Of course it is not only Reid, not only Pelosi, not only McConnell, not only Boehner.
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It is over a century of bad & manipulated & paid-for laws/regulations/federal and state and local government-enforced monopolies.

But those 4, and quite a few other corrupt congress-critters, are determined to increase the corruption. Look at what they did, recently, with the restrictions against insider stock trading by congress-critters and their staffers. It took months of public out-cry, and then, within a few days of passage of the law to stop it, they rammed through legislation that ripped open loop-holes reversing most of the reform.

Then again, I suspect the previous poster was thinking of S744, the reprehensible immigration law perversion bill which would reduce border security, grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens, and increase rather than reduce student and exchange and guest-work and green card visas, and certainly would not put in place reasonable standards for those the lobbyists claim are "best and brightest" or "highly-skilled" to allow well over 100K not so good, not so bright, not so highly-skilled to be brought in as a subsidy for the tech executives. The House might consider an immigration reform bill, but the senate and the leftists in the house are, well, dead-set against any such reform. Similarly, the congressional establishment is opposed to cutting federal government over-spending and paying down federal overnment debt. Similarly, the congressional establishment is opposed to encouraging rather than discouraging monopolies in electricity, telecommunications, etc. Similarly, the congressional establishment favors massive subsidies like the Ex-Im Bank for their political buddy business executives, monopoly rights of way for railroads, issuing massive amounts of scrip and e-scrip and slugs rather than having sound coinage...

Let's see, according to the Treasury Department
http://www.treasurydirect.gov/...
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When JFK was sworn in, in 1961, the federal government debt was about $285G.

When LBJ was sworn in, in 1963, the federal government debt was about $308G.

When Tricky Nixon was inaugurated in 1969 the federal government debt was about $360G.

When Gerald Ford was inaugurated in 1974, it was about $480G.

When Jimmy Carter was inaugurated in 1977 the federal government debt was about $680G.

When Reagan was inaugurated in 1981 the federal government debt was about $860G.

When GHWBush was inaugurated in 1989 it was about $2.7T.

When Clintoon was inaugurated in 1993 it was about $4.2T.

When Shrub was inaugurated in 2001 it was about $5.73T.

When Obummer was inaugurated in 2009 it was about $10.62T.

On 2014-07-18 it was $17.6T.

At the same time, according to the census bureau _Historical Statistics of the United States_, total aggregate federal government spending (not debt, spending), through 1902, adding each year's spending to the total, was just over $17G, a little less than one-thousandth of the current federal government debt, and much less than the monthly interest on the current federal government debt.

http://www.kermitrose.com/jgoMoney.html#FedDebtsee the graphs

OTOH, the House originates all spending bills, the senate either concurs or floats an amendment; if the House agrees to the amendment, the president either approves or vetoes it. IOW, the responsibility is spread around. The over-spending since 1835 has been perpetrated by the Whigs, Reps and the Dems.

It was the regressives about 115-100 years ago who started the perversion of the USA: income extortion, direct election of senators, Federal Reserve Board counterfeiting the currency, the drug wars, foreign adventurism rather than non-interventionism (not to be mistaken for isolationism in which we've never engaged). Of course the Teddy and Wilson and FDR and LBJ regimes worked their hardest to make matters worse.
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None of that is to say that genuine reforms were not called for e.g.
reductions of racism through moral suasion and of Jim Crow laws,
ratification of the amendment (one of the original 12 in the bill of rights) to limit congress-critters from giving themselves raises without having to go through an election before any raise would take place,
the amendment (another of the original 12) to keep the number of House members to 1 for every 30K to 50K adult citizens (rather than the 600K to 700K constituents per "representative" today)

"a very generous severance package"
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The problem is both with retention and hiring. Before H-1B, STEM employers invested in new-hire training (2-16 weeks was common) and retained employee training (2-4 weeks per year). Now, they don't.

Before H-1B, they didn't engage in age discrimination beginning at about 35 years of age. Now, they do, regardless of intelligence and knowledge and re-tooling/continuous learning and praise of performance by managers and co-workers.

Before H-1B, STEM employers were willing to fly candidates in from around the country for real, live interviews. Now, that's more of a rarity, after a sequence of ridiculous telephone trivial pursuit quizzes.

Before H-1B, STEM employers provided relocation assistance for STEM employees within the country and abroad. Now hardly any of them do.

Before H-1B, they bought display ads in multiple major-city, major-circulation newspapers around the country. For a while they advertised both in many papers and on-line. Now they don't. They've developed a notion of "local" restricted to within a few blocks of the work-place; and leap directly from recruiting within that restricted local to cross-border bodyshopping.

Before H-1B, they included in their ads e-mail addresses, actual physical location addresses, and desk-phone numbers actually answered by hiring managers. Now they don't.

