Elon Musk recently sparked heated debate online when the billionaire said on social media that the US lacks enough top engineers, pointing to immigration as a solution to the lack of technical expertise.
“There is a severe shortage of extremely talented and motivated engineers in the United States,” Musk said. Posted On his social media platform, X, tech companies are being compared to a pro sports team scouting players. “If you force the best talent in the world to play for the other team, America will lose.”
claims are at the center of a split Between supporters of President-elect Donald Trump, who takes a tough stance against immigration, and technology entrepreneurs like Musk, who jointly runs exploration company SpaceX and electric vehicle maker Tesla, both hired with H- Provide employment to many foreign workers. 1B visa.
Yet labor market data shows that US tech workers are in short supply, and critics of the H-1B program say it displaces Americans in favor of foreign-born workers hired at lower wages. Is. Proponents of recruiting skilled workers from abroad say that while tech jobs are not zero-sum, hiring foreigners with specialized skills can spur innovation and ultimately create more jobs for U.S.-born workers. .
Data from the National Center for Education Statistics shows That the number of bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in computer science and engineering awarded in the US reached their highest level since 1970–71 in the 2020–21 and 2021–22 academic years.
Meanwhile, tech and engineering jobs are expected to increase in the US Grow By 7% by 2033, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The share of the foreign-born science and engineering workforce has increased over the past three decades, According According to the National Science Foundation, while STEM workers have experienced the highest employment rates of any occupation over the past five years.
Companies with highest number of H-1B employees
Tech companies are some of the biggest beneficiaries of the H-1B program, which aims to allow highly skilled foreigners to work in the US, with Amazon receiving the award. Most H1-B Visas Labor Department data shows that in 2024, any company. Microsoft, Google and Meta were also in the top 10, while Tesla is now at 16th. According National Foundation for American Policy, a non-partisan think tank that focuses on trade and immigration issues.
More H-1B visas were granted to software developers last year than any other position.
“The H-1B visa is like a Swiss Army visa knife. It's used for many different purposes,” said John Skrentny, a sociology professor at UC San Diego. they studied. “If you hear people saying that the H-1B visa is very important for attracting the best and brightest to the United States, they are right. At the same time, the H-1B visa is used for cheap labor goes.”
including investigation 60 minutes And the new York Times Some companies have been found to have fired US workers and then hired H-1B workers in their place, sometimes even requiring the displaced workers to train their replacements in order to receive their severance packages. it occurs.
Ronil Hira, an associate professor of political science at Harvard University and a research fellow at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said the roles for which H-1B workers are hired also include less complex work such as product testing. These roles do not necessarily meet the Visa program's intended goal of outsourcing roles that require unique skills.
Apart from Big Tech companies, consulting companies like Cognizant, Tata and Infosys are also among the largest recipients of H-1B visas, providing tech companies with a steady pipeline of highly educated, well-trained employees willing to work on contract. Do it.
These companies are incentivized to find workers who will accept lower wages, Diamond said.
“Their business model is to resell labor. If you're reselling labor, the way you become competitive is to lower labor costs.”
Promote innovation?
Nevertheless, evidence on the broader impact of the H-1B program on employment in the US is mixed. One Study The IZA Institute of Labor Economics found that the average employer obtaining an H-1B visa is not displacing American workers. The research firm found that although companies that initially received visas hired more foreign-born workers in response, they also generally experienced increased revenues and were ultimately able to hire additional workers.
The study showed that the impact was greater on smaller employers who applied for only a few visas.
“Most of our results are driven by smaller companies because they are the ones for whom the lottery really matters,” said Parag Mahajan, one of the study's authors and an assistant economics professor at the University of Delaware. For those companies, he said, “it's too valuable to look elsewhere for talent.”
Mahajan's study also found that for some companies, hiring a foreign worker on an H-1B visa ultimately created jobs for American-born workers because the person's skills can help the company grow .
But some economists, including Hira, have objected to the claim that foreign workers are needed to address a nationwide shortage of talented engineers.
When there is a shortage of workers for a particular role, wages in that sector go up, the same way gas prices go up when oil supplies are tight, Diamond said. But labor market data shows that wages in the tech industry have remained relatively stable.
After adjusting for inflation, average weekly earnings in computer and math roles are projected to increase 0.27% from 2019 to 2023, Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows. In engineering and architecture roles, salaries declined by 3.53% during the same time frame.
firing more than hiring
Tech companies have laid off hundreds of workers in recent years while continuing to sponsor new H-1B visas. An analysis by Economic Policy Institute Found that the top 30 companies hiring the most H-1B workers hired 34,000 new H-1B workers in 2022, but laid off at least 85,000 workers between that year and early 2023.
These layoffs reflect a decline in jobs available in the industry. job postings According to the job board platform, software development on Indeed.com is up 67% compared to February 2020.
It is not clear how the debate over H-1B will translate into policy after Trump takes office. In his first term, he issued an executive order named “Buy American and Hire American”, which was intended to support American manufacturing. The order also directed Cabinet members to suggest changes to the H-1B program to limit it to only the highest-paid or most skilled applicants.
but in an interview New York Post Last month, Trump called H-1B visas a “great program.” Musk, who has become a close adviser to the president-elect, said he would “go to war on this issue” in an X. Post,
“I've always liked visas, I've always been in favor of visas,” Trump said. “That's why we have them.”
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