Many of the people who are against H1B are missing the bigger picture.

1. H1B employers pay wages based on the numbers Department of Labor provides them.

2. Labor department contains a la carte of titles available for the same job to choose from. Employers generally chose a title with lower wages. Programming Analysts and Software Engineers do essentially the same job with upto 50K spread in wages.

3. The limit on H1B works against American Employers who usually pay much higher wages than the Indian consultancies. The American employers have to compete with a flood of applications from India. This forces big companies to subcontract Indian firms.

4. Companies in India randomly select employees to file for visas irrespective of whether they have actual business in US. Many H1B recipients don't actually come to US. Many wait in India for years before their companies arrange for a actual job in India. The lottery forces everyone to game the system.

5. US cannot actually deny Indian consultancies from operating in US. That would be denying market access to India. Indian companies does 60 Billion dollar worth of business in total. That's paltry compared to trade between US and India. US sells everything from Boeing to Starbucks and any restrictions on visas could invite trade war from India too.

6. People who oppose H1Bs actually dream of earning Wall Street salaries in Silicon Valley. That's a pipe dream unless you work in quant engineer jobs in Hedge funds and HFT. You can't build businesses that would pay the average worker 400K in Silicon Valley.

7. Restrictions on H1B would move American programming jobs to Asia much like the manufacturing jobs of rust belt.

8. The world is a much bigger place than America. An Indian worker taking a job doesn't necessarily mean a loss of opportunity for an American worker. It's not a zero sum game. H1B workers take up tech jobs. In most big companies, the ratio of tech to non tech jobs is atleast 1:6. Look at Amazon creating 100K non technical jobs in last few years. A few million technology workers in America make most of the high tech for the rest of the 7 billion human beings on the planet. Trade restrictions are not something you need. There could be a Chinese firewall in every country to protect local jobs and to rob Google and Facebooks of business opportunities. There would be more Baidu's, Youku's, Wechats and Alibabas in every country on the planet.

9. There's actually such a thing as skills shortage at every level. Even at the blue collar end, Many Americans cannot pass tests at 9'th grade level and are functionally illiterate. Tech jobs require a whole lot more skills that the coal miners in Michigan won't be able to take up. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/education/edlife/factory-...

To summarize, if you are concerned about H1B lowering wages in your market, campaign for worker mobility and higher wages for H1B and the market would work it out. Americans are best at creating free market solutions to problems. H1B lottery system and the restrictions is a socialist solution that best works in restricted economies. Also campaign for a startup visas. Both for entrepreneurs and employees. The Frech Tech visa could be a model http://visa.lafrenchtech.com/ . This would help many of the people languishing in H1Bs to create more companies and more jobs here in US.