Americans will always attempt to improve their wages, either by negotiating or job-hopping. An H-1B worker is legally barred from improving his wages. Even if that were possible, he wouldn't even try. The whole point of the job is cheap labor and the salary is infinitely preferable to whatever he gets in Mumbai. The negotiation is over before it even started.
So if Americans aren't able to compete on price, they can compete on quality right? No, because for most staffing needs, quality isn't even a competition. The corporation literally does not care if they put out a worse product than last year or the year before that. You know what is a competition, though? Shareholder value. See point 1.
So if these megacorporations put out deteriorating product lines, what's the solution? Well, if we consult the free market handbook, an hotshot new company that employs quality American labor will outcompete and displace them. American entrepreneurship, baby! Except even if that were possible, it'll take decades, and in the meantime our workforce will have absolutely nothing to do. The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
And on top of that, even if a new upstart did dethrone Microsoft, Google, Amazon, or whatever, they'd just lay off all their Americans again.
The H-1B program must be shut down as soon as possible.
I don't have numbers to back up my opinion but once H1Bs get in to management and HR the lower pay is short term and after a year they maybe are 10-15% cheaper then an American.
Don't underestimate the sheer tribalism of Indians. They are not individualistic, they want mass Indians to take over.
Large corporations are extremely good at this as they are to big to fail so any downside of mass pajeets is going to be absorbed.
Look at IBM. It's been dying for longer then I've been working.
There is also an actual need of people doing repetitive tasks and Indians are good at that.
If you want a nice story on why I have an issue with Indians.
Previous employer set up a taskforce, one Indian and one white dude. They had to do this upgrades where they had to go manually and run a set of commands, once done they would mark the system as upgraded.
The Indian broke something like 50 systems because he had a mistake in the commands and rather then check the output and the errors he would just paste command after command and then mark the system green ignoring all the error messages.
Do you know what he got for that? He got a freaking award for his hard work from the Indian manager while the white dude that had to fix everything and spent his weekend working on that got nothing and was told by the Indian manager that they can't give 2 awards. The white guy left the company after that.
H1Bs are fucked because money is less important then tribalism and once they get in power they will flood it with Indians no matter what.
That's one of the best H-1B stories I've read. I was going to discuss the ethnocentric angle, but the post was getting a little long. You're 100% right though. Indian supremacist thinking alone would be enough to guarantee the extinction of American workers.
They hire other Indians because they're all in on the scam to help one another out.
It becomes corporate suicide if you need to fire 50%+ of a department and retrain
Works in large companies. There is a lot of resilience built in already.