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Comment by WestCoastJustin | Hacker News Reader

This closely jives with the "Degrees conferred by sex and race" stats from U.S. Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences National Center for Education Statistics.

ps. Interesting side note, is that while looking this up, I wanted to see if H1B visas skewed the stats. I found a page that lists "10 of the largest and hottest US Companies that hire skilled immigrants for H1B visas" [2]. What's interesting is that these numbers are far lower than I thought they would be, as in, I thought H1B visas were the life blood of these companies. But these numbers are probably not even a fraction of their total employee base.

  Amazon      333 visas
  Apple       520 visas
  Facebook    173 visas
  Google      685 visas
  Microsoft 2,125 visas
  ...

[1] http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=72

[2] http://www.h1base.com/visa/work/H1Bvisa10topH1BsponsorsRevie...

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Off topic, but that's partly the reason why I'm fairly annoyed with all the "US company is hiring H1B to repress wage" news. It seems to me that the lower wage can be easily explained by the fact that H1B visa holders tends to be on the younger side (it's not really a nice experience to be on one, and I don't expect mid career programmer to be interested in it). If FB can save 100k per H1B employees, that comes to ~18mils a year. Last year, their revenue was 8 billions.

The H1Bs aren't being hired by A-list companies. They're getting hired by old, slow, cheap, mostly non-tech corporations who won't compete on either quality of work or wages.

> The H1Bs aren't being hired by A-list companies.

H1B is a type of visa, it cannot be hired.

> They're getting hired by old, slow, cheap, mostly non-tech corporations who won't compete on either quality of work or wages.

Foreigner = Evil. On the other hand, you get an H1B if you are shown to be more qualified than u.s. citizens who applied to the job. If anything, it's a great way to bring in skilled laborers and keep them in check (since, if you get fired, you get deported too).

Qualified isn't the problem. Willing isn't the problem. When some old non-tech company needs a network engineer to work in some crusty old industrial town in the middle of nowhere for 2/3 what a qualified person would make in actual civilization, they cannot get one. Even if they paid market rates, which they find appalling, they couldn't get anyone to move into the boonies in an environment with little opportunity for professional advancement.

So they import someone on an H1B visa, work them for a few years, and send them home. They've solved the kind of labor shortage that causes immigration, without actually giving them the chance to become Americans.

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