My county invested (Tax money) in my education and health till my undergrad expecting I will pay tax when I become productive but I took Job in US. I was charged 95K tuition for my master at one of the best universities. If you do the math you can see that US has gained and it has not lost anything. First US has not spent any money to make me productive and I am paying all kind of Tax for Americans.

Only best and educated qualify for H1b and that was the intend.

I want to point that America is business and money and if you can contribute to America economy/society then your a admitted otherwise doors are closed.

Here’s just a something to consider about the process from a current H1B holder:

1. I somewhat understand the issue of “stealing jobs”. It’s the classic argument against the H1B process in the first place. But consider this: a LOT of jobs simply do NOT offer H1Bs period. The pool of jobs that do is quite small. It doesn’t really matter how good you are of how many job offers you get, only a selected few are eligible.

2. Not every country is blessed enough to have facilities for higher education. Where I’m from, it’s a reality that you need to leave to learn more.

3. Some countries are so small, that the job pool for jobs that require higher education just simply isn’t that big. I’m all for going back and contributing, but how does one contribute if you end up at a job that you are over qualified for with a huge student loan to boot?

Just wanted to shed new light on the subject it isn’t (always) about the evil foreigners coming to steal American jobs.

And yes, education is what allows high IQ people to get into better career tracks, but that’s sort of a zero sum game. The number of slots open for a particular career track won’t change just becuase 20% of the class at HarvardPrincetonYale is foreigners. The organizations that can’t recruit enough HarvardPrincetonYale students will just go do the next tier of schools to fill their additional slots.

Personally I’d argue the H-1B visas are good in the short term at least for everyone who’s not an engineer (cheap labor), just as Wal-Mart is good for everyone who isn’t in a business that’s competing with them. The problem is that after a while, ‘everyone’ becomes rather small.

You do have a point that if we outsource engineering and make it a low-wage job, Americans won’t want to do it and we will cripple ourselves technologically. However, this has already happened and I see no way to reverse it.