If H1b were about getting the most talented, it wouldn't be 75-80% from just one country and another 10% from a second country. I'd expect it to be very evenly distributed.
If H1b were about getting the most talented, it wouldn't be 75-80% from just one country and another 10% from a second country. I'd expect it to be very evenly distributed.
I would expect tons of H1Bs from former soviet bloc countries that have incredible math and science education. The fact that the H1B program isn’t clogged with Russians and Ukrainians is evidence something is amiss.
You'll notice it follows a population distribution of the world, with higher weighting from less developed countries. Soviet bloc people are not a high %age of world population and also tend to be captured more by europe since it's closer. People from developed countries tend to have less incentive to move on top of that. Indians have a further advantage of already knowing english on top of that and you get our current distribution of mostly people from india, china, canada (proximity, easy TN visa and english), europe with significant slavic representation and then everywhere else in the tech industry.
The relevant metric isn’t population, but educated population. India has 70% of H1bs while most other countries have under 1%. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualized-h-1b-visa-approv.... India doesn’t have 70% of the world’s college graduates in developing countries.
India has 140 million college degree holders, which is less than China and only twice as much as the U.S. China has more graduates but only 12% of H1b. Russia has about 40 million and gets under 1% of H1bs. So India has 3.5x as many degree holders as Russia, but gets over 70 times as many H1bs. Brazil has about 30 million college graduates and again under 1% of H1bs. So India has 5x the college population but over 70x the H1bs. Indonesia has 17 million degree holders but less than 0.1% of H1b. So India has 8x as many graduates as Indonesia but gets 100x+ as many H1bs.
It’s a scam.