H-1Bs, by the numbers
Here's an interesting resource: a Department of Labor site that lets you see who is hiring H-1Bs and how much they are paying them. The UI is awful - looks like the DoL could use some better programmers - but if it hurts your eyes too much, you can download all the raw data and write your own. (In fact, I think that would make a good project, and I bet one could get funded to do so)
A few examples. H-1B hires last year:
Universities
- Harvard: 380
- Duke: 313
- Stanford: 364
- University of California system: 1684
(Hires at the above places appear to be largely lab techs and postdocs)
Tech companies
- Google: 350 (in California). Salaries range from $80K to $120K
- Intel: 367 (in Oregon), 682 (in California)
- Apple: 215 (in California)
- (Whoa!) Microsoft: 4100 (in Washington) Salaries start around $75K
Here's an interesting project idea:
- Download the data sets, merge the efile and fax data
- Normalize the employer names so you can do a search for, say, all Microsoft hires in the US
- Match school names to IPEDS codes so you can do things like get breakdowns of H-1B hires as a function of faculty size, etc
- Extract postdoc salaries and post them by institution
- Look at compensation relative to prevailing wages - who's hiring high-end people vs. low-end people?
- Overall, how are academic institutions (who are exempt from caps) using H-1Bs? What kinds of people are they hiring?
I suspect that at least some of these questions have already been answered and that there may already be cleaned-up versions of the data set floating around econ departments. I bet Ron Hira would know about such things.
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on Wed, Jun 27, 07:06PM
Geoff,
So, your brief sampling of H1-B users answers my question: how much whinging would there be if Congress proposed an auction process for H1-Bs. The companies that pay well would probably be OK trading the cost of winning the auction with the cost and inconvenience of the current system. But universities (who pay peanuts for their H1-B post-docs) would likely raise a hew and cry. I wonder if there could be some happy compromise: more H1-Bs in exchange for an easy (but more expensive) process to get them.
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on Wed, Jun 27, 10:06PM
Yes, there would probably have to be some kind of exemptions / discounts for universities and / or grad students / postdocs / etc. The trouble is, the more exceptions one sticks in, the more likely the thing is to end up a mess again.
One interesting corollary: the earlier immigration bill specified automatic increases in the numbers of visas whenever the cap was hit. Since companies will take a little while to ramp up on using all those extra H-1Bs anyway, that kind of auto-increase becomes a de-facto lack of a cap. With a fee structure, you could do things like saying, "The cap will increase automatically whenever there are no more visas available for less than, say, $2500" or whatever your threshold happens to be. So no quota increase until people are willing to pay for it.
One other thing: it looks like the data set is for labor certification applications only. LCAs are a prerequisite for getting an H-1B, but it's only part of the process. It's a little confusing: there are maybe 80-100K H-1Bs given out last year, but there are 385,000 or so records in the file. I'm not sure what gives. Maybe you have to get a new LCA when someone's salary changes? Or when they change jobs? I'm not sure why there is such a disparity between the number of LCAs and the number of H-1Bs.
I sent an email to Ron Hira to see if he's got any reaction to the auction idea. Should be interesting to see.
