Life Musings

I thought that the following quote was kinda interesting. It's from a report produced by the National Foundation for American Policy on H-1B work visa wages.

A recent report for the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) asserting that
computer programmers on H-1B visas are underpaid contained shortcomings that
make it unreliable for use by policy makers. The key flaw in the CIS study is
that it utilized data that do not reveal what employers actually pay individuals
on H-1B visas, relying on prevailing wage information alone, when, in fact, the
actual amount companies pay is much higher. Actual starting salaries for H-1B
professionals average 22 percent above the prevailing wage standards, according
to a statistically valid sample of H-1B cases randomly selected for NFAP by a
respected law firm. Another indicator of the CIS paper’s unreliable methodology
is that the paper claims that some large technology companies pay their H-1B
employees, on average, as much as $40,000 less than the H-1B professionals of
competing tech firms located less than 30 minutes away, an impossibility given
the competition for labor.

If companies simply wanted to obtain services based only on wages, then
U.S. companies would move all of their work outside the United States, since the
median salary for a computer software engineer is $7,273 in Bangalore and $5,244
in Bombay, compared to $60,000 in Boston and $65,000 in New York, according to
the Seattle-based market research firm PayScale.