Where are female workers likely to face the largest dollar pay gap vis-a-vis their male counterparts in America?
The answer, according to a recent U.S. Chamber of Commerce publication, is Sunnyvale, Calif., in Silicon Valley, where full-time female workers are paid about $40,000 less per year than their male counterparts.
Why raise this point in an immigration context?
The answer is that Sunnyvale has what would appear to be the heaviest concentration of H-1B employers, and H-1B workers, in the nation.
If you go to the myvisajobs.com website and type in Sunnyvale as the work city, you will find that, of the top 20 H-1B users nationwide, 10 of them are listed as having Sunnyvale as the work city.
Collectively, in this community of 152,000 people, these 10 employers have filed for 159,538 H-1B workers in the last three years. The number of filings, given the workings of the H-1B lottery system is always at least three times as high as workers allocated, but these two numbers give one a strong impression of a high H-1B alien concentration locally.
The leading three H-1B users in the city are Google, Microsoft, and Infosys, the India-based labor broker. The next seven are Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Hcl America, Wal-Mart, Qualcomm, and Wipro, with Hcl and Wipro being hire-a-programmer shops.
The Indian labor brokers are, as reported earlier, highly biased in favor of males, specifically young Indian males of the right castes from the southern part of that nation. Do those biases (and those of the IT industry, generally) tend to explain the annual pay gaps noted by employers in this city? I think so.
On the other hand, the median annual earnings of $103,080 reported for the female workers of Sunnyvale would be welcome in most American households. The men in that town get $142,664 a year. The second highest level of female earnings, $97,583, comes in nearby San Francisco.
All of this reminds us that the jobs lost by Americans to the H-1B program are good jobs.