How tech giants beat H-1B visa cap: They call 'em students

With tech companies like Facebook paying its interns more than most American workers earn and average IT salaries climbing to more than $87,000 a year, it's no surprise that the industry is looking for ways to cut labor costs. It's been obvious for some time that foreign workers coming to the United States on H-1B visas are sometimes paid less than the prevailing wage. Though often denied, this tactic has been used by tech companies to lower their labor costs. But there are only so many of those H-1B visas to go around: 85,000 each year, to be exact.

So the always-creative tech industry has quietly found a way to bypass the H-1B cap and import even cheaper labor. It's called the Optional Practical Training program (OPT). Last year, the United States approved 123,000 applications from companies to bring in students who were allowed to work here for as long as 29 months.

That sneaky workaround was revealed in a report by the federal Government Accountability Office, which was prompted by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who said the study "reveals extensive and alarming DHS [Dept. of Homeland Security, which manages visas] mismanagement of the OPT program." Talk about mismanagement -- in nearly 40 percent of the cases examined by the GAO, the government didn't even know the name of the student's employer.