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[quote=Anonymous]Correlations from Dr. Matloff - Dr. Matloff was born and raised in Los Angeles, and has a [b]PhD in mathematics from UCLA, specializing in probability and statistic[/b]s.

Impact of H1Bs on US Tech Workers

The foreign worker programs are causing an internal brain drain from technology fields in the US. The impact is particularly acute on those who are older which in this H-1B era for the tech field, means over age 35. Employers prefer to hire the younger, thus cheaper, H-1Bs instead of the older, thus more expensive, Americans. Microsoft admits that “the vast majority of Microsoft hires are young, but that is because older workers tend to go into more senior jobs and there are fewer of those positions to begin with (Wadhwa, 2008). A Network World article Bednarz (2012) reports that "Asked for experience preference, corporate hiring managers most frequently say IT pros with two to five years in the workforce, followed by those with six to 10 years’ experience."

The nexus of this to the influx of foreign workers, especially the former foreign students, was cited explicitly by a Berkeley research team (Brown et al 1998; emphasis added): high-tech engineers and managers have experienced lower wage growth than their counterparts nationally... Why hasn’t the growth of high-tech wages kept up?... Foreign students are an important part of the story... Approximately one-half of engineering PhDs and one-third of engineering MSs were granted to foreign-born students in the mid-1990. [b]Later related work (Brown and Linden 2009) showed that the lifetime earnings premium from an advanced degree is negative for natives (due to lost income while in graduate school)[/b] but positive for the immigrants (due to access to the US labor market), thus providing a disincentive for the natives to pursue graduate work (pp.131-132). As the authors point out, "...most [semiconductor companies] want to hire only MS (or PhD) engineers for design...and of course the companies would prefer that the graduate premiums stay low" (p.121). This preference is then satisfied by hiring large numbers of foreign engineers.

Why are such large proportions of U.S. STEM postgraduate degrees earned by international students? The influx from abroad has hindered salary growth at that level, hence making pursuit of graduate degrees unattractive to US students. This displacement of Americans at the PhD level was actually projected (if not planned for) by the Policy Research and Analysis division of the National Science Foundation: “A growing influx of foreign PhDs into US labour markets will hold down the level of PhD salaries... [The Americans] will select alternative career paths... by choosing to acquire a "professional" degree in business or law, or by switching into management as rapidly as possible after gaining employment in private industry... [as] the effective premium for acquiring a PhD may actually be negative” (Weinstein, 1998)

The PERM data indicate that Microsoft pays its entry-level financial analysts and lawyers much more than it pays its engineers. Young people see these market signals and respond accordingly. [b]Anthony Carnevale of Georgetown University has pointed out, "If you're a high math student in America, from a purely economic point of view, it's crazy to go into STEM" (Light, 2011).[/b]

Kerr (2013) aimed to quantify the impact of foreign STEM workers on Americans. They found that “A one SD [standard deviation] increase in abnormally high immigrant hiring [by a firm] at the time of a STEM worker's departure is associated with a 0.16... decline in log annualized wage. [b]This amounts to a 17% drop in original wage.[/b]

Though my focus here has been on CS/EE, one should note the 2012 report by the US government National Institutes of Health (NIH, 2012). It was found that those hoping for a research career must undergo years of low-paid post-doctoral work, during which time they have no idea as to whether they will ultimately be able to secure a career in the field. [b]The report found this to be due to a huge surplus of labour, and it specifically cited the large number of foreign workers (about 60% of all post docs) as a major contributor to the problem.[/b] The report also stated that a result is the loss of many of the nation's top talents from STEM research--the internal brain drain. The internal brain drain is perhaps the most acute of the negative impacts of current policy, from a national interest point of view.

http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/MigLtrs.pdf[/quote]

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