>I truly wonder if those companies would opt to just leave their staff in India, and to hire mostly just customer-facing support types here otherwise.
It's already much cheaper to employ someone in India than to pay that person in the US. The only reason they are using H-1B employees based in the US, is that some companies that are contracting Infosys and Tata want US based employees.
"It's already much cheaper to employ someone in India than to pay that person in the US."
Agreed, but there might be advantages to having someone in the US.
Given a 'major change' it's not entirely unfeasible that these companies do a re-structuring, i.e. using a different customer engagement model (1 customer-facing American + more staff in India) and leverage more 'remote' style technology.
Also - remember that these companies may have been billing those staff out, so 'more cost' = 'more revenue' for them.
Anyhow - I just don't think it's so simple, and I'm not sure that just upping the threshold will work. Granted, $60K is too low.
It'd be nice to have the number set to be commensurate with specific people in specific fields, as measured by various things, i.e. 'tied to an index' so that as the economy does better, companies can bring in more people, but if things start to tighten, the H1's tighten as well.
>Agreed, but there might be advantages to having someone in the US.
My argument is that they are essentially already hiring the minimum number of US based employees that they can get away with. There are companies contracting them that want a minimum number of butts in seats on premises.
Any US taxes due to their US H1-B operations can also be reduced to zero by inflated internal pricing / profit shifting to their Indian operations. Check the tax rates and median IT salaries in Indian service export cities.
Also, they try to rotate employees abroad between several countries so as to keep them on short term visa & tax rules - and maybe also to avoid them getting uppity or starting unions...
It's already much cheaper to employ someone in India than to pay that person in the US. The only reason they are using H-1B employees based in the US, is that some companies that are contracting Infosys and Tata want US based employees.