This article in Gazette highlights the problems that Maryland employers facing as a result of 85000 H1-B visa cap. Getting H1-B in US is a lottery system now with so many applicants fiercely competing for meager 65,000 H1-B visas.

Students in US are some what better off in the sense that they can work on F1 visa for 29 months and apply for 20,000 H1-B visas available.

Chamber of commerce’s lobbying was not working to increase the cap back to 195,000 quota of 2003.

Is H1-B effecting the salaries and jobs taken away from US workers ?

Globalization and the American IT Worker(pdf).

A number of studies have found that the H-1Bs are paid on average 15% to 33% less than comparable U.S. IT workers.Given the similarity in salary savings between offshoring and labor importation, and the fact that having the work done on-site is far more productive, it is much more cost-effective from a CEO’s point of view to hire H-1Bs than to offshore the work