Not good at all.

With an MS in Computer Science from a US public university, I work with more people on H-1B visas than US citizens, while former co-workers change careers since both pay and working conditions have deteriorated significantly in the past dozen years. Those on H-1B are largely unqualified (although there are exceptions), but management has no reliable metrics for productivity in engineering, so their numbers say they’ve saved a bundle. Me, I look for early retirement and tell any young person who will listen to avoid these careers if at all possible. We just might succeed in creating a shortage of US STEM workers by falsely believing one to exist already.

One of their workers was a British PhD, who they brought to the US on H-1B.

According to this government ruling, they violated H-1B law by forcing him to work for no pay part of the time and Canadian dollars the rest:

http://tinyurl.com/7lhq6yc .

He seems to have lost his job shortly after complaining about it.

This illustrates the H-1B is not a “genius visa” bringing potential Nobel prize-winners. It is an indentured-worker visa that allows companies to replace unionized Americans with foreigners having little to no rights. For the first time, there is a net migration of Mexicans out of America, which is an indicator that the US is seen as a sinking ship and it’s time to seek better opportunities at home.

In a decade or two, when India and China have the same technological infrastructure as Japan, this endless supply of indentured workers and cheap outsourcing centers will cease and corporations shall have so betrayed home-grown engineers that they have neither cheap foreign labor nor qualified home-grown labor, as American students desert the sciences in favor of degrees in law or business that offer better job prospects.

At that stage, Silicon Valley will shut down and the world economy shall revolve around chips made in Taiwan. Software firms will close down as the Indian workers who once supported Microsoft in droves start their own businesses in India, where local labor remains a more cost-effective option than emigrating to the US.

Grassley has been good at playing the psuedo-race-card, “The beleaguered American under the yoke of the foreign menace”, but he has failed to tackle the issue at its source. Give a company legalized slave labor and they won’t give it up. All the Congressional rhetoric in the world won’t help, since Microsoft has the same lobbying power as any tobacco company. Congress should end the slavery fostered by Foxconn and the H-1B. Only then will companies turn to American labor first.

It’s really a simple case of Supply and Demand. Consider an analogy. Consider, for example, what would happen if H1B visas were applied to plumbers instead of engineers.

For this thought experiment, pick any city, let’s say, Denver, Colorado. Now, bring in 100 busloads of freshly graduated plumbers (4,000 new plumbers from India), who want to enter into the plumbing business in Denver, and make a living.

The result? Wage rates for plumbers will become depressed. The existing 960 plumbers in Denver, once busy every day, and making a good living, will now have much less work, or no work at all.

Who can compete with improverished hordes of plumbers from India who will work for any price? India has 1.17 BILLION people, and many of them are coming here, flooding our labor markets.

The H1B Visa law was created, written and lobbied for by large American corporations as a means for decreasing their engineering labor costs. Indeed their corporate profits have zoomed up, up, up — while the wage rates paid to their American engineers have gone down, down, down.

This is what the H1B Visa has done to the American engineering profession. H1B has already brought in over one million foreign engineers to America, thus driving down wages, closing American engineering schools, and discouraging American kids from majoring in engineering.

The H1B Visa program has destroyed America’s middle class.