Friday, July 13, 2007

Immigrants Sue; The Rest of the Story

Recently, the Feds decided to cut off 'green card' applications, announcing that all available quotas were filled for this year. It was a surprise action, reversing an announcement earlier this year.

This created a few problems for H1B workers who were 'on track' to become citizens.

One of them, who works for Compuware Corp, a 'body shop' IT consulting firm headquartered in Detroit, is profiled in today's Milwaukee JS.

You can also learn a bit from this source which details his employer's H1B requests.

The key information is found when you scroll to the right--look for the columns which are headed "wage rate" and "prevailing wage."

You'll find that the immigrant in question is being paid somewhere between $46K-$50K as a programmer-analyst, and that the "prevailing wage" is somewhere between $45.8K-$49.2K.

On the other hand, the BLS' tables for Milwaukee tell us that in September, 2005, private industry-employed Computer Systems Analysts and Scientists earned an AVERAGE wage of $57,387./year.

That was two years ago.

On this page, BLS gives a more extensive breakdown of job categories, but it's for the entire Eastern North Central region of the USA, and dated July 2006.

There we find that full-time computer programmers earn an average of $69,209/year (hourly wage times 2,080 hours/year)

Immigrant's salary: $50K, at most, according to his employer's filing.
BLS 2005 average, Milwaukee/Racine: $57, 387.
BLS 2006 average, E. NorthCentral US: $69,209.

"Prevailing Wage" ~$47K.

How does THAT work, Feds?

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