It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the push for H-1B visa expansion has nothing to do with a lack of American professionals and more to do with corporations driving down salaries with Bill Gates at Microsoft driving the lobbying efforts. Now we are being told it isn’t a lack of workers but a lack of innovation by Congressional supporters of the expansion. They are trying to tell us that Americans aren’t clever enough but foreign workers fulfill that need.

From the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS)

In pressuring Congress to expand the H-1B work visa and employment-based green card programs, industry lobbyists have recently adopted a new tack. Seeing that their past cries of a tech labor shortage are contradicted by stagnant or declining wages, their new buzzword is innovation. Building on their perennial assertion that the foreign workers are “the best and the brightest,” they now say that continued U.S. leadership in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) hinges on our ability to import the world’s best engineers and scientists. Yet, this Backgrounder will present new data analysis showing that the vast majority of the foreign workers — including those at most major tech firms — are people of just ordinary talent, doing ordinary work. They are not the innovators the industry lobbyists portray them to be.

Norman Matloff at CIS developed theory to test that assertion that the best and brightest foreign workers would then be paid accordingly. He has called this the TM Value (Talent Measure):

We can thus easily determine whether a foreign worker is among “the best and the brightest” by computing the ratio of his salary to the prevailing wage figure stated by the employer. Let’s call this the Talent Measure ™. Keep in mind that a TM value of 1.0 means that the worker is merely average, not of outstanding talent.

The analysis uses data from the Department of Labor’s Permanent Labor Certification Program (PERM). Go to CIS for more details on his methodology.

Talent Measure Analysis

Again, I take as our Talent Measure ™ the ratio of a worker’s salary to the prevailing wage claimed by the employer. The employer is legally required to pay at least the prevailing wage, and must state on the PERM application how that wage level was determined.3 Since the application will be rejected if the wage offered is below the prevailing wage, by definition all values of TM will be at least 1.0. The latter value means “the average worker,” i.e. of average talent, so if most workers have TM values close to 1.0, then most are probably not “the best and the brightest.”

With that it mind, let’s look at TM values, both overall and also for some specific occupations:

The trend, both general and for STEM occupations, is clear: Most TM values are only a little higher than 1.0, indicating that most of the foreign workers are not outstanding talents.

The sole exceptional occupation is mathematicians. Though rather few workers are in this category, the TM value is worth some comment. The anomaly is likely due to the recent interest in data mining, which has created a de facto two-tier wage structure among mathematicians, in which those who specialize in data mining are paid much more. Since the prevailing wage figures do not distinguish between these tiers, the official prevailing wage value set for mathematicians will be well below the market wage for data miners. Thus it is probable that even these foreign workers are not “the best and the brightest.”

Lobbyists for the big firms often claim that abuse of the H-1B program occurs mainly in Indian-owned “bodyshops” (firms that subcontract H-1Bs to larger companies), while by contrast the big firms are hiring “the best and the brightest.” Yet neither this scapegoating of the Indians nor the claim of hiring the top talents is warranted. Consider the TM values after disaggregation by firm:

Though these figures are slightly above the overall figures we saw earlier, they still show that the firms are not paying salaries indicating top talents.

Even Microsoft, on the high end of the companies shown here, is not paying top dollar, as seen by restricting attention to Microsoft’s workers holding the O-1 visa. As O-1 is specifically for, in the phrasing of the statute, “workers of extraordinary ability,” this gives us a measure of the salaries Microsoft pays to those foreign workers who in fact are “the best and the brightest.” The median TM for Microsoft O-1 workers is 1.404. That represents a salary premium of more than double what the firm is giving its foreign workers in general, so there does not appear to be much support for Microsoft’s claim that most of their H-1Bs are of extraordinary talent.

Thus again, it is readily apparent that even the most prominent tech firms, which are in the vanguard of the industry movement pressuring Congress to expand foreign worker programs, generally do not hire from “the best and the brightest” league.

There is additional data detailing PERM data relating to “outstanding” foreign talent along with the myths and truths. The lobbyists are using the myths primarily to lobby for an increase in the H-1b Visas.

The findings show:

# The median TM value over all foreign workers studied was just a hair over 1.0.

# The median TM value was also essentially 1.0 in each of the tech professions studied.

# Median TM was near 1.0 for almost all prominent tech firms that were analyzed.

# Contrary to the constant hyperbole in the press that ‘Johnnie can’t do math’ in comparison with kids in Asia, TM values for workers from Western European countries tend to be much higher than those of their Asian counterparts.

# Most foreign workers work at or near entry level, described by the Department of Labor in terms akin to apprenticeship. This counters the industry’s claim that they hire the workers as key innovators.

Other CAII News and Information:

Villaraigosa warns ICE to back off immigration raids from the Uncooperative Blogger

Nearly 300 Illegals Convicted of DUI in North Carolina from Virtuous Republic

The Washington Post: Promoting Illegal Immigration Daily and Twice On Sunday from Conservative Common Man

Guard the Border from Home from Virtuous Republic

**This was a production of The Coalition Against Illegal Immigration (CAII). If you would like to participate, please go to the above link to learn more. Afterwards, email brianbonner90-at-gmail-dot-com and let us know at what level you would like to participate.

Technorati Tags: H-1B Visas, Immigration, Illegal aliens, TM, Talent Measure, STEM, Center for Immigration Studies