Date: Thu, 1 May 2008 00:10:51 -0700
From: Norm Matloff <matloff@cs.ucdavis.edu>
To: Norm Matloff <matloff@cs.ucdavis.edu>
Subject: LAT, WSJ (and other) reactions to my study

To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter

Two journalists, one at the Wall Street Journal and the other at the Los
Angeles Times, have reviewed my recent study that showed further
evidence that the vast majority of H-1Bs are not "the best and the
brightest," contrary to what the industry lobbyists claim.  (See
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/NotBestBrightest.txt) Sadly, 
neither review was very careful.

For instance, WSJ's Ben Worthen says,

#  Stuart Anderson, executive director for the National Foundation for
#  American Policy, which is in favor of boosting the H-1B cap, counters
#  that there’s a much more prosaic explanation for why the median worker
#  on an H-1B visa isn’t paid more: Most visa recipients are just starting
#  their careers, he tells us. In 2005, 41% of H-1B holders were younger
#  than 30, and an additional 32% were under 35, according to the
#  Department of Homeland Security. A better measure of their skill is
#  education, he says, pointing out that 57 percent of new H-1Bs received a
#  master’s degree or above in 2006.

Worthen should have known Anderson's "explanation" is patently wrong,
because the legal definition of prevailing wage FACTORS IN experience
and education.  The prevailing wage levels for those young H-1Bs are set
accordingly, and education is similarly accounted for.  My article
discussed the various experience levels defined by the Dept. of Labor in
detail.

(At least Anderson did choose to comment.  CompeteAmerica, the leading
lobbying group that is pushing Congress to increase the H-1B cap,
declined to comment when asked by the Lou Dobbs Show.)

My article also showed that even though the industry lobbyists try to
portray the hiring of H-1Bs from Asia as stemming from supposed high
levels of math talent in that region, the DOL data show that on the
contrary it is the H-1Bs from Europe who are getting the higher pay, not
the Chinese and Indians.  I had written that even though the lobbyists
say employers hire H-1Bs because "Johnnie can't do math,"

%  The lobbyists know that crying educational doom-and-gloom sells.  Even
%  though it was mainly ``Johnnie,'' rather than Arvind or Qing-Ling, who
%  originally developed the computer industry, and even though all major
%  East Asian governments have lamented their educational systems' stifling
%  of creativity, the lobbyists have convinced Congress that the industry
%  needs foreign workers from Asia in order to innovate.

The LAT's Tim Cavanaugh tries to "explain" this on linguistic grounds:

#  immigrant tech workers from Canada and Germany command higher
#  salaries than those from India. That seems easily explicable: a
#  Canadian worker would presumably be a native English speaker and thus
#  a little more comfortable at negotiating a good price, while a German
#  brings language skills that, given Germany's continued industrial and
#  technological strength, would be worth paying a premium for.

I was surprised that Cavanaugh could be so far off base here.  Doesn't
he know that the educated class in India speaks English?  Most have been
doing so since they were in kindergarten or earlier.  The Indian foreign
students at U.S. universities generally have higher GRE Verbal scores
than the Americans, and they generally have richer working vocabularies
while speaking and have better writing skills, relative to the Americans. 

As to the value of speaking German, surely Cavanaugh must know that
knowledge of the Chinese language is far more valuable today.  According
to his linguistic theory, the Chinese H-1Bs should be making top dollar,
which they generally aren't.

Cavanaugh adds:

#  Shouldn't this last point address hyperbole about how "Johann" or "Jean-Luc"
#  can't do math? I mean, the media self-flagellation about poor math scores
#  concerns American students, not Western European students, right? Is Matloff
#  saying Americans and Western Europeans are interchangeable?

Actually, the math and science PISA test scores for German and French
kids are similar to those in the U.S., below the scores of the Asian
countries.  (Note:  Neither China nor India participates in that study.)
The German and French press engaged in the same self-flagellation; see
"La France, élève moyen de la classe OCDE" (France, average student of
the OECD class) Le Monde, December 5, 2001 and "Miserable Noten für
deutsche Schüler" (Abysmal marks for German students) Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, December 4, 2001.  

