College-Grad Salaries Cut by Hidden Army of 1.5 Million Visa-Workers

White-collar salaries are stalling partly because roughly 1.5 million non-immigrant, lower-wage visa-workers have been quietly imported to take many white-collar jobs, sometimes directly from American employees.

Media descriptions of the controversial H-1B program say it brings in 85,000 foreign graduates per year. But the program actually keeps at least 460,000 foreign workers in the United States. Other estimates put the resident H-1B population at 650,000 or even up to almost 1 million.

Similarly, the number of foreign college-grads getting a work-permit via the little-known “Option Practical Training” program rose again in 2018, despite President Donald Trump’s “Hire American” policy. The number of valid OPT work-permits for foreign graduates rose from roughly 200,000 in 2016 to 250,000 in 2017...

Few Americans even know about the L-1 visa program which allows U.S.-based companies to hire foreigners at foreign wage-levels for work inside the United States, says Ron Hira, a Howard University professors who Indian parents were immigrants. He said in a 2016 report:

"The L-1 visa and F-1 visa Optional Practical Training (OPT) programs are in many ways more harmful to American workers than the H-1B program. They have no protections for American workers or foreign workers. There are no recruitment or non-displacement requirements for either program. American workers can and are replaced by these workers " ...

This army of at least 1.1 million white-collar visa-workers is reinforced by at least 300,000 Indian white-collar graduates who can work in U.S. jobs while they wait in line for green cards. Most of those “EAD workers” arrived as temporary H-1B and L-1 workers, but are allowed to continue working with renewable Employment Authorization Documents while they wait for a green card to become an immigrant. Roughly 100,000 spouses of EAD workers also have been given work permits.

“... Freepers … have no clue how hard it is to get a STEM degree. If salaries for STEM employment go up then more Americans with the aptitude will major in STEM.... nobody that majors in STEM is lazy...” [central_va, post 26]

central_va has unscrambled half of it.

But most of the forum seems to be laboring under the misconception that merely upping salaries will attract more qualified people. A central point of dogma for economists, but it’s not true in every place and every time.

STEM is much more difficult than most can bear to admit. I learned this attending a federal service academy in the early 1970s; many classmates attempted to major in engineering, chemistry, physics, math, or (then newly-created) computer science, but were unable to cope. No matter how hard they worked, some simply did not have the smarts. Many flunked out, but many changed their major to something less demanding.

By dumb luck, my time on active duty (which stretched to almost 25 years) coincided with the computer revolution, from punched paper tape, through central mainframes accessed through remote terminals, through floppy-disk desktops, through local nets, to the first phase of the dot-com bubble. Every device imaginable (and some that weren’t) received its very own microchip or CPU, and all of them had to have programming installed.

All of it led to the explosion of jobs in programming, coding, and various related fields - especially in what was previously termed “electrical engineering” (very loosely).

Specialization became unavoidable: there was simply too much intellectual material for one person to absorb. No longer could any single individual design a software package and program it; they could not even gather in the major subprograms necessary, then hold them in their personal imagination all at one time.

By the early 1980s, firms building software-controlled devices had to create coding teams to cope with the mounting complexity. These had to cooperate with other teams (power systems, antennas, materials and structural, environmental) to make sure all of it fit together and functioned. Yet more specialties were created: in systems engineering and systems integration. All of which were gleefully sneered at by the super-specialists at the cutting edge.

A premium was put on teamwork. More vexing still, each of the unrelated specialties had to communicate with each other: something they were incapable of to begin with. Worse yet, engineers and other tech types knew they are smarter than everyone else. Most are indifferent to interpersonal relations; they looked down on us lesser mortals (whom they worked for) and expected us to adjust to them - when they bothered to think about it at all. And they are parochial to a fault: the more specialized they become, the more disdain they develop for everybody else.

Management (and those of us in uniform who led these folks and guided their work) coped only partially. The massive uptake of science and engineering types of the early Reagan years did help a little, but those of us in mid-level leadership billets often found we had to perform extra duty, explaining to newly-commissioned Ensigns and 2Lts just why they were doing things.

Most of it dragged along, or flopped, because no one could really appreciate the proliferation in information systems, and the explosion in system complexity that derived directly from it. Maintenance, operation, and employment concepts had to be re-invented from the inside out. And senior leaders - who were shielded from the changes by the coterie of lackeys and eager aspirants that always cluster around high rankers - got a clue only by accident. They hadn’t gotten where they were by being tentative, nor open-minded. “Timeless truths” and “unchanging verities” were their thing. Rarely did any perceive that giant changes were going on, that they could not reverse.

Just a microcosm of the changes that have hit American industry and the economy over the past 50-odd years. Bear in mind that it went down before affirmative action, diversity, mandatory corporate-cultural sensitivity training, and devolution in higher ed really began to have an impact. None of those have done a thing to improve the smarts of the average STEM-hopeful college student.

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