Posted on 04/27/2009 5:17:06 AM PDT by Wpin
Immigrants who come to the U.S. on work or trainee visas ultimately outperform American-born workers and contribute to the country’s productivity, new research shows.
Examining measures such as earnings, patenting, commercializing and licensing patents, publishing book or papers and presenting at major conferences, McGill University economics professor Jennifer Hunt concluded that those who were most successful came to the U.S. on temporary work visas for the highly skilled, known as H-1Bs, or student/trainee visas, such as J-1s or F-1s.
Meanwhile, those immigrants that came to the U.S. as legal permanent residents performed as well as those who were born in the U.S. But, those immigrants who came to the U.S. as dependents of those with temporary visas — spouses, relatives, etc. — were less productive than native Americans.
Hunt concludes, “Firms, universities and teaching hospitals are successful in attracting and selecting immigrants who remain in the United States to outperform natives, thereby likely increasing U.S. total factor productivity. By contrast, natives and immigrants already in the United States sponsor college-educated immigrant spouses and family members who perform similarly to college-educated natives.”
Looking at hourly wages, Hunt’s study showed American workers, with a bachelor’s degree or higher, made $29.60 per hour compared to those, with the same education level, who came to the U.S. on a work visa and earned $34.20 per hour.
Besides earnings, Hunt primarily attributes the performance advantage to the immigrants’ higher education and tendency toward more lucrative fields of study. When it comes to earnings though, immigrants’ success is heavily dependent on when they come to the U.S. ...
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.wsj.com ...
The US has always been fairly selective about who can get a visa; it’s not surprising that these people go on to do well.
We just have a schizophrenic policy; selective about the educated people who get in while, at the same time, allowing anyone who can sneak across the border and work at slave wages to stay.
yeah..i suspect the usual hate crowd to convene here soon..disputing everything.
The facts remain..
I know of many cases of H1B fraud, usually the perpetrators are consulting "body shops" in the computer and cellular/wireless industries, where the purpose is to put as many people as possible with the client and profit from the difference between what the client pays and what the company pays the worker.
It is not always scutwork - I know of $60K or higher jobs that are never offered to Americans but instead are filled by finding someone from a Third World country and paying them less than the market rate.
yes, there is always fraud when government program is involved. i certainly agree that that sort of misuse should be terminated and companies punished.
The original idea of the program - to attract highly-qualified workers - is essential to the US. Besides, if this hostile to H1 attitude goes on, other countries may similarly punish US citizens working abroad (and they would have to come home and take jobs here from those US citizens who hold them now).
Ending illegal immigration and H1B visa misuse are fine goals.
A Canadian opinion (I don’t call it research) on American productivity. Lovely.
Now, maybe the WSJ could be a bit more honest and compare similar bachelor's degrees instead of all such degrees. Immigrants tend to have technically-oriented degrees that pay much better than a Bachelor's of Fine Arts that some gal on the M-R-S career path is getting.
Hate? Hate is such a lazy word. When confronted with facts that are difficult, if not impossible, to refute, one just bleats Ha-a-a-t-e instead.
I don't hate immigrants, I used to be married to one. What I do hate is the big lie of H-1B visas, where the process is rigged against its own rules to ensure the H-1B holder is hired. What I hate is when, during the 2002 IT slump, 240,000 H-1B holders were brought in during a time of rampant unemployment in the IT sector. In other words, I hate the big lie that H-1B visas represent in this downward trending economy.
I'll ask two questions. One - Why doesn't the US protect it's native workforce like every other decent country on the planet? Two - Why does it import workers while punishing citizens who earn money outside it's borders, again unlike any other country?
In case anyone is wondering about question two, why does US citizens have to pay any income tax on money earned outside the US? It effectively creates a captive workforce while cramming even more workers in. One could say companies deliberately drive down the wage.
It's pretty simple: politicians having money stuffed in their pockets and PACs by corporations and organizations who would rather hire the cheaper H1B labor.
Hogwash. I'd bet neither the author, nor the researcher she quotes, has ever observed or asked any of these visa workers what kind of work they are doing or what they have accomplished.
From most of them, the answer would be, "show up, get check (maybe)".
You should try it sometime.
My brother is a head hunter for a world wide manufacturing corporation. According to him, foreign workers are loyal to the American companies that hire them. They feel their U.S. jobs are the greatest gift they've ever been given. American college students complain about everything. They come to work each day looking for some one else to blame for their miserable existence.
It's not really the education that matters the most. It's the attitude.
I have hired H1B employees, they all worked out great. I find the article very credible, that is why I posted it. The H1B visa immigrants are much maligned, and I believe it is unfair.
Personally I think that like nearly all things. The real answer lies somewhere in the middle of Great Job and Wonderful performance and Lousy Job and Horrible Performance.
With that being said I have only been exposed to a handful of H1B Personnel. And quite frankly although they talked a great line, their performance and quality of work were abysmal. I and my fellow workers spent months and in one case two years cleaning up after them and getting the projects they were working on redone and passed through the certification process.
And quite frankly what ticked us off the most was that we found out that in one case the guy was making double our salaries.
That is horrible, I didn’t mean to imply that all H1B immigrants are great or worthy even...in my cases I have had great ‘luck’ however with wonderful people who work very hard and are very competent.
Productive is relative. We had good Indian programmers but there was always a language gap. They also tended to be a bit inflexible when it came to code changes. But they were really good coders.
More productive ?
I know of a Fortune 500 company who fired all their inspectors and replaced them with Masters level largely Indian foreign “quality” engineers. They paid the inspectors around $40K a year, and the foreigners around $80K a year.
The inspectors actually checked parts and worked with suppliers to correct quality and engineering problems. The foreign engineers set up incredibly complex and utterly inappropriate “quality systems”, burdening the suppliers with rising costs by requiring them to apply quality assurance methods that were entirely inappropriate to the job at hand. They also took the attitude that the company’s engineering was always right (ha !). The systems were so onerous and complex that Mom & Pop suppliers, who actually were the right size for their production volume, couldn’t possibly compete.
Their assembly floor was burdened by the new techniques, which allowed numerous defective parts into their plant such that 10 or 20 large, complex and expensive final assemblies suffered from quality problems that the technicians played hide-n-seek with.
These “productive foreigners” with their advanced degrees were ruinous.
On the other hand, some foreign engineering schools (notably England & Poland) have much better training than ours, when it comes to “hands on” applications, which is what “engineering” is supposed to be - practical application of science.
This was markedly not the case with “bramans” from India and Pakistan. Theory, all day. Practical application, rarely. Arrogance - HUGE.
WSJ Editorial ... Ping!
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