www.cis.org
Mensa Thom -- Check this out.
This is a study by Norm Matloff
H-1Bs: Still Not the Best and the Brightest
Discussion and Conclusions
The lobbyists for the tech industry and the American Immigration Lawyers Association know that crying educational doom-and-gloom sells. Even though it was people born and educated in the United States who were primarily responsible for developing the computer industry, and even though all major East Asian governments have lamented their educational systems' stifling of creativity, the lobbyists have convinced Congress that the industry needs foreign workers from Asia in order to innovate.
The data show otherwise. Most foreign tech workers, particularly those from Asia, are in fact of only average talent. Moreover, they are hired for low-level jobs of limited responsibility, not positions that generate innovation. This is true both overall and in the key tech occupations, and most importantly, in the firms most stridently demanding that Congress admit more foreign workers.
Note again that the analyses presented here confirm and provide much sharper quantitative insight into previous work showing that the H-1Bs are of just average talent. It has been shown for instance that foreign students in the U.S. tend to be concentrated in the less-selective universities, and that they receive a lower percentage of research awards relative to their numbers in the student population. In the workforce, the foreign nationals in the U.S. participate in teams applying for patents at the same percentage as do the U.S. citizens, and so on.
To be sure, the author is a strong supporter of facilitating the immigration of the world's best and brightest. He has acted on that belief, by championing the hiring of extraordinarily
talented researchers, mostly from India and China, into his department faculty. But as seen here, very few of the foreign workers are of that caliber.
Expansion of the guest worker programs - both H-1B visas and green cards - is unwarranted.
