It is getting out of hand. The country is piling up with immigrants and it does seem that employers are more interested in paying lower wages for more work. Also, there are so many ways an employer can hire an immigrant even if that jeopardizes the chances of an American getting the job instead, without Immigration knowing of it.

While I understand that U.S. programmers want high salaries (including those past immigrants who now have citizenship or green cards), there are issues of the development of the software industry in the United States, spillovers to other occupations, and outsourcing that have to be balanced against the programmers interests.

I personally think that a lot of foreign IT workers tend to be technologicaly behind a decade on the actual trend. I am a J2EE devekoper and I have met foreigns able at the very best to code in C++. More, the mnemonic aspect is a priority in Third word universities, so the creativity and ability to adapt complex model to reality is pratically null.
So, this people tend to fill the lower area of the ocupational piramid.
More, usually the H1B is for people with an educational background in Mumbai not in America.

If they put decent checks and balances in place, then the H-1B program would not make so many of us techies angry. (True, we would like to see it end, but compromise is probably the practical route.) For example, companies should be required to interview at least 3 of the best-fitting citizens and provide a written reason to them why they are rejected. Second, salaries and job duties should be verified regularly by inspectors. It is too easy to twist the truth on the visa applications. Further, more info should be made public, including job openings and visa applications. We have a right to know who is giving away our jobs and why. I've personally seen the H-1B program abused.

From a security standpoint, it seems difficult or impossible to do adequate background checks on foreign workers, especially those from India, etc. Also, those countries do not usually have strong laws, or enforcement, against theft of intellectual property, etc. For the worker based overseas, or who could quickly return in the event of trouble here, there seems to be very little deterrent against insider attacks, embedding back doors in code, etc. I'm not sure that the initial savings will be found to outweigh long term costs...

Where there's a buck, there's a scam... ;-)

The United States has 2 choices:

1. Let the software engineers wages go so high that it becomes practically impossible to do business and outsource the jobs to another country.

or

2. Let more people come in, pay taxes to the US which can be used for the benefit of every citizen and create more jobs in the meantime because every well-paid job creates job opportunities for other people.

Global economy means global competition. And the software engineers in US have to start compete, not cry fool. There are no other options and everyone knows it.

90% of all H1-B awards must be dictated to go to protectionist industries like the medical field, legal field, and PE fields. These industries have used licensing to form a protectionist barrier against cheap labor. Rather than 10% per annum pay cuts we should be seenig 10% per annum cost cuts. The average pgmr at Cisco supposedly makes $140k. Would be quite funny if CSCO just laid them all off and hired them back at $75k - the street price for a 40-something with 20-something years of programming experience (~$105k in silicon valley).

I worked for a large telecom company, as a contractor, into the tech and telecom meltdown. When the contract staff was being let go, all of the american contractors were let go, but the indian contractors were brought on as staff. The project director, who attended the going away bash, told us that she would like to have hired us, but that upper management dictated that only foreign H1B contractors be hired on as staff.
On a personal note, my wife was forced to train her indian replacement, in order to get her severance pay, when she was laid off from her job in 2001. It's not a question of quality, it's a question of cost.