I thought these sort of requirements were so companies could hire H1B candidates? The basic idea is you create an impossible to fill position and then have your chosen H1B candidate lie.
Pay a fraction of a citizen or permanent resident's salary to a quasi-indentured servant, in that if you fire them it's iffy if they can find another H-1B gig before they have to leave the country.
In the one case I observed first hand while at Lucent in 2001, an arguably more qualified and very smart Jamaican doing the same job as me was paid $48K (H-1B salaries have to be posted) while I was making $80K. He knew he was being exploited, but all things considered it was better than the alternatives. In another case with an acquaintance at HP, he and a lot of older engineers were laid off at the same time, and he later caught them trying to explicitly hire an H-1B replacement for his job.
Find an awesome candidate for a position. He's on an H1B. Learn that he can only be hired into a position that can't be filled by a permanent resident, but can be filled by him. Create such a job description.
This is also my understanding of how these requirements come about. You have someone you want to hire, but you need to go through the pretence of trying and failing to hire.
It is difficult to find a replacement job in 30 days if fired. Its not hard to quietly look for a better job while on an h1b. And once company A already sponsored the visa, finding company B to extend it is pretty easy.
Its very far from indentured servitude unless you come to the states and refuse to speak to anyone outside your community.
You forgot to mention that the aim of H1B workers is to get a green card, and that for the EB1/EB2-NIV track, where the applicant files himself, a PhD degree is a near requirement. In the majority of cases it's the company that files for green card; if you change employer the process starts again all over. And there is a maximum of 5 years on H1B. It's not nearly as easy as you say.
The environment is structured so that raises come with a change in employment, which explains the aim of the H1B program. It is to create a climate in which employees are reluctant to change employers to put an overall cap on salary growth.
The issue has come up multiple times here on this very board. Do you not know better, or do you intentionally speak the thing that is not?
You are criticizing the GC process, not the h1b process. The h1b is to address a temporary worker shortage, not put people on a long term immigration track due to high skill.
It would be great if we had such a track (beyond people of extreme talent), but we don't.
What temporary worker shortage? If there was one, there would be rising salaries, as we see in the North Dakota oil patch, but in IT wages are stagnant.
I'm criticizing US immigration, in general, temporary and permanent, because the present system benefits neither the majority of Americans nor the majority if immigrants. Large employers, though, benefit disproportionately.
There are rising salaries for good people in tech. Where have you been?
You may say there is no benefit for immigrants, but most of my friends in IT (as qualified as any american) make less than a lac a month (comparable to a mcjob). So that's a tough case to make.
Aside from what hga covered, there's the case that sometimes you want to hire a specific H1B candidate. I've seen a similar thing for moving positions within a University, where policy says you need to advertise for the position but really you're just trying to promote a person. Though there the approach wasn't "lie" but rather "be crazy specific about any random thing in the person's resume".
