Comment Re: looser immigration laws (Score 1) 303
But what is this job that used to pay $80k - $100k exactly and has now dropped to $40k? It's certainly not software development because wages there have not declined - on the contrary, they've been increasing. Why are you certain the H1-B hires are the reason the average salary has dropped? Another thing I've pointed out previously is that the number of H1-B hires isn't even large enough to have much of an impact on any particular field - they're still a vast minority relative to the numbers in most fields in general.
The wages of tech workers are less than pre-recession levels and are increasing at a rate lower than inflation. http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
So sure, maybe you do work at one of the companies that does bring in cheap overseas hires, but my point remains that all the big boys are not doing this. The big tech companies are all paying well above the average. I can't find the site I used last time I looked into this as it had more uptodate data, this one only goes to 2010, but if you find such a site with more recent data you'll see it's the exact same pattern.
The big boys are definitely hiring the most H1B visas. Whether or not that is driving down their wages is debatable. The top requester of H1B visas is Microsoft. http://www.geekwire.com/2012/4... . Intel, IBM and Oracle are also high on the list. (Yeah, I know, that list is a bit dated, but you get the point.) Actually, the largest recipients of H1B visas may be firms specializing in off-shoring jobs. They bring people over here to learn the jobs and then they can do the work from India or wherever after the visa expires. Apparently, these kind of companies got 40,000 out of the 85,000 visas that were issued in 2012. http://www.npr.org/blogs/allte...