"High-Skilled" H-1B's? Nope. It's the Money, Honey

Although the Godfather (Sykes) thinks that H1Bs are "high-skilled" foreign workers, that's not really true.

But you can't blame Charlie for having read that line a million times--it's part of the propaganda effort which has a lot of large money behind it--like Bill Gates' Microsoft, for example.

Some facts for consideration:

1) It is NOT true that the US has "a shortage" of native-born Ph.D.'s in hard sciences. If that were the case, the salaries paid these folks would have gone up over the last several years. They have remained constant (inflation-adjusted) instead.

2) It is NOT true that H-1B's are "a temporary solution"--ask ex-employees of Siemens/Florida, the Journal-Sentinel, Prudential Life, or Metropolitan Life.

3) It is NOT true that the US has a 'shortage' of native-born computer programmers, nor programmer/analysts, nor computer-science people (with BS or MS degrees, too!) If that were true, then salaries would have gone up (see above.)

4) It is NOT true that "enforcement" of laws will open opportunities to US-born technically trained experts. Rather, closing loopholes will do that--and "closing loopholes" will not happen.

In fact, H-1B's are imported to undercut wages and salaries. Despite "common knowledge," (which is not the same as knowledge of the facts), imported labor is paid less than US labor because any damn fool can write a job description which tends to eliminate US labor. And any damn fool can run an ad to "prove" they tried to hire US labor--even if they interviewed none of the US natives.

Thus, "prevailing wage" phrases can be eviscerated or made largely irrelevant. It's called "loopholes."

And that's precisely what's happening, contrary to the Company Line of Propaganda being used since 1998 or so.

On "underpayment," see:

http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/CaseStudyH1BUnderpayment.txt

For other factual matter on H-1B issues, see any other document listed here:

http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/

Prof. Matloff, who wrote most of the content in the above archives, teaches Statistics at UC-Davis. He is very well-acquainted with trends in hiring CompSci people, because most CompSci people take Statistics coursework. Further, Matloff is in the epicenter of CompSci hires--California. Finally, Matloff is a-political (on this issue.) He is clearly unhappy with (D) and (R) positioning and fakery on the matter.