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http://www.zazona.com/- one of the better clearinghouses for the fight against abuse of the H-1b visa. If you're not aware of what's been going on for the past decade or so with this visa, and how the DOL has supported the corporations over just about any protest, this is a good place to start.

For the Everest Computer fight- http://www.ortech.org/ is the homepage of Mitch Besser's High-Tech Union in Oregon, a subsidiary of Communication Workers of America. They're the only ones I know of who have actually won a fight to see the original LCAs of a single company, and have found fraud in the LCAs themselves (the other dirty tricks in this thread are NOT fraud per say- they're loopholes in the law on how to prove that no American is available for the job or how much an H-1b is paid. Everest Consulting was going WAY beyond this- on pay they were doing things like using the figures from one job market to lower wages in another job market, and they were checking the box that they were NOT H-1b dependant when more than 99% of their staff was H-1b. This is NOT the same as Intel using entry-level wages, or HP claiming it's not H-1b dependant because janitors and factory workers are also staff and are largely American Citizens, those are legal loopholes).

I don't agree at all. I was an H1B holder before I received a green card. I also have seen a slew of H1B's hired. Before you hire, you have to post the position and show that there are no "American" candidates (of course you can keep it as quiet as possible). Furthermore you have to show that the wages are of the same level as wages paid to Americans.

There are lots of ways around those requirements. And 95% wages of the BOTTOM of the wage scale, not what was paid to the American you were replacing, is the standard for "show that wages are of the same level as wages paid to Americans". Intel, for example, on every single one of their Labor Condition Applications, lists (.95*EntryLevel)+1 for their wage to be paid to that H-1b holder. It's predictable enough that Mitch Besser, of http://www.ortech.org/ has an excel spreadsheet showing that to the penny.

On the other hand you are shackled to your employer.

And thus not free, correct?

What "foreigners" are not used to is the cutthroat environment they end up in and usually they have to learn how to defend themselves. But that is another issue.

The cutthroat environment wouldn't exist if corporations had to play by the same rules hiring overseas as here.

Bullshit- the President of my union, http://www.ortech.org/, has a Master's Degree in Computer Science- and hasn't held a full time job in three years.

As noted in a footnote to the article), U.S. employers *must* pay foreign workers the prevailing wage for their job fields and show that qualified U.S. workers are not being passed over.

Yeah- but the H-1b is a new graduate when the US techie has 10 years of experience, therefore 25k-35k is the going wage for the experience and the business still saves money. And in my experience, getting the BCIS to actually investigate anything requires several months of 8-hour-a-day work researching and showing your eveidence to different beaurucrats.

In my experience the BCIS (formerly INS) has pretty stringent about these requirements and as a result companies end up paying H1 workers the *same* amount as they would pay a domestic worker. Please do the research or atleast RTFA.

http://www.ortech.org/ has a spreadsheet where they show that Intel pays it's H-1bs EXACTLY 90%(Minimum Going Wage For Entry Level)+$1- in over 4000 Labor Condition Applications. So no- you are wrong with this conclusion.

The problem is that good pay, good food, good benefits, fun toys and the like have been missing from most IT jobs for about 4 years now. That's why people like http://www.ortech.org/The CWA are going after tech workers with a vengance. ORTech.org is the link, this is the first time I've been lazy enough to try the URL tag instead of an Anchor tag.

Absolutely correct. Which is why I've joined ORTech, which is now an associate of CWA Local #7901 and a member of TechsUnite.

ORTECH Has plenty on the subject of going bankrupt, becomeing homeless, and not being able to find a job due to the lethal combination of being bad at freelancing, having an American birth certificate, and having too much education to work at McDonald's. It's been a common problem for three years now, since the end of every idiot who could code in HTML being able to get work. I don't see any return to the .com heyday- and most techies I know don't have the people skills to get the jobs their techie skills can do in the first place.

This may seem to be way off topic- but it's at the core of the original poster's question: he didn't have the skills to understand what the customer wanted/needed, and was trying to do freelance work without a marketer or a graphics artist, so the project is failing.