Not the H1Bs at Amazon who were paid less and guilted into working weekends. Not my Mexican girlfriend who works for $50k as an oil rig chemical engineer in Houston at a company that only hires visa workers on the cheap. Not my Indian neighbors I befriended making $60k in software at Chase bank in Houston on their all-visa teams.
SLB is a good example, where I met my girlfriend. Entry level American chemical engineer: $120-150k. Visa chemical engineer imported to work on the same team in the same position: $50k. Guess which part of the pie chart grew while I worked there.
But I'm not supposed to notice any of this. And until very, very recently it was a faux pas to mention it at all.
If we're going to give anecdotal data, when I lived in NYC I was hired as an H1B, and every single other H1B I knew was paid way more than the median wage. But these were companies not trying to abuse the system. I do not doubt that there are bad actors.
I do agree that there should be minima to prevent abuse. I do not agree that every H1B hire was to abuse the system.
In the early 2010s there were hiring shortages, the startup that hired me would have probably preferred saving on the attorney fees and the 6+ months it took between the offer and the start date. For a new H1B you have to prepare the paperwork in March at the latest, apply the first week of April, for a start date of October 1st. And not only that, but with the quotas and the lottery you're absolutely not guaranteed that your hire is going to make it. All things being equal without a shortage or the ability to underpay, it is not an attractive solution.
H1Bs do push salaries down, because there is more "supply" of workers, so it should probably only be used for hiring for areas with shortages, but even then you can have downturn like what we're having in tech, and some companies may keep their H1Bs over FTE because they are less of a flight risk and can't negotiate their salaries as well. Even with a shortage, this means that employees with that specific skill will be paid less, now it's more of a matter of which one is better for the economy/society.
It's basic economics that more workers with fewer rights lower wages across the board. "They make what Americans do" when there is a continuous flow of competing labor. Sure. What would companies pay if they didn't have these exploitable workers? Would the companies have opened new office closer to where Americans are educated? Certainly, one of those two would happen.
But this is why the government should enforce existing laws and include provisions like must pay x above median average salary for the role to discourage fraud.
But it does negate the claim that H-1Bs are paid the same wage.
If your claim only applies to a subset of visa workers in a subset of companies, then refine the claim to use a word like "some", and it will be a trivial claim that I agree with.
> If it's top talent, then they should be forced to pay them the wage of a US worker, if not more.
They are forced to do that, and they in fact do that.
Source: I was hired by one big tech company as an H-1B worker (I was a new grad) over a decade ago (2012), my salary was ~15% higher than what the chart says for "class of 2014".
I will go a step further and suggest that you, an HNer, were probably even a world class talent back then who mogged your US cohort so badly they offered you 15% more to snap you up.
It's just evident that's not what's happening across all H-1B positions in the US, and those are the ones worth talking about here.
For every one example of "you" I have seen 100 or even 1000 of the other kind of "warm body" type of example. 2012 is already a long time ago. What has happened since is that the US reached some kind of critical mass situation where the number of those "warm bodies" brought in to do cheap work has finally killed the golden goose and now not only is it nearly impossible to find a job, the cost of living has also skyrocketed! We're closing in on the endgame here, mark my words. It will be ugly before it gets sorted out somehow.
Instead, you end up competing against the whole world on salary and servitude hours for a local job.