Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by achompas 4712 days ago
This paper

http://www.epi.org/publication/bp359-guestworkers-high-skill...

seems to say yes:

"Analyzing new data, drawing on a number of our prior analyses, and reviewing other studies of wages and employment in the STEM and IT industries, we find that industry trends are strikingly consistent: ... Wages have remained flat, with real wages hovering around their late 1990s levels."

EDIT: if you're skeptical of EPI, Brookings also agrees:

http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2013/05/10-h1b-visa...

DOUBLE EDIT: to echo what I've said in other comments, Brookings disagrees with EPI's findings. PBS selectively quoted them.

2 comments

Wages have been stagnating generally, including in many industries unaffected by the guest worker program, so I'm not sure they are showing a causal relation.
Table 2 in the Brookings paper says the opposite.

" In recent years, from 2009 to 2011, nominal wage growth for U.S.-born workers with at least a bachelor’s degree has been high for the most prominent H-1B occupations. The average native-born worker experienced flat annual growth in wages over that period (0.0 percent), but wage growth for those in computer occupations—the largest H-1B category—grew by 1.3 percent each year since 2009 and 2.7 percent each year since 2000 for those with a bachelor’s degree. Wage growth was even higher for engineers, with 2.1 percent growth since 2009 and 3 percent growth since 2000."

what about real wages?