Thread: Reports, Studies Shatter Myth that H-1B Visa Holders are Pai

Two good articles recently came out about H-1B. Unfortunately neither of
them are likely to be published in the main stream media.


Article #1:
http://www.ieeeusa.org/communications/r ... 090606.asp
Reports, Studies Shatter Myth that H-1B Visa Holders are Paid Same Wages as
U.S. Citizens

This is one of the best articles that the IEEE has written on H-1Bs. The
paragraph below is the only really weak one because it is contradictory. On
the one hand IEEE acknowledges that the law has many loopholes, but then
they say that employers are not going to be investigated for wrongdoing.

One reason it is so easy for employers to underpay H-1B holders
is because they know how to exploit the loopholes and have
almost no chance of ever being investigated. Even if they were
investigated, the loopholes are so large most of the employers
would likely be found following the letter of the law.

H-1B regulations are filled with loopholes so there is nothing to
investigate as long as employers use the loopholes legally. The problem
with H-1B isn't a lack of enforcement, it's the abundance of legal
loopholes that were designed so employers can exploit H-1Bs and fire
Americans.



Article #2:
http://www.vdare.com/rubenstein/060919_nd.htm
Bad news for American students, workers - massive H-1b Increases rise from
dead in "SKIL Bill"


Edwin S. Rubenstein is consistently one of the best writers and researchers
on H-1B. Be sure to check out the statistics on this webpage.


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Newsletter Homepage:
http://www.JobDestruction.com/shameh1b/ ... onNews.htm

It looks like the DREAM Act will fit right in.

http://www.ieeeusa.org/communications/r ... 090606.asp


Reports, Studies Shatter Myth that H-1B Visa Holders
are Paid Same Wages as U.S. Citizens

WASHINGTON (6 September 2006) — U.S. industry spokespeople say repeatedly that H-1B visa holders are paid the same wages as similarly qualified American citizens. Numerous studies and reports, however, have found this to be untrue.

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) Vice President Phiroz Vandrevala even admitted that his company enjoys a competitive advantage because of its extensive use of foreign workers in the United States on H-1B and L-1 visas.

"Our wage per employee is 20-25 percent lesser than US wage for a similar employee," Vandrevala said. "Typically, for a TCS employee with five years experience, the annual cost to the company is $60,000-70,000, while a local American employee might cost $80,000-100,000. This (labour arbitrage) is a fact of doing work onsite. It's a fact that Indian IT companies have an advantage here and there's nothing wrong in that. … The issue is that of getting workers in the U.S. on wages far lower than local wage rate." ("U.S. visas are not a TCS-specific issue," Businessworld (India) magazine, June 2003)

IEEE-USA President Ralph W. Wyndrum, Jr. said proposals now before Congress to raise the H-1B visa cap should be scrapped until significant workforce protections for U.S. and H-1B employees are instituted.

"Not paying market wages to H-1B holders is unfair to both foreign and domestic high-tech workers," Wyndrum said. "H-1B employees are being taken advantage of, and some U.S. workers' salaries are likely suppressed by the influx of thousands of additional job competitors. The wage problem is one symptom of how deeply flawed the H-1B program is."

Findings showing H-1B holders earning less than the market wages paid to U.S. technology workers include:

"Immigrant engineers with H-1B visas may be earning up to 23 percent less on average than American engineers with similar jobs, according to documents filed with the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL). Salary data from Labor Condition Applications (LCAs) lends credence to arguments that lower compensation paid to H-1B workers suppresses the wages of other electronics professionals." — EE Times (June 2006), which calculated average H-1B salaries from LCAs and compared them to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment Statistics survey of employers. See www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle ... =189401976.

"In spite of the requirement that H-1B workers be paid the prevailing wage, H-1B workers earn significantly less than their American counterparts. On average, applications for H-1B workers in computer occupations were for wages $13,000 less than Americans in the same occupation and state."

"Applications for 47 percent of H-1B computer programming workers were for wages below even the prevailing wage claimed by their employers." — Center for Immigration Studies report (Dec. 2005). See www.cis.org/articles/2005/back1305.html (under Key Findings).

"Some [H-1B] employers said that they hired H-1B workers in part because these workers would often accept lower salaries than similarly qualified U.S. workers; however, these employers said they never paid H-1B workers less than the required wage." Government Accountability Office report (September 2003). See www.gao.gov/new.items/d03883.pdf (p. 4).
According to IEEE-USA Vice President Ron Hira, the concept of "prevailing wages" is worthless as a safeguard for U.S. and H-1B workers.

"Proponents of the H-1B program say that by law H-1B workers must receive prevailing wages, but this is a legal façade so full of loopholes that it is frequently gamed by employers to pay below-market wages," Hira said. "This is another myth of the H-1B program, that prevailing wages are the same as market wages."

A review of the DOL's LCA database for FY 2005 shows some of the well-below-market wages employers have been certified to pay H-1B workers. For example, Teja Technologies received permission to pay a software engineer $10,900. Infosys Technologies was authorized to pay a programmer analyst $20,030. TCS was certified to pay a computer programmer $20,571, and Syntel, Inc., was permitted to pay a computer programmer $31,304.

Under law, U.S. employers have three options for determining an H-1B employee's prevailing wage. According to the DOL, an employer can request a "prevailing wage determination from the appropriate State Workforce Agency;" use a "survey conducted by an independent authoritative source;" or use "another legitimate source of information."

