Our Very Own Numbers

Anyone who follows the whole H-1B/L-1 visa debate knows that each side of the controversy takes their turn at lobbing reports, charts and statistics back and forth. I personally find the whole routine kind of a time-waster. No one's going to change their minds just because they're looking at a new set of numbers. That said, it's still important to get the facts established to counteract a lot of misinformation put out by deep-pocketed interests who are still trying to pretend that their primary intent is not to hire people at lower wages. So, I've decided to go ahead and promote this fine report prepared for the Center for Immigration Studies by prominent anti-H-1B attorney (and co-founder of The Programmers Guild) John Miano.

The report, H-1B Visa Numbers-No Relationship to Economic Need, only uses publicly available data that can easily be verified by others. Miano drew his sources (as outlined on pages 2 and 3 of the .pdf file) from the Immigration and Naturalization Service (and its successor organization, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service), the Department of Labor's Foreign Labor Certification Data Center, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Since these are government agencies, the data would presumably be from neutral, third-party sources. I wanted to provide direct links to all of the sources, but it would be a somewhat tedious process. I did find that everything can be found quite easily through your favorite search engine.

The Key Findings, as directly quoted from page 1 of the report, are:

• There is no cause and effect relationship between H-1B visas and job creation. Adding H-1B visas does not create additional jobs for U.S. workers. (This directly refutes the "March Surprise" report making this very claim that came out just before Bill Gates testified in front of Congress this spring.)
• Since 1999, the United States has approved enough H-1B visas for computer workers to fill 87 percent of net computer job growth over that period.
• Since 1999, the United States has had a net loss of 76,000 engineering jobs. Over the same time period, the United States has approved an average of 16,000 new H-1B visas each year for engineers.
• If current employment trends continue and the H-1B quota remains unchanged, the United States will approve enough H-1B visas for computer workers to fill about 79 percent of the computer jobs it creates each year.
• Pending legislation would increase the number of H-1B visas for computer workers to above the number of computer jobs created each year.
• The data suggest that a large percentage of those who legally enter United States on H-1B visas go into the illegal alien pool.

On to other matters. I certainly can't ignore this report out of Edison, New Jersey of the naturalized Indian-American citizen who was arrested last Wednesday and charged with visa fraud and conspiracy to commit visa fraud. Nilesh Dasondi, who is a member of his township's zoning board, owns CyGate Software and Consulting. This company has offices in New Jersey, Canada and (of course) India. According to the Department of Labor's Foreign Labor Certification Data Center, for Fiscal Year 2007 alone, his company filed for, and had approved, 59 Labor Certification Applications for approximately 150 H-1B workers.

It seems that not everyone he has brought into the country has rare computer skills that are in low supply in the United States. Some of the men he brought in have outstanding talents in running greeting card stores, while all of them were falsely put onto his CyGate payroll through a "running the payroll" scheme.

What boggles my mind is that, assuming these men did not have master's degrees or above, they were all subject to the H-1B visa cap of 65,000 per year. Since the number of applications is far higher than the number of visas that are granted, these 6 men were chosen through a random lottery process. What are the odds that all of Dasondi's people would have won the lottery? We can only logically assume that he had filed applications for a much higher number of people than just the six who were ultimately chosen at random.

Update: InfoWorld's Ephraim Schwartz published an excellent Reality Check blog post about Miano's study.

(Cross-posted at Carrie's Nation.)