[NhanH]

At any given moment, there are at most around 500k H1B visa holders in the US, for all industries and companies. There are 90 millions working American, may be a third (half?) in white collar jobs that would employ H1b. There just straight up aren't enough H1bs to affect the job market.

I don't live in the US, for the usual disclaimer.

[chrshawkes]

I think those numbers are bogus based on my personal experience. I do live in the USA and work in tech the past 10 years.

[joshuamorton]

Those are the official numbers. In fact in 2018 it was 419637.

There are other visas (GC, as an example), but H1B are more of a Boogeyman than they deserve.

[hiram112]

> but H1B are more of a Boogeyman than they deserve.

Where do you work? In some cities, even smaller ones, in which I've worked, nearly every single IT / software office was filled with more and more foreign workers each year, not even including the 'team members' working offshore. Going for lunch at various cafeterias in a big building or food court near tech offices, and you'd think you were in India.

A little Googling tells me that there only about 130M workers actually employed in the US currently. I see a few different statistics for software engineers, but it appears to be anywhere from 1/2% of all of them to harder numbers of 1.5 million.

Let's double that to include other similar fields like DB admins, developers, etc. So at a high end, maybe 3 million developers, software engineers, etc.

According to 'official' statistics, there are 1/2 million working on H1B currently. I'm guessing there aren't too many models and CEOs on H1B, so most are, in fact, in tech. Now add in the L1 visa abusers (supposed to be short term but now used as a loophole) and Opt1 and probably a few more we don't even know are being abused, and don't forget the not insignificant percentage who are on expired visas but still working for body shops run by Indians... Let's guesstimate it's 1 million foreign workers, all concentrated in IT.

So 1 Million workers in an industry of 3 million, and you think that's a 'Boogeyman'? That's a massive economic force that would knock down wages and working conditions for anyone in the industry, while giving huge leverage to employers. And outside of the Silicon Valley FAANG bubbles where we're making $100K as senior engineers, that's what we have been experiencing, a bit worse each year, for two decades now.

[joshuamorton]

There are like 50,000 L1 visas total, and similarly few OPT visas.

So you're looking at half a million out of an industry of 4+ million.

When you overstate the impact by a factor of 3, it's easy to create a Boogeyman.

[hiram112]

Why would you believe anything the government claims regarding immigrants? They've purposefully misled the public for years on the numbers, or just refused to perform real investigations, claiming that "11 million" of undocumented for the last decade. Meanwhile, I watched the last suburb I lived in literally grow by 10K illegals just from El Salvador in the 5 years I lived there.

On top of that, Obama started allowing spouses of H1B visa holders to work in the US too, and many of these marriages are essentially shams in order to allow a friend of the family to come and get a job, often in tech, too.

FWIW, I don't have animosity towards most of these people. Early in my career, when I was a bit naive, I took a job working for the largest H1B sponsor in the US, and worked for them in both the US and India, living there for about a year. I've seen how it's used in both the higher tier companies where it seems more legitimate, but also where companies literally have US workers train their replacements from India at half the salary, double the hours.

I wouldn't believe the L1 and H1B counts, because it's estimated that there are a lot of visa overstays, who were never bothered by DHS and still are not, contrary to what Trump claims. Though USCIS is not rubber stamping every renewal like they used to.

* https://thehill.com/latino/407848-yale-mit-study-22-million-...

[joshuamorton]

> Why would you believe anything the government claims regarding immigrants?

Because Trump is in office, and if there was a modicum of evidence to support something like what you're suggesting (that what, the issuing agency of US visas is actually issuing more than they claim but lying about it??) the Trump admin would be all over it. They aren't.

> claiming that "11 million" of undocumented for the last decade.

I can't tell what you're implying here. Estimates of 10-12 million are the best estimates we've got, and are regularly validated by multiple groups. Your anecdotes don't do anything to change the actual trends across the US. One outlier study isn't conclusive either.

> I wouldn't believe the L1 and H1B counts, because it's estimated that there are a lot of visa overstays,

The best estimates are 2% of overstays, so like 20K people.