So you're looking at half a million out of an industry of 4+ million.
When you overstate the impact by a factor of 3, it's easy to create a Boogeyman.
On top of that, Obama started allowing spouses of H1B visa holders to work in the US too, and many of these marriages are essentially shams in order to allow a friend of the family to come and get a job, often in tech, too.
FWIW, I don't have animosity towards most of these people. Early in my career, when I was a bit naive, I took a job working for the largest H1B sponsor in the US, and worked for them in both the US and India, living there for about a year. I've seen how it's used in both the higher tier companies where it seems more legitimate, but also where companies literally have US workers train their replacements from India at half the salary, double the hours.
I wouldn't believe the L1 and H1B counts, because it's estimated that there are a lot of visa overstays, who were never bothered by DHS and still are not, contrary to what Trump claims. Though USCIS is not rubber stamping every renewal like they used to.
* https://thehill.com/latino/407848-yale-mit-study-22-million-...
Because Trump is in office, and if there was a modicum of evidence to support something like what you're suggesting (that what, the issuing agency of US visas is actually issuing more than they claim but lying about it??) the Trump admin would be all over it. They aren't.
> claiming that "11 million" of undocumented for the last decade.
I can't tell what you're implying here. Estimates of 10-12 million are the best estimates we've got, and are regularly validated by multiple groups. Your anecdotes don't do anything to change the actual trends across the US. One outlier study isn't conclusive either.
> I wouldn't believe the L1 and H1B counts, because it's estimated that there are a lot of visa overstays,
The best estimates are 2% of overstays, so like 20K people.
And 2% of overstays is a misleading number as that includes all those who enter on legitimate short term tourist visas which we don't hand out easily to countries with a high level of visa overstays, such as Venezuela or Sierra Leone. The people who do generally overstay their visas are those who come on short term work visas like L1, or former students who are no longer enrolled and the Opt 1 expired. Or family members 'visiting' their relatives, who never leave.
> In the U.S., visa overstays have exceeded illegal border crossings in each of the past seven years. In 2016, about 515,000 people arrived in the United States illegally, the Center for Migration Studies said in a report. Of these, 320,000, more than three-fifths, overstayed their visas, and the rest crossed a land border illegally. But tracking people who enter the U.S. legally until they leave is difficult. The Department of Homeland Security conducted its own analysis for fiscal year 2017, and its estimate was 702,000 overstayers. (To be clear, that number is a small fraction, 1.33 percent, of the more than 50 million people who arrive in the U.S. each year on valid visas.)
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/04/re...
