EDITORIAL: Immigrants Win Tech Jobs
Advocate (excerpt)

One of the consequences of last year’s bitter debate over immigration reform has been a hiring crunch in high-tech companies.

Why? Because the number of visas for high-tech workers from abroad is limited, despite the howls of computer companies that they need more skilled labor. And one of the issues in the immigration bill was a proposal to raise the annual limit on H-1B visas, those eagerly sought by tech companies.

That’s 85,000 well-paying jobs that are going to immigrants. At what point is the demand for H-1B visas not a matter of an immigration bottleneck but a case of companies seeking cheaper labor from abroad? Independent studies of the technology labor market have suggested in the past that immigrant tech workers will work for less.