- KNOW THE FACTS ABOUT H-1B VISAS
- MYTH: H-1B VISA RECIPIENTS TAKE AMERICAN JOBS
- FACT: H-1B VISA RECIPIENTS CREATE JOBS AND CONTRIBUTE TO THE U.S. ECONOMY
- IF FEWER H-1B VISAS WERE DENIED IN 2007-2008, JOBS FOR NATIVE-BORN AMERICANS IN COMPUTER_RELATED FIELDS WOULD HAVE GROWN 55% FASTER
- 110,000 JOBS WERE ACTUALLY CREATED IN 2009-2010* *IN COMPUTER-RELATED FIELDS IN METROPOLITAN AREAS
- 170,000 JOBS COULD HAVE BEEN CREATED IF FEWER H-1B VISAS WERE DENIED* *IN COMPUTER-RELATED FIELDS IN METROPOLITAN AREAS
- MYTH: H-1B VISAS COST TAX PAYERS MONEY
- FACT: H-1B VISAS CREATE REVENUE
- FACT: 55% OF ALL H-1B VISA FEES GO TO AMERICAN WORKER RETRAINING PROGRAMS
- MYTH: H-1B VISAS HURT LOCAL ECONOMIES
- FACT: IN NEW YORK CITY, THE DENIAL OF H-1B VISAS CAUSED THE ECONOMY TO MISS OUT ON 28,005 JOBS FOR NATIVE-BORN AMERICANS
- THE FACT IS: EVERY FOREIGN-BORN WORKER WITH A STEM DEGREE CREATES AN AVERAGE OF 2.6 JOBS FOR NATIVE-BORN AMERICANS
- FWD.US - Moving the knowledge economy forward. SOURCE: PARNERSHIP FOR A NEW AMERICAN ECONOMY
Items 4 to 6, 10 and 11 appear to have originated from a study titled CLOSING ECONOMIC WINDOWS: How H-1B Visa Denials Cost U.S.-Born Tech Workers Jobs and Wages During the Great Recession, published by the Partnership for a New American Economy in June 2014. Item 12 appears to have originated from a second study titled IMMIGRATION AND AMERICAN JOBS, released by the American Enterprise Institute the Partnership for a New American Economy in December 2011. Hence, both studies were published or co-published by the Partnership for a New American Economy. Their online About page states its third principle at follows:
Increase opportunities for immigrants to enter the United States workforce — and for foreign students to stay in the United States to work — so that we can attract and keep the best, the brightest and the hardest-working, who will strengthen our economy;
This would suggest that this group only searches out and/or funds research that supports this principle. In fact, their online Research & Reports page list a number of reports, all seemingly favorable toward increased immigration.
In item 21 on page 6 of Annotated Research Bibliography: H-1B/Green Card/STEM Labor Shortage Issues, Norman Matloff critiques the first study. Regarding one of its authors, Giovanni Peri, he states the following:
Peri’s online CV says that he has received $50,000 in research support from Microsoft, and the second paper is published by an industry political group, presumably accompanied by funding for Peri’s research. These considerations may explain why there are issues here of lack of balance.
In any case, this bibliography summarizes what Matloff regards as the major research papers on the issues of the H-1B work visa, employer-sponsored green cards and claims of a STEM labor shortage. As can be seen, there are numerous studies on both sides of the issues, suggesting that the video's claims are highly contested despite its presentation of them as Fact versus Myth.
Items 4 to 6 propose that there would have been 60,000 more jobs created if "fewer H-1B visas were denied". How many fewer would needed to have been denied? One? Ten thousand? The total number that were denied? The item doesn't say. In fact, a key finding listed on page 5 of the study is as follows:
The U.S. tech industry would have grown substantially faster in the years immediately after the recession if not for the large number of visas that didn’t make it through the 2007 and 2008 H-1B visa lotteries.
Hence, even the study doesn't seem to say how many fewer denials would have caused this gain in jobs. Also, it's not clear that the study did anything to correct for the fact that 2008 marked the beginning of a major financial crisis, not a mere recession from which we could expect a rapid job recovery.
First of all, the video seriously misstates the study. Page 4 of the study states:
The data comparing employment among the fifty states and the District of Columbia show that from 2000 to 2007, an additional 100 foreign-born workers in STEM fields with advanced degrees from US universities is associated with an additional 262 jobs among US natives.
Compare this with the video's claim that:
THE FACT IS: EVERY FOREIGN-BORN WORKER WITH A STEM DEGREE CREATES AN AVERAGE OF 2.6 JOBS FOR NATIVE-BORN AMERICANS
Note that the video left out the descriptor with advanced degrees from US universities. This implies that the supposed job creation occurs with every degree, wherever it was obtained. In addition, the video changes is associated with to THE FACT IS:. That, in fact, is a warning sign about the video and, two a lesser extent, both studies. They present no indication that these conclusions are heavily contested. They present them as though there is consensus in the academic world on these issues. As Norman Matloff suggests above, they lack any sense of balance. Or as Shakespeare said, "The lady doth protest too much, methinks".
In fact, there are questions about the original claim by the study. Page 4 of the study states:
During 2000– 2007, a 10 percent increase in the share of such workers boosted the US-born employment rate by 0.04 percent. Evaluating this at the average numbers of foreign- and US-born workers during that period, this implies that every additional 100 foreign- born workers who earned an advanced degree in the United States and then worked in STEM fields led to an additional 262 jobs for US natives. (See Table 2)
Hence, it appears that the study found an association between a 0.04 percent raise in employment and a larger share of these foreign-born STEM workers with advanced degrees. It then multiplied this by the average numbers of workers to obtain the 262 U.S jobs per 100 foreign jobs.
In the Methodological Approach section, the study admits that there are challenges to its approach. On page 9, for example, it states:
But one of the fundamental challenges when using cross-state comparisons to show a relationship between immigrants and jobs is that immigrants tend to be more mobile and go where the jobs are. As a result, evidence of high immigrant shares in states with strong economic growth and high employment could be the result of greater job opportunities (as immigrants move to jobs), rather than the cause. Cross-state comparisons would then show an artificially high impact of immigrants on the native employment rate. The study avoids “overcounting” the effects of immigrant workers drawn by a recent economic boom by using an estimation technique (known as “two-stage least squares (2SLS) regression estimation” and discussed in the appendix) that is designed to yield the effect of immigration independent of recent growth and employment opportunities. The analysis also controls for state- and time-specific factors that might affect native employment rates.
We are therefore left to trust that the author controlled for all of these complex factors correctly. However, as seems to be the case with most of these studies, there is not enough information supplied to reproduce the author's work. The Data section does reference some footnotes like the following:
28 The data are from http://nber.org/morg/annual (accessed March 17, 2011).
29 The data are from Foreign Labor Certification Data Center, www.flcdatacenter.com (accessed November 12, 2011), and are for fiscal years. The public-use H-1B data for 2007 contain erroneous codes for the work state, so the analysis here does not include that year. The employer state is used for the work state in 2006 for H-2A applications.
This last footnote, by the way, does not give one a really comfortable feeling about the underlying H-1B data. It does not surprise me, however, having run into problems with LCA data. In any event, I have worked with enough data to know that, when you have thousands of data points and scores of methods to analyze them, some of those methods will always give results that are more favorable than others. It is therefore critical that others be able to reproduce the results so that they can verify the work, critique those methods and try alternate methods. The best way to do this would be for the author to provide a spreadsheet that shows their calculations, along with the references to the data. As it is, however, I can see no way to verify the study's results and no indication that anyone else has verified them. I see no choice then but to ignore the study in favor of studies that can be verified.