> 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.
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.
> 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.
I'm telling you that the estimate of 11 Million is not even close, and it's probably more like 20M-30M. The 11 million is based on the census from 10 year ago, and (you probably heard something about this in the news recently), we're not even allowed to ask them if they're citizens, so they use other ways to guess it. How many illegal immigrants do you think even answer a census, lol?
And 2% of overstays is a misleading number as that includes all those who enter on legitimate short term tourist visas which we don't hand out easily to countries with a high level of visa overstays, such as Venezuela or Sierra Leone. The people who do generally overstay their visas are those who come on short term work visas like L1, or former students who are no longer enrolled and the Opt 1 expired. Or family members 'visiting' their relatives, who never leave.
> In the U.S., visa overstays have exceeded illegal border crossings in each of the past seven years. In 2016, about 515,000 people arrived in the United States illegally, the Center for Migration Studies said in a report. Of these, 320,000, more than three-fifths, overstayed their visas, and the rest crossed a land border illegally. But tracking people who enter the U.S. legally until they leave is difficult. The Department of Homeland Security conducted its own analysis for fiscal year 2017, and its estimate was 702,000 overstayers. (To be clear, that number is a small fraction, 1.33 percent, of the more than 50 million people who arrive in the U.S. each year on valid visas.)
> Of these, 320,000, more than three-fifths, overstayed their visas,
Right, and that number includes (and is mostly due to) short term tourist visa overstays. The impact of that on tech workers is marginal. You're conflating tech worker visa overstays with non-tech worker visa overstays. And since tech worker visas are a small fraction (~1%) of visas granted, unless you're claiming that tech workers overstay at a much, much higher rate (like 20-30x the average), which isn't backed up by data, the number of tech workers here illegally due to visa overstays is indeed marginal. So I'll once again state that despite all your objections, a decent estimate of the number of high tech workers on visas is ~500K, maybe 600K at the top end. That includes all visas and all overstays.
> I'm telling you that the estimate of 11 Million is not even close
You're certainly welcome to continue believing that. It's not correct, but you're welcome to believe it.
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.