H-1B and J-1 consulting and labor firms are far more nefarious than people probably think.
Most of my personal experience is with J-1 pimps. These "firms" import seasonal labor and directly collect wages from the hiring company. The catch is as old as markets, as they usually debit housing, food, and fees that are grossly outside of true cost, but allow for just enough origin country adjusted income to still make sense for students to keep signing on. I have dealt with these firms from Eastern Europe and South America, with both operating on the razors edge of indentured servitude.
These exact same practices dominate the H-1B program.
The most effective change to any of these programs, outside of just volume, would be the direct to employee payment requirement or minimum percentage. That change would force the either higher salaries in order to maintain the labor firms margins, or the labor firms would have to eat the cost to keep the prices down. Enforcement would have to be extreme. As the nature of the relationship between the firm and the visa holder is already indebted, and there would be lots of opportunity for harassment and coercion of the visa holder to fork over more of their paycheck.
Addition:
Another solution may be a visa marketplace that the government would run, to connect employers and visa seekers directly and eliminate the middle man.
How about simply allowing H-1Bs to change jobs if they get an offer from another company, and giving them a sufficient window to find something new if they leave their current company? The no-recourse indentured servitude relationship that makes people dependent on a company for their residency takes away all the employee's negotiating power. If we could change this, I expect that wages would begin to even out.
They can. It's just painful and depending on the competency of both companies legal counsel, it can take months. We've had employees accept offers with a start date, only the visa transfers weren't finished yet so they started MONTHS after the expected start date.
It probably needs to be made easier then, so the H1B can switch jobs as easily as a native worker.
I have not had to deal with US immigration, but my impression is the H1B process is between the employer and the government. It would probably help to make that between the employee and the government, to give the employee more control.
I used to work at a company that had a lot of H-1Bs and treated them terribly. Whenever someone was trying to transfer of get a green card there was some involvement with their current employer, and I always used to wonder "What incentive to they have to do this quickly and correctly?"
The J-1 program is readily abused. I've known young people abroad just graduated with finance or accounting degree are brought in under the J-1 program, under the guise of "business training" for 3 months. They end up doing retail work in bakery or manual work in the kitchen for minimum wage. They have to pay for their own cost for flight, food, and room.
In the early 2000s my dad left his cushy job as an electrical engineer at a nuclear power plant in eastern europe to come to the US with an H1B to fix AC systems for a company owned by an eastern european that only hired immigrants.
They would count the price of plane ticket, technical training classes, english classes, etc to a "debt" that you had to pay off. You would get paid a salary, but depending on how much money you made the company each month, this debt would either go up or down, and the company claimed you wouldn't be able to leave the company until you paid off this debt (eventually my dad figure out that this was not true or at least not legal, but this policy still goes on as we speak).
You can imagine most people who worked there struggled for years to pay off said debt.
Most of my personal experience is with J-1 pimps. These "firms" import seasonal labor and directly collect wages from the hiring company. The catch is as old as markets, as they usually debit housing, food, and fees that are grossly outside of true cost, but allow for just enough origin country adjusted income to still make sense for students to keep signing on. I have dealt with these firms from Eastern Europe and South America, with both operating on the razors edge of indentured servitude. These exact same practices dominate the H-1B program.
The most effective change to any of these programs, outside of just volume, would be the direct to employee payment requirement or minimum percentage. That change would force the either higher salaries in order to maintain the labor firms margins, or the labor firms would have to eat the cost to keep the prices down. Enforcement would have to be extreme. As the nature of the relationship between the firm and the visa holder is already indebted, and there would be lots of opportunity for harassment and coercion of the visa holder to fork over more of their paycheck.
Addition: Another solution may be a visa marketplace that the government would run, to connect employers and visa seekers directly and eliminate the middle man.