Software development appears to be the one the most exposed to cheap competition.

I’m sympathetic to the idea that we should have a generic immigration mechanism for skilled workers. But we don’t have that. Congress hasn’t created one because the American people won’t support one. (Or at least, the parties that want such a thing aren’t willing to spend political capital on it so long as they can kick the can down the road by abusing the current system).

ADDED: Note that neither "programmer" nor "software" appear in the original article: the author is talking about all H1-Bs, which includes medical specialists. (Though, licensing issues might prove a more significant employment barrier for foreign doctors than immigration rules, and those also need to be addressed.)

You don't see local hospitals posting H1B openings for physicians, because the American Medical Association would eradiate them off the face of the planet.

Want to practice in the US as a foreign trained MD? You have to apply to retrain here, with very specific restrictions, and compete against thousands of other expats. You will never be competing directly against American MDs.

This is in direct contrast to the tech industry, which has exactly zero licensing bodies with the ability to dictate who can practice within the profession. Hence, H1Bs galore.

People always make the mistake of comparing highly regulated industries to tech. They couldn't be further apart. A commenter on the Pao case raised this exact point: maybe women are too smart to get into a dog-eat-dog industry like tech! Women sure as heck have no qualms about law, medicine or nursing! Three professions with excellent guild protections and career stability once an initial licensing hurdle is passed.

For better or worse, tech is the wild west of professions. All things considered it's absurdly risky to get into, but for the few superstar talents, it's very lucrative because there are no barriers to entry. For the above average vet with 40 years of experience though, it can be a nightmare, as an eager H1B will sign up for indentured servitude any day to escape third world poverty.

I wouldn't recommend the tech industry to my kids. Too much volatility and risk. You're better off having a steady profession, and pursuing bootstrapped startups on the side. If your idea gets traction, you can always stop practising your profession and return at a later date. That's the beauty of guilds like the AMA, you'll never be thrown under the bus for a quick buck, because the status of an MD cannot be devalued.

Some people dream that if H-1B supply is cut off, engineers will get paid as much as lawyers and doctors, it is not going to happen. Once wages get to a pain threshold, companies will outsource even more. Unlike a doctor or engineer, you don't have to be at the location to build software. The engineers in the USA will be left only for jobs that have to be done locally. A good lawyer or doctor earn knowledge thru accumulated experience, and a 10 to 15 years of experiene. In Engineering, the learning experience curve is max 5 years. There is great chance, whatever you are doing now, that in 5 years it will be obsolete, and you will be re-learning from the beginning.

Lastly, I think you are using "smart, hard-working people" ambiguously. We don't allow hundreds of thousands of foreign lawyers into the US every year. While health care does award some H1B's, Medicine and Dentistry also act as gatekeepers that ensure Americans who pursue these fields are not replaced en masse with foreign nationals. Of course, real estate agents, mortgage brokers, flight attendants, plumbers, meter maids, and almost every other sector of the economy isn't targeted with a work visa.

Now, there's so much work to do in high tech that we still may get some Americans in the field. But we still create a relative disincentive to Americans when we allow targeted visas in science and engineering. After all, an American who pursues a law degree doesn't have to compete with foreign lawyers for jobs and clients. But an American who pursues a graduate degree in engineering most definitely does. Do we really want to discourage our citizens from engineering degrees and direct them toward law and other non-technical fields?

The answer may actually be "yes." We can get engineers more cheaply from overseas, so we have decided, as a nation, to staff these positions with non us-citizens, and encourage our own citizens to pursue other degree paths and professions. But I think this would be a terrible idea, since a robust, home grown engineering and science profession is crucial to the economic health and security of the United States.

I am not making this up....

The fact is that there are too few programmers in the US and far more jobs. The H1-B allows companies to import a slave workforce bound to the visa.

Your assumption that they are merely program assemblers is insulting to everyone who holds an H1-B. Their education backgrounds are competitive with the US.

If there is any correlation with H1-B holders and large corporations, it is most likely due to the willingness to sponsor H1-B visas.

Every year 100,000 H1-Bs can come in. To believe this article, we'd have to pretend that we have a big wall up preventing these dozens or hundreds of exceptional programmers from immigrating to the US, and completely ignore the existence of the H1-B visa and the hundreds of thousands pouring in every year.

I think the tech industry in the US should be looking at American non-college graduates to do this kind of work, especially people from families without a history of college degrees. This would be easier than teaching people how to code and it would be a great foot in the door to the tech industry and a solid middle class career, even if they never become coders.

I've worked with hundreds of h1b visa, 90% of them were just java programmers with a low bill rate. But there were also a few with really rare skills. I'd like to see more of the latter and less of the former. Especially since the number of h1b visa is capped.

