To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter Mon Jun 17 18:41:04 PDT 2013 The EPI paper by Salzman, Kuehn and Lowell, at http://www.epi.org/press/epi-analysis-finds-shortage-stem-workers/ attracted a lot of attention in the press. Since it strongly undermined the "labor shortage" claims of the industry lobbyists, I was waiting to see how the lobbyists would respond. One of the arguments in their response turned out to be, "Yeah, there are lots of American programmers and engineers, but they are not good enough for the employers. Therefore we need to hire H-1Bs." Now Senator Rubio and his aides are making the same argument: http://dailycaller.com/2013/06/17/rubio-doubles-down-into-disaster/ When the lobbyists first starting making such claims, I stated here in this e-newsletter that the quality issue IS an issue. If you have the choice of hiring a weak person versus hiring no one at all, it is much better to hire no one at all. Otherwise the weak person messes things up and slows down the entire project. And as I discussed in my 2003 University of Michigan article, the range of talent is quite broad. That said, the industry lobbyists have NO evidence that there is a lack of quality people. On the contrary, my own EPI paper shows that it is the foreign workers, not the Americans, who are typically of lower quality. And my paper, in addition to reporting my own statistical analyses, cites those of other researchers, with similar results. In addition, one must keep coming back to one of the central points made by Salzman et al (and also in a third EPI paper by Daniel Costa): Wages are not going up! If it is the case that employers only hire people of high quality (more or less true), and that there is a shortage of high quality people, then WHY AREN'T THE WAGES GOING UP? So even though Salzman et al didn't take quality into account, their same argument applies, and the industry's claim implode. By the way, one of the industry lobbyists, in trashing the Salzman paper (the lobbyists's blog was dripping with sarcasm, so "trash" is the right verb), pointed to the figure of 80,000 job openings on Dice.com and said, "Do they [Salzman] et al think we're making those numbers up?" A preliminary analysis of the Dice data would seem to say the answer is Yes, i.e. the 80K number is greatly exaggerated. I hope to tell you more about this within a week or so. Norm Archived at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/RubioGaffe.txt