Where I worked, there was a massive pay disparity among non-immigrant workers. People hired out of college would be making $45,000 a year, while people that had been at the company for a few years and hired away from a well-paying job would be making $150,000 a year. (Raises were basically given via counter-offer matches, as far as I could tell.) There's then plenty of leeway to pay your H1Bs $60,000 a year, which is a rather low programmer's salary, while still paying some Americans less.
I think the key loophole is that you have to pay a certain average amount based on region and job code, but that region includes the suburbs and rural areas and the job code includes all of "senior architect" and "test engineer intern". So you can pay someone a "suburbs" salary instead of a city salary, and pay them a non-financial-services-firm salary even though they work for an investment bank, and then pay them like the lowest-level "computer programmer" American regardless of their job responsibilities.
Anyway, if my previous employer's goal was to attract the best talent by paying great salaries, they failed. I still have nightmares about the time I had to explain to someone with "10 years of experience" what an array was. (He wrote something like: if day == 0: return "Monday" elif day == 1: return "Tuesday". But I digress.)
Where I worked, there was a massive pay disparity among non-immigrant workers. People hired out of college would be making $45,000 a year, while people that had been at the company for a few years and hired away from a well-paying job would be making $150,000 a year. (Raises were basically given via counter-offer matches, as far as I could tell.) There's then plenty of leeway to pay your H1Bs $60,000 a year, which is a rather low programmer's salary, while still paying some Americans less.
I think the key loophole is that you have to pay a certain average amount based on region and job code, but that region includes the suburbs and rural areas and the job code includes all of "senior architect" and "test engineer intern". So you can pay someone a "suburbs" salary instead of a city salary, and pay them a non-financial-services-firm salary even though they work for an investment bank, and then pay them like the lowest-level "computer programmer" American regardless of their job responsibilities.
Anyway, if my previous employer's goal was to attract the best talent by paying great salaries, they failed. I still have nightmares about the time I had to explain to someone with "10 years of experience" what an array was. (He wrote something like: if day == 0: return "Monday" elif day == 1: return "Tuesday". But I digress.)