Congress Is Fully Aware of Problems in the H-1B program, but Doesn’t Want To Offend Big Tech

In today’s H-1B news, “Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith criticized the Trump administration's crackdown on employment-based immigration”:

Smith also disputed claims that Microsoft compensates foreign workers less generously, insisting, “it doesn’t matter whether you came on a visa or you’re an American worker, everybody has the same compensation system.”

Then perhaps Brad Smith could explain the figures below.

Newsweek reports that “Republicans have introduced legislation that would raise a key salary threshold in the H-1B visa program from $60,000 to almost $140,000, a change that could significantly affect some companies that rely heavily on foreign workers.” Under current law, heavy users of H-1B visas ("H-1B-dependent employers", those with 15 percent or more of the workforce on the visas) have to make certain non-displacement and recruitment attestations -- unless they pay the visa workers at least $60,000 or the workers have a master's degree or higher.

In reality the bill (S. 5638) does not represent a meaningful change. Because the lobbyist-written text of the H-1B program has redundancies, Congress could raise the $60,000 figure to $600 trillion and it would have no effect on the program because of the master's degree loophole.

This bill illustrates that Congress is fully aware of the problems in the H-1B program, but does not want to do anything that would offend big tech.

See below the difference in H-1B earnings between aliens and comparable Americans at Microsoft, sorted by country of origin. (The source is data received by Bloomberg News as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.) H-1B workers from some countries are indeed paid more than comparable Americans, but that isn't the case for most countries, including the main sources of H-1B workers, India and China.

Source: Data received by Bloomverg News via a FOIA lawsuit.