Analysis of the H1B visa, and how it really helps big consulting firms, is incomplete without also looking at the perspective of the H1B visa holder. I think I

Analysis of the H1B visa, and how it really helps big consulting firms, is incomplete without also looking at the perspective of the H1B visa holder. I think I can help, as I used to have one. Why do people get H1B visas? It's rarely because they want to work in the US for a few years: It's because they want to stay. I know I did. But how can a prospective immigrant move to the US? By getting sponsored, and waiting for the requisite number of years for the Green Card to come back (it varies, but 5+ year waits happen). The best way to do that is to get an H1B, and then, when the company you work for realizes you are actually good at your job, start the permanent immigration process. The trick is that you have to look for an employer that will take you, and you expect will still be there in 5+ years, and hoping that no layoffs hit you, because layoffs complicate, if not just completely restart, an immigration process. So what do people do? They go with an outsourcer. The outsources will never lay you off: They just ship you to another client. It's an extra layer of insurance if things go bad. So ultimately, the way the system is set up, getting an H1B through one of those big consulting/outsourcing firms is also in the best interest of the people wanting to move to the US. While I do not think there's much agreement on how to solve the problem, regardless of whose interests we have in mind, it 's pretty clear that the system is broken, as it has all kinds of perverse incentives, forcing good, honest people into situations nobody likes. But to fix this, we need a major overhaul of how the US employment-based immigration works. Now, the problem there is of the very diverse interests, which we can see on any tech website: Some people just want us immigrants out of here, thinking that will help them. Others want to increase immigration, thinking that the most qualified people are in the US, the better for the US tech industry. But if there's no sensible compromise, what we get is what we have: A system that doesn't serve anyone very well, much less the people like me who went through it. In my case, I was fortunate enough to come in back when any company could get an H1B if they showed they needed a programmer, and coming from a country with extremely high unemployment, the risks outweighed the rewards. But it was very frustrating to be economically tied to an employer (for about 6 years in my case), and knowing that a job switch in the middle of the green card process, or a layoff, could mean having to go back home.