Donald Trump, zingers and all, emerges as sharp H-1B critic

[Recursion]

3. The prevailing wage rules are hard to enforce too

Take the Disney fiasco. Disney didn't go out and "hire H-1Bs"; they decided to stop doing IT internally and hired a contracting company to do it. That contracting company is "H-1B reliant" (meaning more than 80% of its employees are H-1Bs) and so is subject to stricter hiring scrutiny when the visas are adjudicated but, pays a much lower prevailing wage than Disney did internally. So, they couldn't find qualified Americans at that price (but the price -- just barely -- met DoL's wage parameters in the area) and were allowed to hire H-1B workers for cheaper than the Americans because they weren't technically replacing those Americans (those were technically "new jobs&quot .

On the other hand, unemployment in IT is very low (less than 4%), and there are currently about 110K unemployed American IT workers, as opposed to 600K H-1B employees in IT. If every single unemployed American IT worker took an H-1B's job tomorrow, there'd still be almost half a million H-1B workers in IT.