Investing in education etc is not really the job of companies in our capitalist system. They could not capture enough of the value to justify the cost, especially given the very long lead times.p
Because they still want to hire lots of Americans. They just don't want to pay them market prices. So they bring in H1-Bs to lower wages. If they hired them overseas, there wouldn't be that effect:
From the article above:
"Research by Daniel Costa, of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, and Howard University political science professor Ron Hira, found that 60% of H-1B workers receive lower-than-average wages for their job and region. Google, Facebook and Apple “take advantage of program rules in order to legally pay many of their H-1B workers below the local median wage for the jobs they fill,” Costa and Hira said in an Economic Policy Institute paper."
I'd personally like to see the US adopt a systematic and generous immigration system like Canada's. But the H1-B system has mostly been a farce, used as a weapon against American workers. There are exceptions, but overall, it's most benefited the big tech company stockholders.
Wow, it takes skill to come up with an argument like that. How do you imagine this conversation happens at MegaCorp_0 between HR and a Hiring manager?
HR: “I know you need someone who has Skill_0, but we want to reduce wages so it has to be a h1b...”
Manager: “But I already have Candidate_0..”
HR: “Nope has to be h1b!”
/s (in case it was not obvious)
Let's say that this was honestly true. H-1Bs have been around for what, 30ish years now? If we assume that the sole purpose of H-1Bs was to lower wages, then we should've seen slow wage growth or wage depression for software engineers.
But the reality seems to be the opposite which is that salary growth for H-1B positions seems to be among the highest wages in the country. It seems absurd to make that claim considering many other countries pay software engineers far less and America is considered an outlier with how much we tend to be paid.
This isn't to say that H-1Bs aren't abused because H-1Bs themselves do tend to be paid a lot less and come with a whole host of restrictions that make job seeking difficult. But overall I don't think the claim that it depresses wages necessarily holds water. If anything what would be likely is companies expanding international offices (which many already are doing) so that they can have access to the same cheap labor pool and avoid paying the absurd SV rates for Americans.
Specifically, this study, which is convincing to me, but always interested in other ideas. This one is a kind of natural experiment so the data are randomized (because companies are awarded via lottery): https://gspp.berkeley.edu/assets/uploads/research/pdf/h1b.pd...