Now compare it with the heavily regulated industry of Healthcare. No one likes paying hospital bills in USA, almost everyone works on wafer thin margins and a constant fear of law-suites. Only the doctors and that too only few of them manage to earn a fortune but everyone else is worse off. Far more importantly USA has very inefficient and expensive healthcare system.

But ya, we don’t need to import someone doing JavaScript over to America anymore (which, believe it or not, is what I’ve witnessed). There’s no rhyme or reason to it, we have a solid home grown talent pool for that.

A lot of full stack web dev work can be saturated by Americans because there’s enough people crossing industries to take it on.

I’ll let the other types of developers chime in on what kind of shortage they are seeing, because I see zero in web development. It’s nothing personal to my immigrant friends, but believe it or not our industry is pretty crowded at the moment to justify opening up to foreign workers. We can easily drive prices down amongst ourselves at the rate we’re going at.

I support this policy through and through, and I’m a Democrat.

It's worth nothing that all H1Bs are technically priority occupations. Part of the process is to receive a labor certification that demonstrates you, as an employer, were unable to fill the position with a US citizen or permanent resident.

That itself is a whole can of worms because the system is heavily gamed to ensure that many such positions remain technically unfulfillable locally. For example, advertising such jobs where people are unlikely to find them and apply for them (eg in newspapers).

Now for big tech jobs, that need is genuine. For the body shops, it isn't. Despite attempts in the system to ensure such jobs are paid a fair market wage, they are not. The only people who take them are those Indian nationals who are so desperate to emigrate to the United States that they are willing to endure pseudo-indentured servitude for possibly decades if they and their family can have a better life.

That's a noble goal to be sure but we shouldn't enable employers to take advantage of them so. Even worse, in doing so, they're costing genuinely good jobs in big tech because of the lottery system.

Perhaps I will be down voted for dissenting, but I do write from personal experience. I've seen thousands of jobs outsourced, and contrary to the wisdom expressed on internet forums here and elsewhere, H1B is a prime facilitator of moving work offshore. Entire support/application teams relocated, but supplanted with a liaison team of slightly more experienced non immigrant visa workers brought on shore to work with business units.

It's had a direct effect on wages and opportunity, and a big cause of why American students decline to pursue computer science degrees. Sure, there have been winners and survivors, but the average wage / contract rate for a programmer is less than it was 20-30 years ago. Worse, opportunity has been snuffed out — 20 years ago, corporate jobs would go in search in-house looking for anyone who wished to step up and learn the craft, applying their business knowledge. Now, project work is simply delegated to offshore vendors.

I have no gripe with bringing in the best and the brightest from abroad. There should be no restrictions in that regard. And for many reading Hacker News, it is all about that. However, the bulk of H1B is allotted to entry level programmers that could have easily been filled by Americans, who could have the choice of a better career path alternative. I know, because I was the guy who had to train those guys who were flown in from India, and I would quickly determine that the extent of their training was reading a manual on the plane ride to the U.S.. No problem, the offshore vendor marketing representative would shrug, we'll send another guy tomorrow.

Many posts in defense here of H1B will cite 1s and 2s but corporate outfits use up hundreds (if not 1000s) of such slots. My past experience in Arizona, working for American Express, Honeywell, APS (power company) I can attest to thousands of positions filled by H1B that used to be manned by employees and on-shore contract workers. Most all of those positions are not the "best and the brightest", but imported entry level workers.

Then we consider that our reservation systems, utility company billing systems, charge card systems, claims adjudication are staffed predominately by foreigners. In a few years, the Americans who serve as subject matter experts will step aside and the expertise will be entirely with the offshore vendors. Now, I not going to invoke nationalistic appeals, because I do believe it should be a meritocracy, and some of the rhetoric I hear from xenophobic protectionist interests is simply sickening.

And yes, I've experienced difficulty in finding work in spite of my degree and qualifications. Or have seen my consulting rate / salary depressed because of H1B. I've retooled and work now for less than a third of what I made in the corporate world, as a web developer for a non-profit now — I've been blessed with a spouse that makes double that as a registered nurse. Soon, due to her having health issues, I may need to seek a better paying gig(s). My inbox does occasionally see a recruiter solicitation, but the rates/salary offered are a joke.

Furthermore, the adage that a company cannot find qualified help needs to be qualified with "cannot find help at the pay / rate being offered" — I could go on in this post with detailed occurrences but will cite just one that is emblematic of the issue. A colleague at a past work contract needed to hire a GIS developer and had a candidate in mind. But he could only offer a temporary 3-6 month contract at a rate less than market value. Still, his preferred candidate would have snagged it if there was some guarantee of full time employment at end of the "probationary" period, or an increase in rate or a bonus paid. None of it was to be forthcoming, so it was settled that an H1B candidate got the job.