Worthen's writeup was mostly fair, but this passage was an exception:

#  A chart accompanying Matloff’s study shows that tech companies, many of
#  whom are lobbying Congress to grant more H-1Bs, tend to pay more than
#  prevailing wage, with Microsoft and Oracle leading the way.

That's just plain wrong.  My chart shows that most of the firms were paying
between 5 and 10% above prevailing wage, which even Worthen admitted in his
phone interview of me is hardly in the the "world's best and the brightest"
range.  Microsoft did indeed have a higher premium, 19%, but that still
obviously is not genius level.  On the contrary, my article showed that
Microsoft O-1 visa hires--the wording in the statute is that this visa type is
for those "of extraordinary ability," thus best and the brightest by
definition--were getting 40% higher than average.

It's also too bad that Cavanaugh and Worthen overlooked my point (which
I stressed with Worthen when he called me) that this newest data merely
supplements previous work on this topic, which I wrote about in earlier
articles.  I've cited the work of former Assistant Secretary of Labor
David North, for instance, which showed that the foreign students
studying in U.S. universities are mainly in the lesser-ranking
institutions, again contrary to their claimed "best and brightest"
status.  I've also analyzed the list of winners of the annual Best PhD
Dissertation Awards given by the Association for Computing Machinery,
in which the numbers of foreign students is proportionally lower than
their numbers in the CS PhD population.

I've been interviewed by the press many times over the years, with the
reporters being quite evenhanded in the vast majority of cases (with
some exceptions, one of which I'll mention shortly), so I was taken
aback by these two blogs.  There seems to be an underlying assumption on
the part of both of these journalists that "Matloff's report can't be
right, so let's figure out where the flaw is."  One must wonder what
causes such attitudes.

A few years ago I was a guest on a radio show hosted by Marty Nemko, a
San Francisco-based author of books and newspaper columns for job
seekers.  He was pretty hostile to me, which seemed odd until the truth
suddenly came out:  He resented me because I'm a supporter of
Affirmative Action, a fact he'd seen in my bio at
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/matloff.html.  He told me that he was
bitterly opposed to Affirmative Action, having been rejected for a
faculty position long ago (ironically at my university, UC Davis), in
which he claims he was passed over in favor of an Affirmative Action
applicant.  To him, Affirmative Action is anti-merit, and my work on
H-1B amounted to protection of meritless Americans against genius
Asians.  Needless to say, I don't agree with such an analysis, and in
fact I have always strongly supported facilitating the immigration of
the genuinely best and the brightest.  I mentioned to Worthen, for
example, that there are at least two members of my faculty, one from
India and the other from China, who would not have been hired had I not
vigorously worked to convince my colleagues to vote in favor of hiring
them due to their brilliance.

Presumably Cavanaugh and Worthen don't have a personal axe to grind like
that.  But their pieces were biased, that's for sure, and it would be
interesting to know just where they're coming from.

The two blogs are enclosed below.

Norm

http://blogs.wsj.com/biztech/2008/04/30/are-h-1b-tech-workers-highly-skilled-or-just-lower-paid/?mod=WSJBlog

April 30, 2008, 6:01 am

Are H-1B Tech Workers Highly-Skilled or Just Lower Paid?

Posted by Ben Worthen

The H-1B visa program is often described as a way to get the best and the
brightest tech workers from other countries into the U.S. But a new study
suggests that description may not be deserved.

Norman Matloff, a professor at the University of California, Davis, examined
the salaries of 52,350 H-1B visa holders who filed for permanent status with
the government, a filing which usually contains someones actual salary and
not just a broad salary range. While its not a true analysis of H-1B
salaries, its the best data available, Matloff tells the Business Technology
Blog.

