The salaries of the average H1B worker compared to the average American worker are probably relatively close.

But when I say H1B workers are "cheap labor" I'm claiming this on aggregate. If we take a charitable view that an H1B worker is paid $5K less than a non-H1B worker per year - and that's very charitable based on the numbers I've heard thrown around - a company like Tata or Accenture is looking at tens of millions of dollars in savings.

Note also my characterization was not on the quality of the work produced by H1B workers: I've seen some good and some bad, just like everyone else really. But having artificially cheap labor is inherently bad, both for the laborers that can't negotiate something better & workers in the rest of the industry whose wages are deflated to match.

Indeed, cheap labor is really only good for one group: the one that's constantly pushing to increase the H1B cap.

There is also the matter which was discussed in the original post: there are countless ways for employers to take advantage of immigrant workers. This makes them more desirable than native workers, who have more options.

I have spoken to HR people that say H1Bs's are 15 to 20k/year cheaper on average. The trick is disconnecting what they do from what their job title is. After that you just pay them less for the same job.

That's not pure savings as there are plenty of paperwork costs etc, but you still end out ahead after ~1 year of work. O and just submit a lot of names to the lotto.

It's not always cheap labor, but when perusing the publicly listed wages for engineers on h1-b visas, they seem on average lower than the offers I've received for the same title at the same companies. It's hard to make any strong conclusions however, since most salaries are not published and just a job title does not say too much about how someone was hired into a company.

I agree generalizing it as cheap labor is not fair, but I do feel sorry for my friends just starting their careers with a serious lack of job mobility.