H-1B scandal: New study unmasks that Cisco and Microsoft NOT using H-1B visas to recruit the best [View All]

[OhioChick]

H-1B scandal: New study unmasks that Cisco and Microsoft NOT using H-1B visas to recruit the best and brightest

The worst fears of H-1B critics has been confirmed:

A new study published today by Dr. Norman Matloff - professor of computer science at the University of California - Davis, unmasks that Cisco and Microsoft are NOT using the H-1B visa program to hire the best and brightest.

Cisco and Microsoft say that continued U.S. leadership in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) hinges on their ability to import the world’s best engineers and scientists.

Dr. Norman Matloff presents new data analysis showing that the vast majority of the foreign workers at Cisco and Microsoft are people of just ordinary talent, doing ordinary work.

They are not the innovators that Cisco and Microsoft portray them to be.


Cisco and Microsoft claim that the U.S. lead in tech depends on hiring innovators from abroad.

The analysis demonstrates that the foreign workers are in fact generally not outstanding talents, thus casting serious doubt on the claim that innovators are being hired.

Most foreign tech workers are in fact not the best and the brightest.

This is true both overall and in the key tech occupations, and most importantly, in Cisco and Microsoft who are 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.networkworld.com/community/node/27421


H-1Bs: Still Not the Best and the Brightest
May 2008

By Norman Matloff


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.

I presented some initial analyses along these lines in an earlier Backgrounder,1 showing for instance that STEM foreign students at U.S. universities tend to be at the less-selective universities. Here I present a much more direct analysis, making use of a simple but powerful idea: If the foreign workers are indeed outstanding talents, they would be paid accordingly. 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 (TM). Keep in mind that a TM value of 1.0 means that the worker is merely average, not of outstanding talent.

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