To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter Thu Apr 10 22:46:17 PDT 2014 In response to my posting yesterday on the research by Hanson and Slaughter paid for by CompeteAmerica, http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/HansonSlaughter.txt several researchers pointed out to me that H&S were wrong in yet another way: H&S said that the NSCG data set I used for my research excludes those with foreign degrees, but actually, NSCG does include such people. I must say, though, that I think what H&S meant was that in my analysis, I included only those who earn a U.S. degree (typically a graduate degree, following a bachelor's degree at a foreign university). As I explained yesterday, I focused on this group because the industry itself has stated that this is the group of foreign workers that is most important to them. Speaking of academics and their views on H-1B, an alert reader sent me this, from Robert Reich's Facebook page: "The number-one priority of America’s high-tech firms in the fight over immigration reform has been to increase the annual cap on the number of “skilled” foreign workers they can bring to the U.S. each year under the H-1B visa program. (This year’s cap of 65,000 was reached less than a week after applications for the program were accepted.) High-tech firms say they can’t find the skilled programmers, computer system designers, and software engineers they need here in America. "The government should just let the market work” argued one high-tech executive recently. High-tech executives are the ones who don’t want to let the market work. If they really faced a shortage of high-tech workers in America, they’d pay higher wages. In fact, the wages of programmers, systems designers, software engineers and others have barely budged over the past decade, adjusted for inflation. High-tech firms want skilled foreign workers because they don’t want to pay more than they’re paying now. According to the latest government statistics, the median wage for new H-1B holders in computer-related occupations is only $50,000 – way below the median wage for those occupations in the U.S., and even below the starting salaries of new U.S. graduates in these fields. So I'd say "no" to increasing the number of H1-B visas. You agree?" I'm not quite sure about that $50,000 figure, but it is nice to see such comments from a Berkeley professor and former Sec. of Labor. Yet, over the years Reich has been wildly inconsistent on this issue. He was a major critic of H-1B while he was in office, then swung over to the industry side in the late 90s and early 2000s, as I wrote in 2005, but now seems to have switched yet again. You can read my rather pointed comments in 2005 at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/Reich.txt Concerning the $50K, I'm sure the industry lobbyists will respond by "rounding up the usual suspects," in this case the Indian bodyshops. As many of you know, I'm very irked by the scapegoating of the Indian firms, which is (a) unethical, (b) inaccurate and (c) designed to manipulate the politics of this issue. The fact is that nearly all tech firms are abusing the visa; they just differ with regard to the levels of workers they hire. This has been in the news the last few days. As has been the case in recent years, the H-1B cap filled within days of opening, and there has been the predictable flurry of articles in the press about the big proportion of the visas used by the Indian bodyshops. Supposedly those firms are not using the visas as intended, according to the official line in some DC and DC-related circles. I've never understood this argument. Ostensibly, the H-1B program is designed to alleviate labor shortages. If an employer who can't find Americans for his open position fills it with a rent-a-programmer from Tata Consultancy Services, isn't that alleviating the labor shortage? Granted, firms like TCS are less subtle in their actions, but the bottom line is that abuse of H-1B pervades the entire industry, NOT just in the Indian firms. I've shown that statistically, and I've seen it personally in many, many instances. Norm Archived at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/HansonSlaughterReichEtc.txt