India's tech industry panics over U.S. plans to change high-skilled visas

"Preference given to H1-Bs that pay the most".

Sounds like a win for workers all around.

What happens when the employers run a fake payroll to pay more money on paper but low in reality ?

On the long term this will help Indians even more and various US businesses might be willing to outsource even more operations out of USA to India.

Heh. Depends on which part of India you're referring to. The younger me would have found it more difficult to get foreign assignments that form the foundation for a lot of the house buying and marriage making here, but I think the slightly more experienced folks like present me welcome the change - that is the low end of the salary range I'd expect if I was going to jump countries with a family, and now I don't have to compete in a lottery with tens of thousands of fresh graduates wanting onsite assignments.

The bodyshops like TCS, CTS and Infy will suffer, though. Their exorbitant margins on shipping obedient and freshfaced barely-post-teenagers off to projects where they're mostly expected to punch the clock and do bits and pieces of what the Architect says / tech support are over. They'll survive, though - the Leads, Pricipals and Architects will just have to travel up and down a bit more. I expect they'll lay off a lot of people, though. And the long tail of salaries here will likely go down. But if there is an increase in off-site outsourcing, it'll balance things out. They'll just staff more people at the home base and freeze salary hikes citing this.

Dowries will also likely go down. There's going to be a sudden dearth of grooms with the cachet of foreign work experience and a cache of saved dollars. It's also possible that if this sticks a lot of the shady engineering colleges that have sprung up here like weeds will see reduced demand. Entry fees at medical colleges will probably spike.

This is the new CNN. On the positive side, at least they didn't use "has a cow".