New Data On H-1B Visas Prove That IT Outsourcers Hire a Lot But Pay Very Little (qz.com)

New submitter FerociousFerret shares a report from Quartz: Hard numbers have been released by the U.S. government agency that screens visas for high-skilled foreign workers, and they are not pretty. Data made available by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) for the first time show that the widely made complaint about the visa program is true: a small number of IT outsourcing companies get a disproportionately high number of H-1B visas and pay below-average wages to their workers. The new data also gives a more accurate picture of salaries of H-1B workers by employer. The top IT outsourcing companies on average paid much lower salaries to their workers. The wage divide is largely a result of different education requirements of H-1B positions. H-1B visas are issued to workers with specialized skills which generally requires a Bachelor's degree or higher. More than 98% of approved H-1B visa positions were awarded to workers with either a Bachelor's or a Master's degree in fiscal year 2016. A closer look at the educations held by H-1B workers at companies like Google, Amazon and Intel -- places with in-house tech staffs -- show that more than 60% had Masters degrees. For most IT outsourcing companies, the majority of H-1B visa holders only had a Bachelor's.

Comments

I'm Shocked, Shocked I say...

[mhkohne]

That corporations would do the most economically sensible thing, given the conditions at hand.

In other words: Duh. Now that we have the evidence, can we PLEASE do something about this?

I have serious problems with a visa that's designed for the worker to have to go home again later (I know that a fair number of H1B holders do convert to green card holders, but that's deliberately NOT the point of an H1B).

H1B should be a fairly rare thing - if the US is so short of workers that you have to go oversees, then we should be giving out green cards and encouraging citizenship, not paying crap wages, depressing pay scales for US workers, and then sending them home.

Take the number of H1B visas issued, and put that number into the green card program instead. I want people who are going to stay and be my neighbor, not temps from oversees!