.

Many of the Indian body shops seem to give the H1B program a bad name, but tech companies like Microsoft and Google really do use H1's correctly and as intended, in my opinion; e.g. no discrimination in salaries and maximum leverage of domestic talent where possible.

Yes, that seems to be the case. The problem is that the majority of H1B visas go to those body-shops. The top ten H1B employers are all such body-shops.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/04/03/176134...

Microsoft hires thousands of workers from the H1B body shops (infosys, tata, etc). Half of Microsoft's workforce is "dash trash" contingent staff, employed by those terrible shops.

Perhaps, I'm not sure as I don't meet many vendors in Redmond. I know that we have a lot of blue badges with H1s and you couldn't tell the difference (well, the American will speak with an American accent).

I'm actually stationed in China, so our body shopping tends to be local, where ironically, I (an American) am the one on the working visa.

It's not possible that Microsoft and google are using h1bs correctly. Anyone who says there is simply no US person skilled enough to fill a position is lying through their teeth.

My computer science class at a top state university was like 70% foreign in the mid 90s; today it's much worse. The American talent pipeline is just not full enough to satisfy demand. Hiring ANY programmer that meets our requirements is difficult enough without having to worry about where their citizenship is.