As someone who has worked with and hired many H1Bs, that hasn't been my experience at all. If anything, the median quality is significantly worse than American

As someone who has worked with and hired many H1Bs, that hasn't been my experience at all. If anything, the median quality is significantly worse than American programmers. Green card workers tend to be much better than H1Bs, although "better than average" still doesn't apply. The problem is definitely the median, not the extremes. Top-quality foreign programmers are absolutely as good as top American programmers. It's in the middle that things go sour. There are many reasons for this, both cultural and business. The big business problem is that H1Bs are hired from body shops to supply large numbers of staff quickly at a price target, so they rarely get to work on interesting, challenging projects. Whatever projects they're on are dragged down by the poor quality of their teammates, so they don't get to challenge themselves and excel. It's also aggravated by their body shop employers rewriting their resumes in an absolutely generic fashion for maximum buzzword compliance, denying the workers a chance to shine and specialize to potential employers. So the interview process consists of starting with a generic technology set, and then spending five minutes or so on technical questions to see if they actually know their ass from a hole in the ground or not (they usually don't). If they do, the process can proceed normally. But without a resume that shows any individuality, it's a huge waste of time for the interviewers to weed through all the crap. This adds to the perception of poor quality. Yeah, it's a real problem.