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You can go here and plug in "Microsoft Engineer" and get a sense of the H1B salaries for different titles: http://www.h1bwage.com/index.p.... The salaries aren't super low, especially considering that the Redmond area is not entirely cheap but certainly cheaper than Silicon Valley.

The "ridiculous requirements" thing isn't H1B visas so much as it is green cards (H1Bs don't actually require extensive advertisement). And the problem with green cards is that you can't use any experience that you had in the United States to justify your employment, but to apply for the green card (down this employment path) you had to have been in the US on a visa, most likely an H1B visa, for years.

But the point is, just because Microsoft had layoffs, doesn't mean they laid off any qualified people.

Yes, I am going to tell you just that, because I know it from personal experience.

Now you can just trust me, or you can go verify. That's precisely why I asked whether you have even tried to look up the numbers. H1B salaries can be looked up easily, tied to specific positions in a given company. GlassDoor can provide the baseline for the same company (or, better yet, if you know someone working there, ask them).

I suspect that he miscalculated something, because it's an extremely low wage even for an H1B sweatshop (and not all places employing H1Bs are sweatshops). See for yourself.

Now, the fact that you can file an H1B application for a position that's $25/hr (a more realistic low figure) is still depressing and shouldn't be allowed, but we're not talking about McDonald's wages here.

H1B caps are documented and are public record. So are salaries.

Have you actually studied how much H-1Bs are paid, or are you just repeating what you've been told.

Many are paid less, but quite a few are paid the same or more. See for yourself.

The median wage for H1B visas is meaningless, because it lumps together vastly different companies. If you look at median H1B wage per company, you'll see that some are consistently good, and others are consistently bad.

Go here and try typing in various company names. Try, say, Google, and then Tata.

If all companies wanted H1B visa holders purely to depress wages, then no-one would sponsor their H1Bs for green cards - yet many companies do it for all new hires.

Have you seen http://www.h1bwage.com/ ?

According to the site - "h1bwage.com is the online wage library for h1b prevailing wage determinations, and the disclosure databases for other programs."

So it's referencing the standard salaries for positions, and/or the H1B application statements of companies applying for the visas. It in no way reflects what the hired workers actually earn, and is not intended to. Salaries are always "negotiable".

I suspect that some of those figures are what the consulting firm is charging to place one of those working in another company - so the company is paying that amount for the person, but the consulting firm is taking a good portion of it off the top before they actually pay the worker.

Have you seen http://www.h1bwage.com/ ?

PROFIT is the be-all and end-all of big/multi-national corporations

Mostly, though not actually necessarily. It would be for Microsoft sure.

If big companies really cared about employees then yearly raises would be automatic,

Yearly raises are automatic at these companies (maybe the bottom X% might not get a raise).

No anti-poaching agreements behind closed doors would ever exist.

Those are illegal, but it's harder to prove those illegal deals happen than getting salary underpaid. The thing with salary is it's quantitative and the government already has that data. You can still fuck around with it, but it's really hard when you have tens of thousands of US employees as the basis for comparison like these big companies do, and the requirements of the H1B make their salaries known. A large corporation with lots of US employees like Microsoft *cannot hide H1B fraud*.

And don't think for one moment that an H1B employee who was getting screwed wouldn't stick their middle finger up at Microsoft and engage in a lawsuit if they weren't getting paid what their peers were. You know how many of them are Canadian (and thus they are not from a poor country, but one where they can reasonable expect to get a similar job at a similar rate of pay back home, and are hired in numbers because the countries are really close)?

I hold an H1B, they pay the costs for the visa, and my I am paid > 160k per year per my tax return, base salary as would be shown on such a site would be > 130k per year. They continue the process until you have a green card. I think one huge thing you're missing is that the green card process is broken, and the H1B is the patch. You can fix the green card process and then the H1B cap nattering will vanish overnight.

As I have said before, mandate ALL H1B holders have a $500,000 salary minimum and no movement restrictions.

A 500k salary minimum doesn't mean you want the best and brightest, it means you don't want anybody. Just say what you mean. I would agree on eliminating movement restrictions though, that is better for everybody.

