The distribution is complex because visas are awarded by lottery. Many companies are treating the program as expected, and applying for a small number of high-skill high-wage specialists. Then there are a much smaller number of companies that flood the lottery with thousands and thousands of applications each year on the premise that their applicants are interchangeable and the more applications they submit the larger their share of the visas will be. Because most companies don’t have 100x as many qualified foreign applicants as roles to fill or places to put those people if they unexpectedly got a few more approvals than planned, they cannot avail themselves of this strategy. So H1B holders are a bimodal distribution of very high wage workers and below-average wage workers.
Found a cool link elsewhere in the thread. You can see the effect manifest pretty clearly. You see a lot of Cognizent, Tata, Infosys, etc and low salaries, but in CA the largest H1B employer is Google and in WA it’s Microsoft, and in those two states the average H1B wage is much higher.
I can see your point, but I think the effects of this regulation are misunderstood here. Prevailing wage is based on locality. H1Bs in California now have to be in the >95% bucket of prevailing wages for their county. Even FAANG engineers would have trouble reaching that threshold as it only takes base salary into account and not total comp.
Found a cool link elsewhere in the thread. You can see the effect manifest pretty clearly. You see a lot of Cognizent, Tata, Infosys, etc and low salaries, but in CA the largest H1B employer is Google and in WA it’s Microsoft, and in those two states the average H1B wage is much higher.
https://www.quiverquant.com/sources/visas