Matloff found that the median tech worker on an H-1B is paid the prevailing
wage for their job description, the minimum amount required by law. Some are
paid more foreign mathematicians make a fair amount more than the prevailing
wage, for example but the median programmers and engineers make the minimum.
Matloff tells us that if these workers really were the best and the
brightest they would command salaries higher than the prevailing wage. To
him, this suggests that businesses are using the visa program to hire
low-cost workers, not highly-skilled ones. (A chart accompanying Matloffs
study shows that tech companies, many of whom are lobbying Congress to grant
more H-1Bs, tend to pay more than prevailing wage, with Microsoft and Oracle
leading the way.)

Matloffs study was published by the Center for Immigration Studies, a think
tank which says it favors fewer immigrants but a warmer welcome for those
admitted.

Stuart Anderson, executive director for the National Foundation for American
Policy, which is in favor of boosting the H-1B cap, counters that theres a
much more prosaic explanation for why the median worker on an H-1B visa isnt
paid more: Most visa recipients are just starting their careers, he tells
us. In 2005, 41% of H-1B holders were younger than 30, and an additional 32%
were under 35, according to the Department of Homeland Security. A better
measure of their skill is education, he says, pointing out that 57 percent
of new H-1Bs received a masters degree or above in 2006.
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http://opinion.latimes.com/opinionla/2008/04/putting-the-b-i.html

Putting the "B" in H-1B

The Center for Immigration Studies' Norman Matloff comes up with a new
measure that, he says, indicates H-1B visa recipients are not in fact the
best and the brightest that proponents sometimes suggest they are.

I don't know how persuasive you'll find Matloff's "talent measure," or TM
value. I think it fails to prove Matloff's main conclusions: that H-1B
holders overall are not noticeably more skilled than native workers and that
within the universe of H-1B holders, Western Europeans are more skilled than
Asians. But the TM value has one attraction: It uses a marketplace value for
making its assessment.

The value is calculated by comparing the ratio of the worker's salary to the
prevailing wage figure stated by the employer. So if you've got a TM value
of 1.0 you're making essentially the average salary for the job you're
doing. Since employers can't (officially at least) pay visa holders less
than the stated prevailing wage, nobody should show a TM value of less than
1.0. On the other hand, if you're a gifted worker you should have a higher
TM value because you can command a higher salary.

The shocking conclusion? One multiplied by one equals one:
  * The median TM value over all foreign workers studied was just a hair
    over 1.0.
  * The median TM value was also essentially 1.0 in each of the tech
    professions studied.
  * Median TM was near 1.0 for almost all prominent tech firms that were
    analyzed.
  * Contrary to the constant hyperbole in the press that “Johnnie can’t do
    math” in comparison with kids in Asia, TM values for workers from
    Western European countries tend to be much higher than those of their
    Asian counterparts.

Shouldn't this last point address hyperbole about how "Johann" or "Jean-Luc"
can't do math? I mean, the media self-flagellation about poor math scores
concerns American students, not Western European students, right? Is Matloff
saying Americans and Western Europeans are interchangeable?

The breakouts by company and nation of origin are interesting, but I'm not
sure they prove anything other than that Microsoft appears to be a generous
employer and that immigrant tech workers from Canada and Germany command
higher salaries than those from India. That seems easily explicable: a
Canadian worker would presumably be a native English speaker and thus a
little more comfortable at negotiating a good price, while a German brings
language skills that, given Germany's continued industrial and technological
strength, would be worth paying a premium for.

Or maybe language skills have nothing to do with it, and there are some
other variables at work. (For example, suppose most or all of the people in
the U.S. doing a particular job are Indian H-1B holders: Then a TM value of
1.0 could just mean that they're all above average, Lake Woebegone-style.)
In any event, I don't see how these numbers refute the claims of the
hypothetical industrialist or lily-livered immigration supporter who thinks
the best person to judge what skills he or she needs is the person doing the
hiring.

Prove that I just don't get it or am being intentionally obtuse by reading
the whole article right here.

Posted by Tim Cavanaugh on April 29, 2008 in Bizarre Theories , Business ,
Credentials , Economy , Immigration , Mobility , Process , Technology |
Permalink