I worked for outsourcing company in India, large hardcore Big-3 tech company in Silicon Valley and a Startup. I can give you a perspective on this.

H1B visas are used by two category of companies.

1. Google like company who needs expertise and hires directly. Treated at par with other google employees. 2. Infosys like company that has its fingers in far too many pies and essentially works to provide cheap labor to American clients.

(Note that "cheap labor" benefits American companies stay a float. An automotive company might have lowered its expenses by engaging Infosys. Take that benefit out and the company might think of moving to Mexico to reduce operating costs by engaging cheaper manual labor. Cheap labor can be seen as exploitation of the worker and hence we can think of that Indian guy on H1B as someone who is being exploited.)

Infosys can file 3000 petitions for H1B and win lotter for 2000 of them. Google can only hire 4 IIT students out of which only 2 make it to USA.

The best way forward is to keep H1B as highly valued employee visa with no cap but much higher salary cap, dual intent visa and no lottery.

Provide another visa to Infosys like company with no immigration intent. Hard limit of how many years they can stay in USA and keep track how how much economic benefit they bring.

>I truly wonder if those companies would opt to just leave their staff in India, and to hire mostly just customer-facing support types here otherwise.

It's already much cheaper to employ someone in India than to pay that person in the US. The only reason they are using H-1B employees based in the US, is that some companies that are contracting Infosys and Tata want US based employees.

"It's already much cheaper to employ someone in India than to pay that person in the US."

Agreed, but there might be advantages to having someone in the US.

Given a 'major change' it's not entirely unfeasible that these companies do a re-structuring, i.e. using a different customer engagement model (1 customer-facing American + more staff in India) and leverage more 'remote' style technology.

Also - remember that these companies may have been billing those staff out, so 'more cost' = 'more revenue' for them.

Anyhow - I just don't think it's so simple, and I'm not sure that just upping the threshold will work. Granted, $60K is too low.

It'd be nice to have the number set to be commensurate with specific people in specific fields, as measured by various things, i.e. 'tied to an index' so that as the economy does better, companies can bring in more people, but if things start to tighten, the H1's tighten as well.

>Agreed, but there might be advantages to having someone in the US.

My argument is that they are essentially already hiring the minimum number of US based employees that they can get away with. There are companies contracting them that want a minimum number of butts in seats on premises.

Any US taxes due to their US H1-B operations can also be reduced to zero by inflated internal pricing / profit shifting to their Indian operations. Check the tax rates and median IT salaries in Indian service export cities.

Also, they try to rotate employees abroad between several countries so as to keep them on short term visa & tax rules - and maybe also to avoid them getting uppity or starting unions...

The quota of H1b visas (compared to demand) is so low that it's very likely it will be filled even after losing the low paying applications. So tax revenue shouldn't go down.

> the top users of H1s are foreign companies, like Infosys and Tata - they bring in people on these visas

IIRC the top 10 were all consulting companies the last few years. You can look at the pay rates vs google/MS/etc... and see the difference. You can also look at the number of green card sponsorships.

It's really awful.

   it's kind of 'insourcing' not 'outsourcing'

It's still outsourced, but it's not offshored also.