Life Musings

From the same previously mentioned NFAP report:

Contrary to the myth that H-1B visa holders are "indentured servants," professionals on such visas understand their market value and show great mobility in the U.S. labor market. An NFAP sampling of U.S. employers and immigration lawyers confirmed that individuals on H-1B visas changed employers frequently. In fact, generally speaking, the majority of H-1B hires by large companies today first worked for other employers. This is supported by data from the Department of Homeland Security.

A recent report for the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) asserting that computer
programmers on H-1B visas are underpaid contained shortcomings that make it unreliable for use by policy makers. The key flaw in the CIS study is that it utilized data that do not reveal what employers actually pay individuals on H-1B visas, relying on prevailing wage information alone, when, in fact, the actual amount
companies pay is much higher. Actual starting salaries for H-1B professionals average 22 percent above the prevailing wage standards, according to a statistically
valid sample of H-1B cases randomly selected for NFAP by a respected law firm.
Another indicator of the CIS paper’s unreliable methodology is that the paper
claims that some large technology companies pay their H-1B employees, on average, as
much as $40,000 less than the H-1B professionals of competing tech firms located
less than 30 minutes away, an impossibility given the competition for labor.

If companies simply wanted to obtain services based only on wages, then U.S. companies would move all of their work outside the United States, since the median salary for a computer software engineer is $7,273 in Bangalore and $5,244 in Bombay, compared to $60,000 in Boston and $65,000 in New York, according to the Seattle-based market research firm PayScale.