@2nfi GOOG and MSFT hire only a small fraction of H1Bs... The program is intended to benefit companies that behave like GOOG but it's not how things are playing out. 50%+ of H1Bs are paid at the very low end of the spectrum, barely making the minimum prescribed by law. For
Alternatively, you may check out the numbers below, you'll see three positions that GOOG filled with 70K engineers in 2016 (there are many more, but here is just three for you)...
http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=Google&job=&city=thorn&year=2016
So let me play this out for you - the three positions at issue are in Thornton, Colorado - north of Denver and east of Boulder, the city of #gold. Google runs a data center over there and there is not much talent around - yet, if they were to pay a reasonable and market price for the positions, let's say 120K instead of 70K, you'd find a bunch of folks from Michigan or Oregon who would move there in a snap. The money is good and the company is stable. Yet, they opt to keep the wages low and fish for foreign talent at 70K which is not the market price. So, in order to avoid paying market, they are importing resources with no import tariffs.
So, let's invert this a bit. Let's try to do the same thing with doctors - so, I think that $200K family doctor is too expensive, let's import Russian MDs with excellent training and keep that price at $100K. How about accountants and lawyers, let's do the same thing. Veterinarians - OK, that works too, nurses - we have a shortage, let's do it. On, and on, you can cover pretty much every profession here and there will be millions of people from all over the world lining up for those jobs. Yet, we don't do it, we pay market prices and supply/demand self-regulates. Yet, in tech, we somehow created this monster immigration program that hurts both domestic workers by depressing prices and the population as the whole as potential entrants into IT job market are deterred as entry level position compensation is kept artificially low.