While you guys are focusing on the legitimacy of H1b, impact on US economy, good or bad etc, let's look really into those numbers and get some real meaning under the whole H1b-cap stuff.
Let's say there is a company, namely IT consulting company, hiring the people in their home country who want to pay for their H1b visas. The company trains the people and looks for IT projects for them(or worse, you are on your own to find projects). You have to pay $5000-10,000 up front and the company "modifies" your resume so that everyone is pretty much guranteed for a job. Once you get started, the company keeps up to 6 months of your paycheck and after that, you are free to go, just transfer your H1b to another company.
"In 2006, a review of new information from the federal government suggests that
the companies benefiting most from the temporary worker program aren't U.S.
companies at all. Rather, they appear to be Indian outsourcing firms, which
often hire workers from India to train in the U.S. before returning home to
work. Data for the fiscal year 2006, which ended last September, show that 7
of the top 10 applicants for H-1B visas are Indian companies. Giants
Infosys Technologies (INFY) and Wipro (WIT) took the top two spots, with 22,
600 and 19,400 applications, respectively. The company with the third most
applications is Cognizant Technology Solutions (CTSH), which is based in
Teaneck, N.J., but has most of its operations in India. All three companies
provide services to U.S. companies from India, including technology support
and back-office processing."-----businessweek
Hope this will reveal some insights about where the hell the 150,000 applications come from. One note: those people are bearly qualified with little knowledge on IT but trained to do repetitive coding work.
Slashdot Mirror
While you guys are focusing on the legitimacy of H1b, impact on US economy, good or bad etc, let's look really into those numbers and get some real meaning under the whole H1b-cap stuff. Let's say there is a company, namely IT consulting company, hiring the people in their home country who want to pay for their H1b visas. The company trains the people and looks for IT projects for them(or worse, you are on your own to find projects). You have to pay $5000-10,000 up front and the company "modifies" your resume so that everyone is pretty much guranteed for a job. Once you get started, the company keeps up to 6 months of your paycheck and after that, you are free to go, just transfer your H1b to another company. "In 2006, a review of new information from the federal government suggests that the companies benefiting most from the temporary worker program aren't U.S. companies at all. Rather, they appear to be Indian outsourcing firms, which often hire workers from India to train in the U.S. before returning home to work. Data for the fiscal year 2006, which ended last September, show that 7 of the top 10 applicants for H-1B visas are Indian companies. Giants Infosys Technologies (INFY) and Wipro (WIT) took the top two spots, with 22, 600 and 19,400 applications, respectively. The company with the third most applications is Cognizant Technology Solutions (CTSH), which is based in Teaneck, N.J., but has most of its operations in India. All three companies provide services to U.S. companies from India, including technology support and back-office processing."-----businessweek Hope this will reveal some insights about where the hell the 150,000 applications come from. One note: those people are bearly qualified with little knowledge on IT but trained to do repetitive coding work.