Congress Fully Aware of Problems in H-1B Program, Doesn’t Want To Offend Big Tech

In today’s H-1B news, “Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith criticized the Trump administration's crackdown on employment-based immigration”:

Smith also disputed claims that Microsoft compensates foreign workers less generously, insisting, “it doesn’t matter whether you came on a visa or you’re an American worker, everybody has the same compensation system.”

Then perhaps Brad Smith could explain the figures below.

Newsweek reports that “Republicans have introduced legislation that would raise a key salary threshold in the H-1B visa program from $60,000 to almost $140,000, a change that could significantly affect some companies that rely heavily on foreign workers.” Under current law, heavy users of H-1B visas ("H-1B-dependent employers", those with 15 percent or more of the workforce on the visas) have to make certain non-displacement and recruitment attestations -- unless they pay the visa workers at least $60,000 or the workers have a master's degree or higher.

In reality the bill (S. 5638) does not represent a meaningful change. Because the lobbyist-written text of the H-1B program has redundancies, Congress could raise the $60,000 figure to $600 trillion and it would have no effect on the program because of the master's degree loophole.