Can you spare us the pontification? My issue with H1s is when employees that are clearly qualified are fired and forced to train cheaper replacement. H1 is about filing shortages not about helping Disney save money.<p>The same crowd that supports unlimited immigration, ironically oppose free trade. If it&#x27;s ok to let in $60,000 engineers because there is a shortage of professionals willing to work for $60,000, why is it not ok to let in tarrif-free cars because people don&#x27;t want to spend $20k on a Chevy?<p>There is no shortage of software devs. There is a shortage of software devs willing to work for $60k. The H1 system ought to be for exceptional cases such as a data scientist proficient in R, Haskel and Ruby which experience on mobile API design. It shouldn&#x27;t be for effectively entry or mid level work. Many of the Infosys and Tata engineers with whom I have worked have been reasonably competent, but far from spectacular and some have been downright dangerously incompetent. Not a single one has been a field-leading expert.<p>Someone mentioned about what if plumbers were the primary recipient of H1s.. That would be interesting because it would expose the scam that is the enterprise-level H1 system.<p>It&#x27;s about cheap labor (generally) and not about some imagined shortage of people. Honestly, outsourcing firms ought to be excluded from H1 eligibility; only primary employers should be allowed to apply. The program should also have more oversight. For example, you claim you can&#x27;t find an engineer that can work in C and interact with SOAP APIs. Before your H1 request is allowed to proceed, the government (or quasi-government) should then be allowed to send you US resident prospects that meet your requirements. If there are none, then you get the H1 application processed. Essentially affirmative action for US citizens and resident. If you are unwilling to hire the employee, you would need to justify why. Salary discussions would be forbidden until after you make a hiring decision. If you say yes but the salary is too high, then there would be kind of an arbitration system.<p>My point is that H1 is about lower cost most of the time and has little to do with an actual shortage.