why the US needs more H1B visas

The US needs talented workers, and that is the truth. US has always been a talent driven economy, that is the reason why the US has been a leader in technology, business, and engineering related work. It is the absolute talent of the US workforce that has lead to the current lead that US has in the IT industry.

Anyone who claims that this would not have been possible without foreign talent is fooling himself. A visit to any office of one of these Multi National Companies would be enough to show really how diverse (including foreign nationals) the workforce is. Diversity has been carefully nurtured by the leading companies in the US and worldwide, because diversity breeds innovation and trust, both of which are fundamental to business growth.

The need of foreign talent is quiet independent of US borne talent, it has nothing to do with importing cheap labor, and has everything to do with importing talent and encouraging growth.
If US companies wanted cheap labor they have better alternatives than wasting time and money on getting expensive foreign labor, they can just outsource the jobs abroad!

Foreign workers who are invited to work in the US actually cost more to the companies, for example a consultant of foreign origin is paid 1.2 times more than a local worker. Add to this the costs associated with getting the visas processed and the cost associated with waiting for the employee to actually get to his work due to the visa regulations.

Then why do American companies keep wanting more and more foreign born labor? It is because local talent is lacking, and because they need to have workers from economies where they wish to operate. In todays global world, these multinational companies cannot hope to sell there product globally if they do not have a global workforce.

Furthermore, a foreign worker in the US is actually good for the US economy, especially in its stagnant time. At the end of the day, the foreign worker has to live in the US, so he has to spend money in the US, which puts the money he earns right back into the economy. Moreover, as a recent entrant to the country, the foreign worker is more likely to spend money on getting settled, i.e. buying consumer electronics, houses, and automobiles, injecting money into these trailing economies. Furthermore, the foreign worker pays exactly the same taxes (if not more) as every other US resident, which puts money back into the tax system, the foreign worker is required to pay into the social security system although he is not eligible for social security himself. So having a foreign worker abound is in no way hurtful to the economy.

The jobs that foreign workers take are such that no satisfactory US national has been found to perform that job, in fact that is one of the requirements of the H1-B visa, so it is quiet illogical to say that foreign workers take away US jobs. In this retrograde times for the US economy, there is a severe need of talented labor that is targeted towards a specific task. And if that labor is not available locally, US companies have to get it from abroad, if they are stopped from doing this, the only thing that is going to happen is that the jobs are going to go overseas, which will remove jobs perhaps permanently from the US soils.

The truth of the matter is that US is can no longer sustain the technological lead of the 80s, and the 90s. The rest of the world has caught up, and if the US wants to maintain its advantage of an early start and a fantastic university education system, it has to rely on attracting and retaining foreign talent. That is the only way forward in an increasingly global economy.