Fragomen on Immigration: Report Finds Lack of H-1B Visas Causes Job and Wage Loss for U.S. Tech Workers

A new report by the bipartisan Partnership for a New American Economy has found that the denial of H-1B visas for foreign computer technology professionals has caused a significant loss of job and wage growth for U.S.-born tech workers. The report, entitled “Closing Economic Windows: How H 1B Visa Denials Cost U.S.-Born Tech Workers Jobs and Wages During the Great Recession,” drew on data from a naturally-occurring randomized sample: the 2007 and 2008 H 1B visa lotteries. 

• The high number of H-1B visa applications that were eliminated in the 2007-2008 visa lotteries represented a major lost opportunity for U.S.- born workers and the American economy overall.
• The U.S. tech industry would have grown substantially faster in the years immediately after the recession if not for the large number of visas that didn’t make it through the 2007 and 2008 H-1B visa lotteries.
• U.S.-born workers without bachelor’s degrees were disproportionately hurt by the H-1B visa lotteries in 2007-2008.
• The H-1B visa denials from the lotteries in 2007 and 2008 greatly slowed wage growth for workers in computer-related industries. 

When employers were unable to hire H-1B workers to whom they had made job offers, those employers did not create jobs in operations, sales and other support positions that expanded businesses would have needed. And contrary to the popular myth that all tech jobs are performed by high-skilled workers, many of these lost jobs would have gone to lesser-skilled support staff working in secretarial, administrative and other lower-level positions. Notably, these are the types of jobs that would have gone to precisely those workers who were hardest hit by the recession that began in 2007. 

The clear results of the detailed analysis set out in this report show that “[d]enying H-1B visas didn’t help the economies of America’s cities or their U.S.-born workers. Instead, it cost their tech sectors hundreds of thousands of jobs and billions in missed wages.” 

The report, available at the link below, is well worth reading in its entirety: 

http://www.renewoureconomy.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/pnae_h1b.pdf