[wsxcde]

You can't stay for more than 6 years on an H1B unless your employer files a PERM application, has that approved, and then you/your employer files an I-140, and that is also approved. In other words, if your employer never filed a PERM, or never had one approved, you have to leave after a maximum of 6 years.

Green card applications for Indians (and to a lesser extent Chinese and Mexicans) are backed up for decades. So you're looking at people who filed PERMs in the last decade and are still waiting for green cards. They're allowed to stay on the H1B, which is why we have 800k people on H1Bs today. But these people are not working for Infosys, they're working for Google and Microsoft.

The 86,000 number contains 20,000 visas allocated to people who have graduate degrees from US universities. I don't think any of these folks are working for Indian consulting firms. So that leaves about 66,000 visas and 40,000 of those, at most, go the consulting firms. I did make an error in my math, which is not accounting for the fact you can stay for 6 years on this visa. Anecdotally, I know that most people of these people leave after about 2-3 years, when their "project" ends. But anyway, let's assume the worst case. You may have 240,000 people in the US on an H1B and working for an Indian tech consulting firm. That is still a small fraction of 3.6 million.

[FooBarJmp]

You should really look at TCS/WIPRO/InfoSys employees, or talk to them, it would really enlighten you.

240,000 is way more than your initial 40,000, yet you still say it's a small fraction.

So many articles say differently. I guess they could be all wrong. https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/04/14/how-the-salari...

[wsxcde]

Yes, it is 6.67%. That is literally the definition of a small fraction. And that is assuming a gross overestimate of 240k employees for Indian consulting firms in the US. Exact numbers are hard to get but here are some more facts: Infosys had a total of 23,594 employees in the US for 2016. TCS in 2012-13 had a total of only 21,830 employees outside India. With the two biggest H1B employers out of the way, I don't see how you're going to support your claim that there are 700k employees of Indian consulting firms on H1Bs in the US. It is simply not possible.

I have plenty of friends who work for Infosys and TCS. None of my friends even applied for a green card and they all went back to India after a couple of years here at the most. Many postings in the US at these companies last only 9-12 months. And neither TCS nor Infosys have any interest whatsoever in helping people immigrate to the US. (You need an employer to file a PERM application if you want a green card. A green card is required if you want to stay here more than 6 years.) That is the exact opposite of what they want to do.

The article you've mentioned says nothing about H1Bs. Outsourcing is not going to go away even if you eliminate H1Bs. And yes, all these articles making noise about this epidemic of H1Bs are in fact wrong. They're written by a bunch of poorly-informed Americans who wouldn't know the difference between an I-140 and an I-20. And their goal is to just generate clickbait to cater to nativist sentiment in the US. There's a lot of conservatives who emphatically don't want more Indians in this country. But they know they'll never win if they argue that they don't want Google and Microsoft employees here. So instead they've come up with this nonsense about Infosys and TCS stealing American jobs.