Study: Most H1B workers at tech firms are "ordinary talent, doing ordinary work"

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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.

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The data show dramatically that most foreign workers, the vast majority of whom are from Asia, are in fact not “the best and the brightest.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The lobbyists love to claim that the industry resorts to hiring foreign workers because Americans are weak in math and science. Various international comparisons of math/science test scores at the K-12 level are offered as “evidence.” The claims are specious — after all, both major sources of foreign tech workers, India and China, refuse to participate in those tests, and India continues to be plagued with a high illiteracy rate. Serious educational research, including an earlier Arizona State university report and a recent major study by the Urban Institute show clearly that mainstream American kids are doing fine in STEM.

Nevertheless, the “Asian mystique” persists. The image is that our tech industry owes its success to armies of mathematical geniuses arriving to U.S. graduate schools from Asia. Once again, though, the data do not support this perception.

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Asians [are] typically being hired into non-innovative jobs while more Europeans are in the types of positions that could involve innovation.

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The lobbyists know that crying educational doom-and-gloom sells. Even though it was mainly “Johnnie,” rather than Arvind or Qing-Ling, who originally developed the computer industry, and even though all major East Asian governments have lamented their educational systems’ stifling of creativity, the lobbyists have convinced Congress that the industry needs foreign workers from Asia in order to innovate.

The facts show otherwise. Most foreign tech workers, particularly those from Asia, are in fact not “the best and the brightest.” This is true both overall and in the key tech occupations, and most importantly, in the firms most stridently demanding that Congress admit more foreign workers. Expansion of the guest worker programs — both H-1B visas and green cards — is unwarranted.

http://www.cis.org/articles/2008/back508.html

[Heracles 417]

I thought about this the other day. How is it that all of these Indian schools can produce so many "high skilled" individuals while the American schools apparently cannot. How is it local Indian and Asian colleges are producing so many tech savvy students while hundreds of thousands of Indians and Asians are studying in western schools. Both of my schools back home had a huge number of international students; with the greatest percentage from Indian and Asia.

Which leads me to believe it is all about screwing the American worker over for cheap labor. The Indian guys I work with who came here on H-1 visas are hardly tech geniuses. Far from it actually.

Edited April 29, 2008 by Boo-Yah!