Since H-1B, the numbers of contingent/temp/consulting/custom programming/contract gigs and the numbers of domestic and cross-border bodyshops have exploded, while real jobs, developing hardware/software applications/systems for real hardware and/or software product firms have virtually disappeared.

That a *FREE* market economy, not a regime of force and fraud.
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The Adelson, Gates, Zuckerberg... claims ("talent shortage", "best and brightest", "qualified"...) are fraudulent, thus a violation of the prerequisites for a free market.

"Right now we're hiring. Truth is we probably get 6 times the number of H1B applicants compared to US applicants."
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So, obviously, something about your advertising methods are biased... or the kind of work you mention in your ads is less appealing to US citizens for some reason.

What methods are you using to advertise the jobs? I assume you've placed ads on some of the on-line sites. How many classified or display ads have you taken out in print publications (both general circulation and trade zines) both in your metropolitan area but across the USA? What is the circulation of the publications in which you've advertised? For how many days and weeks are the ads to run?

How many deans and department chairs have you written to or called? How many university computing centers and institutes and labs have you contacted? Have you built up long-run relationships with those deans and department chairs and directors?

Did you include your e-mail address and the number of the phone on your desk in the ads?

Is the tech involved more or less obsolete? Are you advertising outside of the appropriate niche? Maybe you're reaching a lot of the wrong people, and few of the right people.

How willing are you to fly candidates in for interviews from around the USA?

How willing are you to invest in the 3 weeks of new-hire training that DoL expects to be the norm?

How willing are you to invest in relocation assistance for the best candidates?

How willing are you to help them break a lease, sell a home, and secure new quarters within 30 miles or so of your location?

What if you find a great candidate who, in light of the on-going economic depression, is cold broke, doesn't have a car or a pile of cash to come to you, or a cushion on which to live for a few weeks until pay-day?

How much are you able and willing to invest into reaching and hiring the genuinely best or brightest?

It is easy to find good developers nearly everywhere. But it requires lifting a finger to find great developers. However, you have a much larger pool of bright, gifted, good and great developers if you include US citizen developers, younger developers and older developers, black, yellow, pink, brown and orange developers, rather than dumping all US citizens' applications into the black-hole candidate management system without otherwise examining them... as has been the practice since H-1B was hatched.

Yes, purple squirrel job descriptions are used both for hiring a particular person on H-1b, and as part of the PERM process to convert from a temp visa to a green card (as described in 2007 by Lebowitz at the C&G seminar).
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Yes, though H-1B visas were, for a short time, single-intent, guest-work only visas. Applicants were required to show that they owned property or had some other anchor to the old country. That was done away with, they were converted to "dual intent" so that they could convert from H-1B to green card without having to go back to wait for the process to run its course.

Then the H-1B was changed so that they could go from one employer/sponsor to another, even if they have a pending green card application. But, regardless of whether they have a pending green card application, the barrier to jumping ship is still higher than it was for US citizens before the H-1B visa existed, so many guest-workers keep their mouths shut and make nice and do whatever unethical or otherwise obnoxious projects the employer wants and stay put until they get a green card.

While it is true that hiring managers and HR clones create job descriptions specifically designed to eliminate American workers, it is *also* true that some American "IT workers" and some foreign "IT guest-workers" think they are super-awesome and really aren't. Or maybe they just think they're shrewd enough enlist other, more tech-savvy acquaintances to be able to muddle through while sowing confusion and bragging about themselves to deceive.
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Or they might have the skills, but they don't have the specific credentials the HR gate-keeper demands. I mean, how many US STEM pros have 4 years of experience programming in Swift... seeing as it's only a few weeks old. (Flashback to the mostly-newbie recruiters at the bodyshops demanding 5 years of Java experience in 1996.) Or maybe they have a bachelor's, or a master's or even a PhD, but it's not from the university the hiring manger likes. Or maybe they have the degrees, but not the certicates. Or maybe they have the skills with brand A version 4.7.2, but not brand B version 1.4.5, and neither the recruiter nor the hiring manager knows that they work almost exactly the same way, nor that anyone the least bit savvy with version 2.0 could adapt within half an hour to brand A version 4.7.2 or brand B version 1.4.5.

They might have skills, but they might not actually have the specific, purple squirrel combination of skills that the hiring manager wants, to replace a team of 4-12 specialized collaborators with one indentured house-geek.

Or they might want a real long-term full-time job designing and/or developing commercial software products instead of a series of bodyshop/temp/contingent/contract/consulting gigs doing "data processing" or "IT" kinds of work at non-STEM firms. Or they might want to make enough to actually make a living, buy books and e-books and DVDs and otherwise continue learning, buy a home and car, marry, raise a family... radical things like that.

