Life Musings

The following is from a policy report by the National Foundation for American Policy:

A study by Madeline Zavodny, a research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, found that the entry of H-1B professionals neither lowers the contemporaneous earnings of natives, nor has “an adverse impact on contemporaneous unemployment rates.”

Research by Paul E. Harrington, associate director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, shows foreign-born and native professionals earn virtually identical salaries in math and science fields. National Science Foundation data show foreign-born scientists and engineers actually earn more than natives in some fields.

Even among the highly stratified sample of the small number of employers whose actions warranted investigation and government-imposed penalties between 1992 and 2004, the average amount of back wages owed by even those employers is small – less than $6,000 per employee, no more than the typical government and legal fees paid by most employers to hire H-1B visa holders. And among
those employers, few if any are well-known companies. Generally, of the small number of violations no more than 10 to 15 percent of H-1B violations in a year are found to be “willful” by the Department of Labor, indicating the extent of abuse is limited.

I'm not saying that there are no problems with the H-1B program. I do think that these problems have been greatly exaggerated though, especially since many unemployed Americans have been understandably disgruntled.