To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter 166

The NYT blog on H-1B yesterday (http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/)
drew 398 reader comments, far more than any other topic among the other
five or six currently on the site.  My guess is that the Time was taken
aback by the quantity of reader responses on this topic.  By the way, I
read or at least skimmed every single one.

Interestingly, the panel of six experts, including several familiar to
readers of this e-newsletter (Ron Hira, John Miano, Vivek Wadhwa and
me), were pretty much ignored in the reader comments.  Readers had their
own prior points of view on the topic, and expressed them--sometimes
elegantly, sometimes crudely--but they rarely drew upon the statements
of us "experts."  Still, I assume that those not familiar with the topic
found the experts' statements informative.

To me the most interesting aspect was the consensus that the H-1B
program does indeed have very deep problems.  Except for the occasional
immigration lawyer who wrote that employers must pay H-1Bs prevailing
wage (ignoring my point that the legal definition of prevailing wage is
full of loopholes, rendering legal prevailing wage well below true
market wage), there seemed to be rather general agreement that the
program is widely abused.  Many of the current and former H-1Bs who
wrote reader responses admitted that H-1Bs are typically underpaid (as
one put it, "at the lower end of the range"), and even the most pro-H-1B
panelist, venture capitalist Mark Heeson said the program has "serious
issues."  (I was a bit surprised that Vivek Wadhwa said nothing negative
about H-1B here, though he frequently writes about about the widespread
underpayment of H-1Bs, even admitting to engaging in such practice
himself back in his CEO days.)

The Times will be running an article on H-1B over the weekend, and
commentary from the same expert panel will appear next week.

Norm