Managers don't want to invest in training, or flying in candidates for interviews, or relocation assistance, or 8th-page and quarter-page job ads in multiple high circulation print publications the way they did before H-1B. They don't want to put their e-mail addresses and desk phone numbers in the job ads because they know they'd be swamped by able and willing US citizen candidates as well as by spurious callers.

I'm just amazed they have the gall to apply for a patent for such an obvious kind of thing.
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Where's the innovation in this scheme? What new approach are they using to try to justify having a patent on it? It's like the idiot-phone trying to get patents for installing a digital camera into the phone. What is not obvious to anyone about how to do these things?

"It's not just software development, but any job. If the employees are happy about how they're being treated, they'll do the best job they can, because they want to stay with the company."
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It also means they've got "buy-in". They approve of what you're having them do. The goals/aims are ones they want to work toward; they're worthwhile. They might see themselves as having a chance to have a proportional share in the firm's success.

But if the firm is doing bad things; if set A are getting the big bonuses or otherwise getting ahead, while set B of workers are knocking themselves out for nothing... they're not likely to be happy.

At the same time, if
1. someone does something or sees someone do something of no note but garners extravagant praise and other rewards; and/or
2. if he does something great or sees someone else do something great and the person/people who did it gets no praise or no rewards; and/or
3. if he sees people getting hollow praise but no other rewards for doing worthwhile things,
it kills his enthusiasm and his happiness, and undermines his ability to improve himself in his job, and most likely in his career for the long-run.

The trouble with "prevailing wage" is that it is a legal term of art. If you look up "prevailing" and "wage" in even a good dictionary, it would give you little insight into the meaning of the legal term "prevailing wage". It does not mean, as many would think, "the wage that would have prevailed for the job and the abilities of the individual worker if there had never been any H-1B visa-grantees in the area doing this kind of job". It does not mean "local market wage for the particular job".
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In practice, it has always meant a little less than local market compensation for the average worker doing this particular kind of work (and, yes, job titles and such can be and have often been gamed*). Sometimes and in some places in the USA, it has meant 2% below local market compensation; other times and in other places in the USA, it has meant 35% below local market compensation. (And we must remember that L visas have no local market compensation or "prevailing wage" requirement; they can be paid at the levels of their country of origin.)

But, the H-1B grantees, if we are to believe the lobbyists, are each and all "best and brightest". And someone who is "best" or "brightest" should be earning a significant premium over the average. Since the very best software developers have been found to produce as much as 10 or 12 times as much value as the mediocre, then the premium commanded by one of the "best" or "brightest" should be as high as 10 times the compensation of the average.

But what has been found? Those H-1B grantees who were also sponsored for green cards (i.e. most likely the better ones), were earning 0.001% above the median. Not 10 times the median, not 5 times the median, not 130% of the median.

So, absent other more or less objective measures of the skill levels of the individual H-1B grantees (IQ, SAT, ACT, LSAT, MCAT..., increased value of stock granted as part of the pay package), perhaps a 150% of median or average would be reasonable. But, once again, what do we see in practice? If pay is a few thousand dollars BELOW the average for new (most likely lower-skilled wet-behind-the-ears, inexperienced) college grads, i.e. if pay is merely $60K, many standards for H-1B grantees and their employers are waived under current law.

( * For instance, the rules allow, or at least allowed, e.g. a cross-border bodyshopper to pay all H-1B grantees the same, below-market compensation, so long as they were all paid the same and no US citizens were employed at that location at a higher compensation. And this was even the case when an employer dumped all of his US citizen employees doing the same work at a higher compensation level in favor of contracting with the bodyshopper. The new, below market compensation, because it is the same for all of the bodyshop's employees doing that kind of work in that place, is the "prevailing wage".

Domestic bodyshoppers have also pulled the equivalent of this scam; negotiate a deal; employer dumps all his people in a particular kind or kinds of work; replace them with cheaper bodies shopped who are paid significantly less by the bodyshopper (in hourly wage, benefits, training, etc.), and charges original employer slightly less than prior total costs of employing people; the difference going into the pockets of the execs of both firms. Voila, the new "prevailing wage" is less than the local market compensation used to be. Some people with few alternatives will absorb the cuts in a lowered quality of living and hire on at the bodyshop; others will be unemployed or under-employed for extended periods, will seek greener pastures elsewhere...)

"if you're primarily an embedded or industial automation developer, you're going to have an easier time finding work in an area that already does a lot of similar work"
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Certainly... as long as by "in an area" you mean within a radius of 2K miles or so. "Industrial automation" covers a lot of ground, from citrus juice processors near Orlando, to heavy-metal manufacturing in TN, KY, OH, IN, IL, to metal refining and such in PA, OH, MT.. to consumer products manufacturing in OH, NJ, KY, TN, KS, GA, PA...