Despite the law's intent, Hira enumerated a few ways companies circumvent the law's prevailing wage requirements when hiring H-1B workers:

By selecting a survey source with the lowest salaries

By misclassifying an experienced worker as entry level

By giving the person a lower-paying job title than one reflective of the work to be performed

By citing wages for a low-cost area of the country, then sending an employee to a higher-cost area
One reason it is so easy for employers to underpay H-1B holders is because they know how to exploit the loopholes and have almost no chance of ever being investigated. Even if they were investigated, the loopholes are so large most of the employers would likely be found following the letter of the law. First, DOL's automated review of LCAs is limited to looking for missing information or obvious inaccuracies; no human looks at the applications. Second, if a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) review finds that an H-1B worker's income on the W-2 form is less than the wage on the original LCA, DHS does not have a way to report the discrepancy to DOL.

"It's a self-policing system that is never actually checked," Hira said. "The law itself is written in a way to invite exploitation. It should be no surprise that firms take advantage of the loopholes."

IEEE-USA advances the public good and promotes the careers and public policy interests of more than 220,000 engineers, scientists and allied professionals who are U.S. members of the IEEE. IEEE-USA is part of the IEEE, the world's largest technical professional society with 360,000 members in 150 countries. For more information, go to www.ieeeusa.org.



http://www.vdare.com/rubenstein/060919_nd.htm

September 19, 2006

National Data, By Edwin S. Rubenstein
Bad news for American students, workers - massive H-1b Increases rise from dead in "SKIL Bill"

The good news: the Senate immigration bill will probably not be acted upon this year. The bad news: The House and Senate may disagree on big immigration issues like border security, but they apparently share the same vision on H-1b visas—high tech "guest workers."

Hence the new "Securing Knowledge, Innovation and Leadership," or SKIL Bill, which resurrects the high tech industry's H-1b and green card reform wish list embodied in the Senate bill.

The new bill would raise the H-1b cap from 65,000 to 115,000. If the higher cap is fully subscribed, next year’s cap would automatically increase by 20 percent. Et cetera, et cetera.

After ten years of such compounding there theoretically could be a nine-fold increase in the number of H-1bs entering the U.S. annually. And this doesn’t include the separate 20,000 H-1b cap for persons with advanced degrees in science and engineering. The SKIL bill would exempt foreign students with degrees from U.S. universities from the cap, effectively doubling the number of foreign-born MAs and PhDs permitted to remain in the country.

Implication: By 2016 the high tech labor-force could be swelled by as many as 640,000 foreign-born workers each year.
An absurd extrapolation, you say? Perhaps. But no more absurd than the current situation. Even at 65,000 annually, the H-1b influx represents an overwhelming share of high-tech employment growth in the U.S. For example, according to AeA, the trade association representing the high-tech industry, total high-tech employment rose by 61,000 positions last year—or 4,000 less than the number of H-1bs admitted.

Displacement of U.S.-born personnel by their foreign-born counterparts is strongly suggested by year-to-year changes in high-tech employment and H-1b visa issuance. (Table 1) They move in decidedly different directions:

High-tech employment H-1b Visas Issued
2001 -53,259 +163,600
2002 -612,024 +79,100
2003 -333,033 +78,000
2004 -44,738 +65,000
2005 +61,111 +65,000

Further evidence: When the supply of oil falls short of the demand for oil, the price of oil rises. It has. When the supply of housing can’t keep up with demand, housing prices rise. They have.

So what’s been happening to the wages of high-tech personnel?

Data compiled by AeA show real wages are still below levels reached during the bubble years. The decline is especially pronounced in the software industry, which employs about half of all H-1bs admitted. (Table 2.)

Here are average wages (in 2004 dollars):

1999: Total high tech: $74,222 Software: $101,717
2004: Total high tech: $72,440 Software: $80,637
% decline: Total high tech: -2.4% Software: -20.7%

Starting salaries of high tech personnel with bachelor’s degrees have declined by even more than average salaries, according to a Business Week column. [The New Global Job Shift, February 3, 2003] This is the niche most likely to be filled by incoming H-1bs.

The last refuge of H-1b advocates: the alleged incompetence of U.S.-educated personnel. High tech gurus routinely malign the ability of U.S. public schools to produce students competitive with their foreign counterparts in science and engineering.

But the average test scores upon which this perception rests conceal more than they reveal. As the editors of The Ethics and Public Policy Center's The New Atlantis reported recently:

"Two University of Pennsylvania researchers recently aggregated scores from a number of cross-national studies and found that white students in the United States, taken alone, consistently outperform the predominantly white student populations of several other leading industrial nations. 'There is compelling evidence," they write," that the low scores of [black and Hispanic students] were major factors in reducing the comparative standing of the U.S. in international surveys of achievement. If these minority students were to perform at the same level as white students, the U.S....would lead the Western G5 nations in mathematics and science, though it would still trail Japan.'"[ Is the United States Really Losing the International Horse Race in Academic Achievement? Erling E. Boe and Sujie Shin, 2005]

Americans can do these jobs. But by breaking down the market and discouraging students from entering these fields, our promiscuous importation of H-1bs is creating the very shortage the policy is allegedly designed to fill.

These idiots don't see that they are also being exploited just like the rest of us!

What is happening in this Country is not one party versus the other. They are ALL involved and it is all about greed! We do not have a government anymore! It is being run by corporations and all they care about is profits!

We the people do not have representation at ALL! We are just used as collateral. There was an article that Virginiamama posted recently that really makes sense when you look at the things that are happening in this country.

The government uses us as COLLATERAL to borrow, etc. I know it seems out there but when you think about it and put it with everything else that is happening, it really makes sense.

Why is it that the people do not have the same retirement benefits as the elected officials? Why is it that they can give themselves a raise when they work less hours than we do and don't have the threat of being fired for doing a bad job like the rest of us? Why are they not held accountable by the same standards as we are?

Who appointed elected officails as GODS!? They put their pants on one leg at a time like the rest of us! It is time they EARN their keep!