The government refuses to release wage data from visa petitions for nonimmigrant workers. The publicly available data is instead from Labor Condition Applications. That provides an excellent view of what employers claim the prevailing wage is and a generally good view of H-1B wages. But because there is not a one-to-one match between H-1B workers and Labor Condition Applications, analyses of the latter produce the response that only the visa data is accurate – but that is not published.
Computer hacking at the professional-services firm Deloitte provided the data for a new study of H-1B wages at that company. Lo and behold, this study found that Deloitte pays its H-1B workers 10 percent less than newly hired peers. This is consistent with the H-1B program’s statutory intent of replacing American workers with cheap foreign workers.