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Building a Workforce for the Information Economy
Third, according to interviews with H-1B employers conducted for the committee,31 some foreign workers—especially from Asia—are willing to take jobs entailing work “below their qualifications” as a means of entry into the United States because the pay in such jobs is better than that in jobs available in their home countries. Thus, to the extent that foreign applicants for a given job bring better (more advanced) credentials than do their domestic counterparts, the foreign applicant has a natural advantage.
Fourth, critics assert that without a ready supply of foreign workers, employers would be forced to make greater use of the existing domestic labor pool by increasing salaries, training opportunities, and other aspects of job compensation and “attractiveness.” This argument has been especially focused on the available pool of older IT workers.32
Discussion As should be clear from the two perspectives on the program, a key question in the debate is whether employers have a financial incentive to employ H-1B workers rather than domestic workers. Unfortunately, the evidence on this point is mixed, and the data poor. For example, based on interviews with some H-1B employers, Salzman reported that H-1B workers in jobs requiring lower levels of IT skill received lower wages, less senior job titles, smaller signing bonuses, and smaller pay and compensation increases than would be typical for the work they actually did.33 However, it is unclear whether these employers are representative of all IT employers. Similarly, while violations of existing law governing the employment of H-1B workers (such as payment of the prevailing wage) obviously happen to some degree, the number of documented violations is small.34
31
Salzman, 2000, “The Indian IT Industry and Workforce,” commissioned paper.
32
See, for example, Matloff, Norman. 2000. Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage, University of California at Davis, April 8. Available online at <http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html>.
33
Salzman, 2000, “The Indian IT Industry and Workforce,” commissioned paper.
34
Since FY 1992, when DOL was first assigned the responsibility for investigating alleged violations of the H-1B program, through the end of FY 1999, the agency (per its own data) handled 448 complaints, commenced 304 investigations, and closed out 159 cases. Of the 159 completed investigations, 134 of them resulted in a finding of a violation; 25 involved no violations. Since the inception of DOL 's H-1B oversight, 15 employers have been statutorily debarred for at least a 1-year period from obtaining employment-based nonimmigrant work visas and sponsoring workers for permanent resident status. An additional 12 employers agreed in consent decrees to a period of voluntary debarment. During this 7-year period (FY1992 to FY1999), the agency ordered repayment of back wages in 107 cases totaling $2,667,880 (or a cumulative average of $381,125 per year or a per employee average of $3,675) and required payment of civil monetary penalties of $221,250 (a cumulative yearly average of $31,607). During this 7-year period, the INS approved 409,834 H-1B visa petitions. Thus, documented violations do not provide evidence that large numbers of H-1B employers have failed to maintain compliance with LCA requirements. The magnitude and the extent of undocumented violations are unknown.
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