Just look it up here. This stuff is a matter of public record: http://www.h1bwage.com/index.p.... Search Microsoft, look at the job titles, consider that the vast majority are located in Redmond (much lower cost of living than Silicon Valley or New York, higher than flyover country).

Look, I get it, you're unemployed, you're bitter, and you're looking for blame, but you've been going on like this for weeks now and it's tiresome.

I'll admit I'm not American, and I don't know the vagaries of the H1-B system, maybe that means I don't know what I'm on about, but maybe alternatively it allows me to be objective.

You see here's the thing, I hear a lot whining about how H1-B has decimated the US technical industry, and the people I hear it from all seem to have one thing in common - they're unemployed or they seem to believe they're underpaid, and it's all the fault of immigrants. So I decided I'd look at the fact.

I figured I'd see exactly what these low paid immigrant workers are getting paid and so forth, and I found this site which seems to have a pretty good database:

http://www.h1bwage.com/

For 2012 a search of programmer came up with 10k records, developer another 10k, whether any of these crossover I'm not sure, but hey let's call it 20k anyway. Estimates are shaky but currently the amount of developers in the US seems to be anything from about 1 million to 4 million depending on who you ask, but again let's given the benefit of the doubt and pretend there are only 1 million, so H1-B visas account for 2% of developer jobs each year based on these figures, that's a small amount but it's certainly not negligible so it's a fair criticism that H1-B immigrants are taking at least a non-negligible amount of jobs each year. Note that the number of developers has grown each year, and so has the visa cap, roughly linearly so the figure will be reasonable for past years also.

But I also found figures for average salaries for developers, they seem to have remained fairly stagnant for a few years (if the economy isn't growing much, neither will wages grow much) at roughly $73k per year as the average and the top 10% earning an average of $110k. So the next issue is that immigrants are being employed because they accept less money and are bringing salaries down, again though looking at http://www.h1bwage.com/ I can't really see how that's true - the majority are getting paid more than the average so if anything H1-B immigrants must be raising the average.

In fact, many of the companies that I see chided here for wanting to increase the H1-B quota "to bring down developer wages" are doing quite the opposite. Facebook in 2012 was paying an average of $115k per developer, Google $125k, Microsoft $104k, Apple $119k. Given this, all these major companies are paying well above the average developer salary to immigrants, and all except Microsoft are paying above the average paid to the top 10% of developer salaries in the US.

So here's what frankly I think the facts say the reality of the situation is, that in practice, across the globe it's not ever going to be the case that every American programmer is better than every other programmer in the world, in fact, there will be a sizeable segment where the opposite is true, that is for example, that perhaps the bottom 50% of American programmers are statistically going to be nowhere near as talented as the top 10% of developers in almost every other country in the world. That's bound to be a lot of developers, and awful lot. What this means is that technology companies who want to populate their company with the best talent available no matter where in the world that comes from are going to have to use the H1-B visa program.

I'm not saying there aren't companies taking the piss, one company at least stood out on my peruse through and that was Wipro, they clearly seem to pay a little below average on average, and lot in some cases whilst also taking up more than their fair share of the quota, but by and large the H1-B visa program seems to be being used for what it's intended to be used for, on average does not appear to decrease average developer salaries but in fact increases them and that companies such as Facebook, Microsoft etc. want to

Look, I get it, you're unemployed, you're bitter, and you're looking for blame, but you've been going on like this for weeks now and it's tiresome.

I'll admit I'm not American, and I don't know the vagaries of the H1-B system, maybe that means I don't know what I'm on about, but maybe alternatively it allows me to be objective.

You see here's the thing, I hear a lot whining about how H1-B has decimated the US technical industry, and the people I hear it from all seem to have one thing in common - they're unemployed or they seem to believe they're underpaid, and it's all the fault of immigrants. So I decided I'd look at the fact.

