Elon Musk recently sparked a heated debate online when he said on social media that the U.S. lacks top engineers and cited immigration as a solution to a problem he characterized as a lack of technical expertise. .
“There is a severe shortage of extremely talented and motivated engineers in the United States,” Musk wrote on his social media platform X, comparing tech companies to professional sports teams scouting players. “If you let the best talent in the world play on the other team, America will lose.”
The claim is in the center divide Both supporters of President-elect Donald Trump, who tend to take hard-line stances on immigration, and technology entrepreneurs like Musk, who with X run exploration company SpaceX and electric car maker Tesla. Company H employs many foreign workers. 1B visa.
But labor market data suggests there is no shortage of high-tech workers in the U.S., and critics of the H-1B program argue that it displaces Americans and leaves them employed at lower wages. It claims to support foreign-born employees. Proponents of hiring skilled workers from abroad say that while high-tech jobs are not zero-sum, hiring foreigners with specialized skills fosters innovation and ultimately leads to more U.S.-born workers. They argue that more jobs could be created.
The number of bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in computer science and engineering awarded in the U.S. is at its highest level since 1970-71 in the 2020-21 and 2021-22 academic years, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics. Reached.
Meanwhile, technology and engineering jobs in the United States are expected to grow by 7% by 2033, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The foreign-born share of the science and engineering workforce has increased over the past 30 years, with STEM workers having the highest employment rate of any occupation over the past five years, according to the National Science Foundation .
Companies with the most H-1B workers
Tech companies are some of the biggest beneficiaries of the H-1B program, which aims to allow highly skilled foreign nationals to work in the United States, and Amazon Most H1-B visas According to data from the Department of Labor, any company could do so by 2024. Microsoft, Google and Meta are also in the top 10, but Tesla currently ranks 16th, according to the National Policy Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank focused on trade and immigration issues.
Last year, more H-1B visas were issued to software developers than any other occupation.
“H-1B visas are like the Swiss Army Knife of visas. They are used for a variety of purposes,” says the University of California, San Diego Society, author of Why STEM Graduates Choose Careers Outside of Their Fields. Professor John Skrenny said. they studied. “If you hear someone say that H-1B visas are very important for attracting top talent to the United States, they’re right. At the same time, H-1B visas are being used for cheap labor.”
Survey by etc. 60 minutes The New York Times reports that some companies are laying off American workers and replacing them with H-1B employers, in some cases requiring departed employees to train their replacements in order to receive severance pay. He revealed that he was even doing this.
Ronil Hira, an associate professor of political science at Howard University and a fellow at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said some of the roles H-1B workers are hired for include less complex work, such as product testing. It is said to be included. These roles do not necessarily meet the visa program’s intended goal of outsourcing roles that require unique skills.
In addition to Big Tech companies, consulting firms such as Cognizant, Tata, and Infosys are also among the largest recipients of H-1B visas, providing highly educated and well-trained employees willing to work for technology companies on a contract basis. provides a stable pipeline.
These companies are encouraged to find employees willing to accept lower wages, Hilla said.
“Their business model is to resell labor. If you resell labor, the way to be competitive is to lower your labor costs.”
Supporting innovation?
Still, the evidence that the H-1B program has had a broad impact on U.S. employment is mixed. A study by the IZA Institute for Labor Economics found that the average employer receiving H-1B visas does not replace American workers. According to the research firm, companies that received visas initially hired more foreign-born workers in response, but they also typically saw an increase in revenue and were eventually able to hire additional workers. It is said that
The impact was greater for smaller employers, who applied for only a small number of visas, the study showed.
“Most of our results are driven by small businesses, because that’s where the lottery really matters,” said Parag Mahajan, one of the study authors and an assistant professor of economics at the University of Delaware. Ta. For those companies, “there’s great value in looking for talent elsewhere,” he said.
Mahajan’s research shows that for some companies, hiring foreign workers on H-1B visas ultimately creates jobs for U.S.-born workers because their skills help the company grow. It also became clear that something was going to happen.
But some economists, including Mr. Hilla, dispute the claim that foreign workers are needed to fill a nationwide shortage of qualified engineers.
Just as gasoline prices go up when the oil supply decreases, a shortage of workers in a particular role causes wages in that sector to go up, Hilla said. But labor market data shows wages in the tech industry are relatively stable.
Median weekly wages for computer and math-related occupations increased by 0.27% from 2019 to 2023, after adjusting for inflation, according to data from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. Engineering and architecture occupations saw wages decrease by 3.53% over the same period.
More people are fired than hired.
Tech companies have also laid off hundreds of employees in recent years while continuing to sponsor new H-1B visas. According to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, the top 30 companies employing the most H-1B workers hired 34,000 new H-1B workers in 2022, but not in the same year and 2023. It was initially revealed that at least 85,000 workers had been laid off.
The layoffs reflect fewer jobs available in the industry. According to the job board platform, the number of software development jobs on Indeed.com is 67% of what it was in February 2020.
It is unclear how the debate over H-1B will be reflected in policy after President Trump takes office. During his first term, he issued an executive order called “Buy American, Hire American,” aimed at supporting American manufacturing. The order also directed the Cabinet to propose changes to limit the H-1B program to only the highest paid or most skilled applicants.
But President Trump called the H-1B visa “a great program” in an interview with the New York Post last month. Musk, who has become a close ally of the president-elect, said in one X post that he would “go to war over this issue.”
“I’ve always liked visas, I’ve always been for visas,” President Trump said. “That’s why we have them.”
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