But with the surplus of STEM workers we've had over the last 30 years or so, old clusters like Route 128 in MA and the Chippewa Falls, St. Paul, Minneapolis super-computing hot-bed, or even the mini-clusters around Detroit, MI and Dayton, OH and Cleveland, OH and Rochester, NY and Kansas City, KS and Oklahoma City and Ponca City, OK and Ft. Huachuca, AZ... have dumped tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of STEM pros into unemployment and under-employment.

I met people in San Diego who said they did embedded programming, and H-1B guest-workers there who said they were data-base experts who were either so shy of industrial espionage or incompetent to talk shop. There was supposedly a biotech cluster there, but you'd never know it from recruiting efforts. Ditto with the NJ pharmaceutical cluster. US citizens need not apply.

I'm positive H-1B is a scam. I'm optimistic that reform (i.e. reduction, moratorium; institution of reasonable standards) can be achieved.

"The real fiction is when companies lie and say that they can not find local qualified workers in order to justify hiring H-1B workers."
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There are several fictions rolled into such claims.

How local is "local"? "Oooh, we couldn't find someone who was already living within 4 blocks, so obviously we had to take someone from 5K-6K miles away, instead. Surely, you didn't expect us to advertise the job across the 3 neighboring states, let alone across the country, did you."

"Qualified", as in "an important qualification for this job is to be a pliant indentured guest-worker much less likely to jump ship to another employer or blow the whistle on unethical activities than a free US citizen willing to stand up for himself". "Qualified" as in, "We must have a purple squirrel (software designer + algorithms specialist + software developer + data-base analyst and architect + graphic artist + accessibility specialist + internationalization expert + PR/marketing/sales specialist + mathematician or physicist or chemist or pharmacist or economist or historian or mechanical engineer or psychologist or 12th century literature expert or utilities app area expert or...) for this job! A team of 6 or 12 collaborating specialists just won't do."

"Surely you didn't expect us to offer average or below-average market pay and benefits for someone with well-above average intelligence, creativity and industry, with the expectation that he work hellacious hours did you?"

So, the Tata VP, Vandrevala was lying when he said H-1Bs were 25%-35% cheaper than US citizens? The LCAs which repeatedly showed the H-1Bs were 10%-25% below local market compensation (most clustered around 12% below local market; and this for people we were supposed to believe were "best and brightest", the kinds of people who should be commanding compensation up to 10 times local median compensation for the job) are a figment of all our imaginations? Former cross-border bodyshopper Vivek Wadhwa was lying when he admitted that the core thumb-on-the-balance was that H-1Bs were cheaper? Yah, sure.
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"the company made a good-faith effort to fill the positions with Americans, but wasn't able to find people with the needed skills."

I must congratulate you on not using/abusing the transparent weasel-word "qualified".

Tell us about this "good-faith effort":

Did they put the hiring manager's e-mail address and desk-phone number in the half-page or quarter-page display ads in newspapers across the country and in trade publications, the way employers did before H-1B?

Did they include them in their postings on a dozen or more job boards? (A lot of firms place job ads on sites, either without an e-mail address and phone number belonging to a manager, or at a site which blocks such contact information from job-seekers.)

Did they offer to fly candidates in from Maine, Florida, Hawaii, Alaska, Kansas... for interviews, and were the executives and mangers ready and willing to cover the hotel, rental car, and meal costs the way employers used to do before H-1B?

Did they offer relocation assistance the way employers did before H-1B? Did they offer to buy the new-hires' homes and re-sell them at the company's risk the way better employers did before H-1B (some firms offered this service on a contract basis to other firms)? Did they offer coaching or assistance in dealing with movers?

Did they offer 2-16 weeks of new-hire training (and 2-4 weeks per year of retained employee training) the way employers did before H-1B?

If applicable, did they offer to sponsor the new employee for necessary security clearances?

Were able and willing candidates' info buried in their "applicant management system's" black-hole data-base, never to be seen by human eyes again?

Were they actually offering market compensation (not just a bodyshopper's hourly rate, but total package of salary, insurance, paid holidays off, paid vacation off, sabbatical, company gym, company cafeteria, training, tuition and fee and text reimbursement, company thrift plan, credit union membership, on-site or near-site day-care, stock-share grant, stock options, IRA, Keogh, intrapreneurship grants, flexible hours... whatever)?

Were the "needed skills" actually *needed*, or were there a lot of "nice to haves" listed as "required"? Did they describe an actual human being, or were they seeking a purple squirrel kind of candidate to do -- for one below-market wage -- the jobs appropriate to a team of 5 or more specialists? Or was it merely a very peculiar niche?