[PaulHoule]

I will "flip the script" and say I see it goes both ways: other people lose their jobs to Indian immigrants but those Indian immigrants are frequently underpaid and otherwise exploited.

More than once I've seen very talented Indians get mistreated. At one startup I worked at they put an Indian immigrant on an H-1B through some crazy abuse which made our new HR manager quit. I wanted to tell him "your skills are in demand, you could get a job across the street" but because he was on an H-1B.

I quit the ACM for a few reasons and unqualified support for the H-1B program was one of them. I joined the IEEE Computer Society instead because the IEEE takes no position on the issue. As I see it, Indians are treated particularly poorly by the US immigration system because "there are so many Indians", yet with a high level of education and an entrepreneurial attitude they make a strongly positive contribution to our economy.

[valianteffort]

You are correct in that part of the reason they are hired is because they are ostensibly indentured servants. They cannot quit because without another job lined up they have to leave the country.

But I don't think we should be correcting that issue to their benefit while Americans are dealing with a horrendous job market and high unemployment rates. And in my experience, it was often other indians abusing the indian foreign workers. These behaviors are incompatible with western society.

[PaulHoule]

Look, it's a classic that people with an identity will use it to exploit other people with the same identity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_fraud

If it gets on the agenda I will write my congressman a letter saying we should end the H-1B program. Overall though I don't think that is the major cause of why people here are unhappy with the economy.