You're correct that India accounts for most of the H1B visas, but my comment was actually referring to the companies that bring in H1B workers, not the national

You're correct that India accounts for most of the H1B visas, but my comment was actually referring to the companies that bring in H1B workers, not the nationality of the H1B workers themselves. Here's a link to an article on msnbc: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17048048/ http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17048048/ "data for the fiscal year 2006, which ended last September, show that 7 of the top 10 applicants for H-1B visas are Indian companies. Giants Infosys Technologies and Wipro took the top two spots, with 22,600 and 19,400 applications, respectively. The company with the third most applications is Cognizant Technology Solutions, which is based in Teaneck, N.J., but has most of its operations in India. All three companies provide services to U.S. companies from India, including technology support and back-office processing." This article raises the point that H1B visas may actually facilitate and accelerate the trend toward moving jobs offshore. Some people think this is a worthy goal - source the labor where it can be provided most economically. But then we should be honest about it, and agree that our national policy will be to assist foreign corporations in moving development jobs offshore. Then our own young people can take that into consideration, along with our government's decision to protect sectors like law from foreign competition, when choosing a graduate degree and career. I also disagree with you that the writer of the article is opposed to immigration, and he definitely makes a strong case against the claim of "playing a race card". Here's the quote from his article: "What's more, the H-1B issue is separate from the debate concerning an overhaul of sadly confused and outdated immigration framework as a whole. Friedman's hardworking Indian immigrants would still have an opportunity to come to the United States and make their contributions as citizens-to-be if H-1B were suspended, using the regular immigration framework." So this writer is clearly not opposed to Indians (among others) immigrating to the US. The question is: should there be a special visa program designed specifically to bring more engineers to the United States than we'd get through the normal process of immigration? It's a reasonable question, but it really is separate from the more general question of whether people should be allowed to pursue a better life through immigration to the US, or even whether we should try to bring more "educated people" here in a general sense. The H1B is used specifically to increase the number of engineers, and it seems pretty obvious to me that if you do that to engineering but not to other fields, you'll deter young Americans from entering engineering relative to other fields that are not targeted by work visas.