- Indian companies
- Using cheap labor
- Paying significantly less then other companies.
- Responsible for almost 50% of all H1B applications
Driving the salaries by immigration is an historical complaint worldwide. HackerNews or not.
Seems you could collapse those two issues by just saying: the 50,000 slots (or however many there will be) are auctioned off, or allocated in order of highest salary offer, or something similar. In theory the "invisible hand of the market" ought to then allocate the slots to where foreign talent is most needed, and the companies using it for cheap labor won't be able to outbid Google/etc. for the slots.
Sponsoring someone would be too damn dangerous and expensive for smaller companies and startups.
These programs suppress wages for low-end computer positions. If you were around in the 90s at a big company/government, you'd run into old guys who made big bucks tweaking COBOL and Operator types tweaking Batch jobs. The whole point of COBOL was that you could teach the average bean counter to write it, so the answer to the problem of these guys retiring was to import cheap workers and automate.
My grandparents all came to the U.S. from Ireland. No H-1 nonsense where you get tied to an employer, just plain immigration and a path to citizenship. It should be no different today.