I figured I'd see exactly what these low paid immigrant workers are getting paid and so forth, and I found this site which seems to have a pretty good database:

http://www.h1bwage.com/

For 2012 a search of programmer came up with 10k records, developer another 10k, whether any of these crossover I'm not sure, but hey let's call it 20k anyway. Estimates are shaky but currently the amount of developers in the US seems to be anything from about 1 million to 4 million depending on who you ask, but again let's given the benefit of the doubt and pretend there are only 1 million, so H1-B visas account for 2% of developer jobs each year based on these figures, that's a small amount but it's certainly not negligible so it's a fair criticism that H1-B immigrants are taking at least a non-negligible amount of jobs each year. Note that the number of developers has grown each year, and so has the visa cap, roughly linearly so the figure will be reasonable for past years also.

But I also found figures for average salaries for developers, they seem to have remained fairly stagnant for a few years (if the economy isn't growing much, neither will wages grow much) at roughly $73k per year as the average and the top 10% earning an average of $110k. So the next issue is that immigrants are being employed because they accept less money and are bringing salaries down, again though looking at http://www.h1bwage.com/ I can't really see how that's true - the majority are getting paid more than the average so if anything H1-B immigrants must be raising the average.

In fact, many of the companies that I see chided here for wanting to increase the H1-B quota "to bring down developer wages" are doing quite the opposite. Facebook in 2012 was paying an average of $115k per developer, Google $125k, Microsoft $104k, Apple $119k. Given this, all these major companies are paying well above the average developer salary to immigrants, and all except Microsoft are paying above the average paid to the top 10% of developer salaries in the US.

So here's what frankly I think the facts say the reality of the situation is, that in practice, across the globe it's not ever going to be the case that every American programmer is better than every other programmer in the world, in fact, there will be a sizeable segment where the opposite is true, that is for example, that perhaps the bottom 50% of American programmers are statistically going to be nowhere near as talented as the top 10% of developers in almost every other country in the world. That's bound to be a lot of developers, and awful lot. What this means is that technology companies who want to populate their company with the best talent available no matter where in the world that comes from are going to have to use the H1-B visa program.

I'm not saying there aren't companies taking the piss, one company at least stood out on my peruse through and that was Wipro, they clearly seem to pay a little below average on average, and lot in some cases whilst also taking up more than their fair share of the quota, but by and large the H1-B visa program seems to be being used for what it's intended to be used for, on average does not appear to decrease average developer salaries but in fact increases them and that companies such as Facebook, Microsoft etc. want to

Agreed, the US is definitely one of, if not the hardest country to migrate to even as a skilled worker.

America suffers from a lot of nationalism anyway, stemming largely from the ideology of American exceptionalism, but I can't help but think that as an outsider a lot of H1B complaints stem from that nationalism.

I Googled a bit and found this site for example:

http://www.h1bwage.com/index.php

Whilst there are companies that are paying, what I assume are low wages for the US market, a lot of large companies, especially those often under the spotlight on this issue, such as Facebook, Oracle, Apple, Microsoft, Google are paying well over $100,000 for developers. A good number of Google's in fact are getting close to and in some cases over $200,000.

Is this really dragging wages down? If so then what the hell kind of wages do Americans expect? Even at the lower end of these companies offerings, $100,000, that's still £65,000 which is plenty enough to live a very comfortable life on in the UK and we have much higher taxes and get screwed far harder on many products like fuel.

Are Americans really sure H1B users are driving wages down and that it's not simply because said companies genuinely do want to be able to get the best talent globally, something which H1B cap puts a limit on? Are there any studies I can read showing a definitive link between H1B usage and decreased wages. I'm not even sure that the cap is large enough to even be able to have a tangible effect on wages when spread across every industry.

If it looks like nationalism, sounds like nationalism, and smells like nationalism it normally is. But I'd love to be proven wrong and see some evidence that there is a demonstrable causative link between H1B uptake and decrease in wages in fields such as software. On that note, are software engineering wages even actually going down in the US in the first place?

I don't really have a horse in this race as I'm neither American, nor do I, or have I ever had any intention of becoming American, but I'm intrigued to see what the evidence is on this issue and learn a bit more about it as each time it's brought up it always sounds like one of those topics that's strong on the rhetoric, and loose on the facts.

For some actual salaries check out: http://www.h1bwage.com/

Not sure how accurate it is but I'm in there.