H-1B Recipients Are Not the ‘Best and Brightest’

Apersistently frustrating aspect of the debate over high-skill immigration is the disconnect between rhetoric and policy. Advocates will often speak of Einsteins and von Brauns but then support policies that bring in ordinary college graduates instead. Elon Musk, for example, recently praised the H-1B program while also claiming to want only “the top ~0.1% of engineering talent”. The former does not produce the latter.

In case there are lingering doubts about this distinction, my colleague John Miano recently posted an analysis of H-1B wage data obtained by Bloomberg News. He shows that H-1B recipients are generally paid at the lower end of the wage distribution for a given occupation and location. His tables offer some very specific illustrations. In Portland, Intel pays H-1B materials engineers from India about $20,000 less than U.S. materials engineers. In San Jose, Google pays H-1B software developers from China about $55,000 less than U.S. software developers. The examples go on and on. (The linked post is part of a larger report that will be published soon.)

Now, wages and skills are not always perfectly linked. One could imagine H-1B recipients suffering a wage penalty because they have limited bargaining power. However, it is difficult to reconcile being the “best and brightest” with receiving below-average wages in a given occupation and location. The simplest explanation is that H-1B recipients are not the best and brightest.

A recent Trump administration policy imposing a $100,000 H-1B visa fee caused even the Chamber of Commerce to admit this reality. As my colleague George Fishman points out, the Chamber’s court filing against that policy declares that “employers need not show that their prospective [H-1B] workers are the best of the best, but merely highly skilled”, and that imposing a best-and-brightest requirement “undercuts the very existence of the program”.