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posted by martyb on Friday April 21 2017, @03:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the depressing-wages dept.

Demand for the visas far exceeds the 85,000 cap, meaning that the government has to ration them to firms by lottery. Indian outsourcing firms like Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), which provides low-cost back-office services, are now the biggest employers of H-1B workers. Analysing data compiled by Théo Négri of jobsintech.io, The Economist found that between 2012 and 2015 the three biggest Indian outsourcing firms—TCS, Wipro and Infosys—submitted over 150,000 visa applications for positions that paid a median salary of $69,500. In contrast, America's five biggest tech firms—Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft—submitted just 31,000 applications, and proposed to pay their workers a median salary of $117,000.

The Economist reassures us that, "Given that the unemployment rate for college graduates sits at 2.5%, it is fair to say that most native workers displaced by H-1Bs land on their feet."


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Friday April 21 2017, @07:06AM (2 children)

    by hemocyanin (186) on Friday April 21 2017, @07:06AM (#497283) Journal

    Given that the unemployment rate for college graduates sits at 2.5%, it is fair to say that most native workers displaced by H-1Bs land on their feet.

    There is a lot left out of this sentence. For example:

    • What kind of job? Full time? Part time? Minimum wage?
    • If full time and not minimum wage, are wages being suppressed by increased labor supply?
    • If so, how much and how does that impair graduates' ability to handle their student debt burden?
    • Are there certain degrees which land jobs quickly and others where people struggle to find work relevant to their degree?
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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by hemocyanin on Friday April 21 2017, @07:22AM

    by hemocyanin (186) on Friday April 21 2017, @07:22AM (#497292) Journal

    Yeah, here is where the data is from: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm [bls.gov]

    Note the caveat:

    Includes persons with bachelor's, master's, professional, and doctoral degrees.

    I'm not going out on a limb by saying that "master's, professional, and doctoral degrees" are more likely to end up in employment, and mixing those in with bachelor's degrees is obviously misleading. Yes, the philosophy Ph.D is probably harder to use, but all those MDs, dentists, nurse practitioners, etc. will skew the data.

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by urza9814 on Friday April 21 2017, @02:01PM

    by urza9814 (3954) on Friday April 21 2017, @02:01PM (#497398) Journal

    Yup. Standard tactic used by most colleges. They'll claim *everyone* gets a job after graduation; what they DON'T tell you is how many of those "jobs" are just flipping burgers at McDonald's. The numbers you actually want to look at is how many find a job *in their chosen field*. I bet that number is significantly lower.

    And there's absolutely now way in hell that the writers and editors at The Economist don't know this; it seems they have an interest in downplaying the unemployment problem...