Lets talk about the visa itself and why this should or should not surprise anyone.

It is a visa for people with bachelors degrees or better or special experience. It is a dual intent visa, meaning that you have an opportunity to get a green card and eventually become a citizen. More than 50% of these visas are used by technology companies such as Microsoft and Oracle, as well as Indian recruiting firms such as Infosys and Wipro. For this reason it is often referred to as the technical visa. I may have this part a little wrong, but I believe it is good for 3 years plus another 3 years and another 1 year extension if you are applying for a green card. Thats easily 7 years. The number of people allowed in on this visa vary each year. This past year the cap was 65,000 plus 20,000 extra for graduate students. Along with cap exempt category well over 100,000 temporary workers came to the US on this visa. In the past the 65k part has been over 100k itself. In these years, my graduating class saw each-other every three months at the career fairs.

The whole principal on which this visa is sold to Congress and the Senate is that there are not qualified Americans for these Jobs. The technology lobbies have been lying for the past 15 or so years about this shortage. Economic indicators indicate no shortage. (Wages have stagnated, unemployment in the field is higher, massive layoffs of technology workers after or before H1's hired)

What has been happening is these corporations have been profiting, by hiring cheaper foreign labor. They save about 10k a year per employee (not all companies do this but the impact is large enough) and suppress the wages of IT professionals at the same time. There is a clause that the prevailing wage must be paid, but there are easy ways around this such as specifying the job is for a junior programmer when he does senior level work or in a location that pays less. There is no money set aside for enforcement of the program. The DOL pretty much rubber stamps applicants.

The large tech companies also make huge campaign contributions to our Senators and Congress people each year, to keep re-passing this legislation and to raise the cap year after year. Ever wonder why they are always smooching the rear end of tech companies?


Why should you care? If you think the existence of an American middle class is a good thing, you should care. When corporations can replace the middle class, by making jobs unavailable to them, The incentive to be educated in the field is eliminated, more foreign workers are brought over and the work is shipped over seas. I don't know about you, but to me, without a middle class we are lords and serfs.