On April 3, 2017, the job search company Glassdoor posted an article titled "Dispelling Myths: What H1B Visa Workers Are Really Paid". It was written by their Chief Economist, Dr. Andrew Chamberlain and mentions that a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research and that "it was widely reported in media as showing H1B visas hurt wages for American workers." It goes on to describe its own study as follows:
To answer this, we looked at a large sample of salaries from H1B visa applications and compared them to similar U.S. salaries reported on Glassdoor. We looked at the most recent year available - federal fiscal year 2016 - and focused on 10 major U.S. cities, comparing pay for U.S. and foreign H1B workers for the same job titles.
The bottom line: Across the 10 cities and roughly 100 jobs we examined, salaries for foreign H1B workers are about 2.8 percent higher than comparable U.S. salaries on Glassdoor. While it may be true that an influx of H1B workers in the 1990s hurt computer science wages, there's no evidence in the data on Glassdoor that H1B workers today represent a source of "cheap" labor paid any lower than comparable U.S. workers.
Following are some problems with the Glassdoor study:
There is a brief description of a regression that Glassdoor did on the H1B and Glassdoor data. However, the only data that is supplied are the median salaries for 12 selected job titles in 10 cities. Even this data cannot be cut and paste into a spreadsheet. It is presented in png images and must be manually reentered. In any event, the Glassdoor data appears to be private data. Much of it may or may not be viewable on their site but there is no way to view or verify all of the data. The H1B data, however, does appear to come from this file of 2016 H-1B disclosure data on the Department of Labor website. It was, in fact, possible to reproduce many of the H-1B salary numbers. However, it was apparent that the numbers for the job categories were obtained by searching the field JOB_TITLE instead of the standardized field SOC_NAME. You can see a list of the 2018 Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) system at this link.
Because of the non-standard job titles, it was only possible to match up 5 of the 12 Glassdoor Job Titles with BLS Job Titles. However, the following table shows that this includes the two categories, Programmer Analyst and Software Engineer, that make up a majority of the jobs listed in the H-1B Labor Condition Applications (LCAs).
Total H1B Total H1B
Glassdoor Job Title BLS Job Title LCAs Workers
------------------- --------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Project Manager NA 10,890 19,162
Program Manager NA 1,850 3,410
Professor NA 7,657 7,742
Risk Manager NA 110 141
Data Scientist NA 1,321 1,555
Financial Analyst Financial Analyst 2,048 3,537
Programmer Analyst Computer Systems Analyst 57,477 81,453
Software Engineer Software Developers, Applications 47,176 83,946
Business Analyst NA 11,884 20,048
Graphic Designer Graphic Designer 863 1,340
Java Developer NA 3,112 3,377
Web Developer Web Developer 1,023 1,682
Note: NA denotes a Glassdoor Job Title that has no BLS Job Title equivalent
The following three graphs and tables show that the median salaries of the two major job categories (Programmer Analyst and Software Engineer) and Financial Analyst. They show H-1B workers making lower median salaries in all 10 cities. The difference between U.S. and H-1B median wages are less clear in the last two job categories (Graphic Designer and Web Developer) but the above table shows that these categories make up a much smaller percentage of the H-1B LCAs.
Programmer Analyst - Median Salary, 2016
City BLS Glassdoor H1B
Atlanta 86,694 65,000 64,043
Boston 94,682 77,000 69,000
Chicago 87,776 85,000 61,000
Houston 92,934 80,000 65,000
Los Angeles 91,832 80,000 70,000
New York 98,426 81,000 63,300
Philadelphia 91,166 63,500 68,037
San Francisco 106,995 76,250 75,000
Seattle 95,909 90,000 84,739
D.C. 99,757 97,000 70,000
Software Engineer - Median Salary, 2016
City BLS Glassdoor H1B
Atlanta 97,178 90,000 76,000
Boston 107,931 100,000 90,000
Chicago 97,302 90,000 75,000
Houston 105,165 86,000 72,000
Los Angeles 110,053 100,000 92,153
New York 104,936 110,000 100,000
Philadelphia 100,214 86,000 72,800
San Francisco 123,490 125,000 120,390
Seattle 127,982 115,000 115,000
D.C. 113,027 105,000 88,950
Financial Analyst - Median Salary, 2016
City BLS Glassdoor H1B
Atlanta 74,610 68,350 62,500
Boston 84,094 71,000 60,000
Chicago 79,893 70,000 60,042
Houston 80,475 76,000 60,000
Los Angeles 86,840 65,000 62,400
New York 103,022 70,000 66,560
Philadelphia 75,234 60,000 60,850
San Francisco 107,744 85,000 80,000
Seattle 85,114 73,000 80,000
D.C. 89,024 70,000 64,000
Graphic Designer - Median Salary, 2016
City BLS Glassdoor H1B
Atlanta 50,253 50,000 54,000
Boston 57,470 50,000 54,000
Chicago 50,690 48,500 42,099
Houston 43,347 48,000 50,000
Los Angeles 53,227 51,000 37,440
New York 59,322 52,000 46,920
Philadelphia 52,125 44,360 59,000
San Francisco 65,208 70,000 62,000
Seattle 58,386 52,000 70,824
D.C. 63,253 46,000 43,175
Web Developer - Median Salary, 2016
City BLS Glassdoor H1B
Atlanta 76,814 85,000 76,000
Boston 77,750 75,000 80,766
Chicago 72,550 73,000 68,800
Houston 68,390 65,000 82,618
Los Angeles 67,413 75,000 72,000
New York 76,939 75,000 72,500
Philadelphia 68,536 68,000 67,038
San Francisco 97,739 91,500 87,495
Seattle 90,272 87,500 103,755
D.C. 83,512 79,000 72,000
Glassdoor and H1B numbers: Dispelling Myths: What H1B Visa Workers Are Really Paid - Glassdoor Economic Research BLS numbers for May 2016: Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA Boston-Cambridge-Nashua, MA-NH Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN-WI Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land, TX Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward, CA Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV