Our elected officals only care about the top 10%.
Bill Clinton showed them the way.
There is not one bit of difference in the current crop of candidates either, if anyone of them would actually intend to fix any of the many wrong directions in which this country is heading they would not even be allowed to get into the debates.
Our system is badly, badly broken and will only get worse.
Reelect NOBODY
Vote for NONE OF THE ABOVE.

page 2 of UI report:

Our analysis at the aggregate level does not find a shortage of potential S&E students or workers. However, this conclusion is put forth with one caveat: the analysis of all S&E students and workers may not apply equally to the trends and problems faced in specific fields or by domestic minority groups. A fine-grained analysis of specific industries, occupations, and populations is needed to identify the weakness in the U.S. education system.

Sorry Ephraim Schwartz, I have to agree with Bill Gates.
I do not know about high tech executives but I am a middle level manager working in a IT/technology group and I can't find QUALIFIED people.
The report and the article are misleading.
Just because there are people taking more science classes does not automatically translate into better science graduates.
The report may be good for AntiImmigration groups but I have to face the reality of delivering projects and on time and within budget. Bottomline - Without these H1b folks working, I wouldn't be able to deliver.

Why, sure, PB, you can't find "qualified" workers, because every time you find a US citizen capable of doing the work you make an extra effort to declare him to be "disqualified", as advised by the immigration sheisters. We're wise to that scam.

Yes, there may be a hundred jobs in the country that no US citizen can immediately do, but there's no way there are over 100K such in IT. And even if there were, hardly any of the H-1Bs would be capable of doing them, either, because, according to the scant government records available, the vast majority are inexperienced and possess no extraordinary skills.

(1) One myth dogging the immigration debate is that employers are fibbing (or grossly exaggerating) when they claim that hiring foreign professionals is unavoidable because U.S.-born Ph.D.s are hard to come by. But a new report on doctorates from U.S. universities shows they're telling the truth, and then some.

(2) Immigration opponents still claim that the likes of Intel and Oracle merely want to hire Chinese engineers on the cheap. In fact, U.S. law already prohibits companies from paying these foreign nationals less than natives. And all other things being equal, the American job applicant has an advantage because employers are required to pay an additional $4,000-$6,000 in taxes and fees on every H-1B visa holder they hire.

(3) Economic protectionists oppose lifting the visa cap to meet demand. But it makes little sense for our universities to be educating these talented foreign students, only to send them packing after graduation. Current policies have MIT and Stanford educating the next generation of innovators -- and then deporting them to create wealth elsewhere.

Closing the door to foreign professionals puts U.S. companies at a competitive disadvantage and pushes jobs out of the country. Worse, it does so at a time when other nations are rolling out the welcome mat. Earlier this year Microsoft, which is the third-largest sponsor of H-1B visas, announced plans to open a new software development center near Vancouver. The decision to locate the facility in Canada was based in part on the fact that it doesn't have access to enough foreign workers state-side.

"We currently do 85% of our development work in the U.S., and we'd like to continue doing that," says Jack Krumholtz, the company's director of government affairs. "But if we can't hire the developers we need, . . . we're going to have to look to other options to get the work done." Meanwhile, the European Union recently introduced its own new temporary work visa that's designed to reduce red tape and waiting periods for foreign professionals.

If the U.S. spurns this human capital, it will find a home somewhere else. And that will be America's loss.

-- American Brain Drain, The Wall Street Journal, November 30, 2007

(1) You could lose your job to a foreign worker—not because he’s cheaper but because he has better workplace skills and discipline. That’s the message Labor Secretary Elaine Chao hears from U.S. executives who are worried about America’s competitive future.

(2) Beyond the cheaper cost of labor, U.S. employers say that many workers abroad simply have a better attitude toward work. “American employees must be punctual, dress appropriately and have good personal hygiene,” says Chao. “They need anger-management and conflict-resolution skills, and they have to be able to accept direction. Too many young people bristle when a supervisor asks them to do something.”

(3) As for our job future, Chao notes that most of the fastest-growing jobs today are in industries requiring advanced knowledge and skills and are “very high or high wage.”

- How Safe Is Your Job? By Lyric Wallwork Winik | parade, July 1, 2007
http://www.parade.com/articles/editions/2007/edition_07-01-2007/Intelligence_Report

Critics make assertions about the wages of H-1B professionals not out of concern for the H-1B visa holders but because the critics believe the competition harms native workers.

Note that it is possible that a policy that results in increased competition can affect some people but remain good policy nonetheless. For example, a moratorium on opening new restaurants in an area would help existing restaurant owners and their employees but would be bad for consumers and entrepreneurs who live nearby, as well as workers seeking opportunity. For that reason such protectionist policies are rare in America and their rarity is a primary reason for America’s economic success relative to other nations.

-- page 4 of H-1B PROFESSIONALS AND WAGES: SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT, NATIONAL FOUNDATION FOR AMERICAN POLICY (NFAP) Policy Brief, March 2006

(1) Critics assert the only reason a U.S. employer would ever hire someone on an H-1B visa is because he or she will work cheaper than Americans, implying that only people born in the United States possess desirable skills. The story that a veritable conspiracy exists in America to hire foreign-born professionals so they can work cheaply is unsupported by the evidence. Moreover, it runs contrary to common sense and any serious analysis of how the U.S. labor market functions. (page 1)

(2) If companies simply wanted to obtain services based only on wages, then U.S. companies would move all of their work outside the United States, since the median salary for a computer software engineer is $7,273 in Bangalore and $5,244 in Bombay, compared to $60,000 in Boston and $65,000 in New York, according to the Seattle-based market research firm PayScale. (page 2)

(3) Wages in other countries (page 11)

While much anxiety has emerged in recent years about companies locating work outside the United States, it seems contradictory for critics of “outsourcing” to also oppose the entry of skilled professionals into the United States.

Companies possess legitimate reasons to place resources in whatever geographical location will best serve the interests of customers, shareholders, and a company’s broader workforce, since unprofitable firms serve none of those interests well or for very long. However, most people would agree that U.S. government policy should not, in effect, force companies to locate more of its workforce outside the country by prohibiting foreign-born professionals to work inside the United States.

The median salary for a computer software engineer is $7,273 in Bangalore and $5,244 in Bombay, compared to $60,000 in Boston and $65,000 in New York, according to the Seattle-based market research firm PayScale. Those who would bar the door to foreign nationals being hired on H-1B visas – many graduating from U.S. universities – need to explain why it would be better if those individuals were hired in other nations by either U.S. or foreign companies.

-- H-1B PROFESSIONALS AND WAGES: SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT, NATIONAL FOUNDATION FOR AMERICAN POLICY (NFAP) Policy Brief, March 2006

Critics do not explain why H-1B professionals who are said to be underpaid would remain en masse with their employers when they could seek higher wages with competing firms. Some argue that H-1B visa holders sponsored for green cards are reluctant to change employers because they will lose their place
in the queue for labor certification and permanent residence.

To the extent this problem persists the solution is to:

a) Streamline the labor certification process (progress has been made via DOL’s new PERM system).

b) Eliminate the labor certification backlog.

c) Allow premium processing (employers paying an extra fee) to speed green card processing at the immigration service.

d) Reduce the employment categories that require labor certification.

e) Expand the annual allotment of employment-based immigrant visas.

Major U.S. employers have supported such reforms, some of which were included in the recent Senate passed budget bill, though the measures failed to become law by not surviving the reconciliation process with the House of Representatives.

- Page 8 H-1B PROFESSIONALS AND WAGES: SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT, NATIONAL FOUNDATION FOR AMERICAN POLICY (NFAP) Policy Brief, March 2006

(1) Contrary to the myth that H-1B visa holders are “indentured servants,” professionals on such visas understand their market value and show great mobility in the U.S. labor market. An NFAP sampling of U.S. employers and immigration lawyers confirmed that individuals on H-1B visas change companies frequently. In fact, generally speaking, the majority of H-1B hires by large companies today first worked for other employers. This is supported by data from the Department of Homeland Security. (page 1-2)

(2) H-1B VISA HOLDERS POSSESS LABOR MOBILITY (page 8)

While the Department of Labor is unlikely to catch all underpayment of wages, the greater protection for both H-1B professionals and other workers is the freedom to change employers and the competition for their services.

A myth has been perpetuated that H-1B visa holders are “indentured servants.” This is far from the truth. An NFAP sampling of U.S. employers and immigration lawyers found that individuals on H-1B visas change companies frequently. A number of S&P 500 companies related that the majority of their H-1B hires first worked for other employers. (Independent immigration attorneys confirmed this.) H-1B visa holders are individuals who understand the marketplace, exchange information with others in the field, and are highly sought by employers. In fact, Congress made it easier for those in H-1B status to change jobs by allowing movement to another employer before all paperwork is completed.

Data from the Department of Homeland Security show that in FY 2003 more H-1B applications were approved for “continuing” employment than for initial employment. While continuing employment also includes H-1B professionals receiving an “extension” to stay at the same employer for an additional three years, anecdotal evidence indicates most “continuing” employment involves an H-1B visa holder changing to a new employer.

- H-1B PROFESSIONALS AND WAGES: SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT, NATIONAL FOUNDATION FOR AMERICAN POLICY (NFAP) Policy Brief, March 2006

EMPLOYER LEGAL AND PROCESSING FEES FOR H-1BS

U.S. employers are obligated to pay H-1B professionals the same wage as “all other individuals with similar experience and qualifications for the specific employment in question.”

But unlike with a native-born worker, the hiring costs to an employer do not end with the acceptance of a job offer. To hire a foreign national on an H-1B visa a U.S. employer must incur the following costs:

(a) $2,500 in legal fees;
(b) $1,500 training/scholarship fee;
(c) $1,000 “premium processing” fee (not required but routinely used to overcome long processing times);
(d) a new $500 antifraud fee;
(e) a $185 immigration service fee;
(f) a $125 in additional incidental costs (Federal Express, etc.), and
(g) a $100 visa fee.

These combined costs total $5,910.

While the legal fees could be higher or lower depending on the law firm and the relationship with the employer, these figures do not include additional in-house human resources costs associated with the extra work involved in employing foreign nationals. Nor do the costs include the expense of approximately $10,000 that can be incurred by sponsoring a foreign national for permanent residence (a green card), which many large technology companies, in particular, will do.

Critics rarely take into account that companies incur many additional expenses beyond simply the wages paid to H-1B visa holders.

- page 7 of H-1B PROFESSIONALS AND WAGES: SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT, NATIONAL FOUNDATION FOR AMERICAN POLICY (NFAP) Policy Brief, March 2006

When discussing salaries, one must compare apples with apples. In other words, one should not assume something nefarious is afoot when a difference in years of experience, skill level, and language results in different salaries for individuals.

For all computer programmers with a bachelor’s degree, the median annual salary was $67,000 in 2003, while a programmer between 25 and 29 had a median salary of $58,000, according to the 2003 National Survey of College Graduates. Simply put, it may make sense for an employer to pay a younger worker less than a worker with more years in the labor market because greater experience and proven ability merits greater compensation.

The wage differences for programmers of different ages cited above ($9,000) are minor compared to other occupations. For example, in 2005 the typical annual salary for a rookie in Major League Baseball was $316,000. In contrast, the average salary for all big league baseball players was more than 8 times higher, at $2.6 million a year.

Even though there is little evidence that H-1B professionals are paid less than their native counterparts, when one takes into account factors such as experience and, perhaps, language ability, there would be nothing untoward about differences in wages, since H-1B professionals tend to be younger than natives.

-- Pages 5-6 of H-1B PROFESSIONALS AND WAGES: SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT, NATIONAL FOUNDATION FOR AMERICAN POLICY (NFAP) Policy Brief, March 2006

Dan Siciliano, who teaches corporate governance at Stanford Law School, cited recent research showing that the record immigration between 1990 and 2004 had helped to increase wages in the United States, contradicting older research that predicted the opposite would occur. He said that immigration— including illegal immigration —increased the wages of the native-born by an average of 1.8 percent, and by as much as 3.4 percent among 9 out of 10 native-born workers with at least a high school education.

Mr. Siciliano, a research fellow at the Immigration Policy Center, an organization affiliated with groups that support liberalized immigration, said the older studies failed to recognize that immigrants create jobs as well as fill them.

With enough immigrant waiters to staff a restaurant for lunch as well as dinner, for example, he said, the owner will make more on his capital investment — and perhaps open a second restaurant across town.

“There’s a divide between what we say we want from immigration and what the economy is telling us we need,” he said.

- Where Millions Entered U.S., a Debate on Letting in More By NINA BERNSTEIN | NY Times, March 31, 2007

(1) A study by Madeline Zavodny, a research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, found that the entry of H-1B professionals neither lowers the contemporaneous earnings of natives, nor has “an adverse impact on contemporaneous unemployment rates.” (page 1)

(2) Research by Paul E. Harrington, associate director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, shows foreign-born and native professionals earn virtually identical salaries in math and science fields. National Science Foundation data show foreign-born scientists and engineers actually earn more than natives in some fields. (pge 1 & 5)

-- H-1B PROFESSIONALS AND WAGES: SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT, NATIONAL FOUNDATION FOR AMERICAN POLICY (NFAP) Policy Brief, March 2006

(1) current law already requires H-1B professionals to be paid the higher of the prevailing wage or actual wage paid to Americans in similar positions. So it's not as if U.S. businesses pursue foreign engineers, computer scientists and the like because they're cheaper to employ.

(2) But the back wages owed to H-1B hires amounted to just $4.6 million in 2006, down from $5.2 million the previous year. In a $12 trillion economy, those numbers are infinitesimal. Department of Labor investigations reveal that some 90% of violations are paperwork offenses and good-faith misunderstandings.

-- The Grassley Visa Tax, The Wall Street Journal Editorial, November 2, 2007

(1) Even among the higly stratified sample of the small number of employers whose actions warranted investigation and government-imposed penalties between 1992 and 2004, the average amount of back wages owed by even those employers is small – less than $6,000 per employee, no more than the typical government and legal fees paid by most employers to hire H-1B visa holders. And among those employers, few if any are well-known companies. Generally, of the small number of violations no more than 10 to 15 percent of H-1B violations in a year are found to be “willful” by the Department of Labor, indicating the extent of abuse is limited. (page 1)

(2) ENFORCEMENT AND FINES SHOW LITTLE EVIDENCE OF UNDERPAYMENT OF H-1BS (page 6)

One way to obtain an upper-bound estimate of possible underpayment of wages to H-1B professionals is to examine Department of Labor (DOL) enforcement actions against employers. The evidence indicates that even among the highly stratified sample of the relatively small number of employers whose actions warranted investigation and government-imposed penalties (136 nationwide in 2004), the amount of back wages owed by even those employers is small. In fact, on average, it is no more than the typical government and legal fees paid by most employers to hire H-1B visa holders.

Between 1992 and 2004, in all DOL investigations, the average amount of back wages owed to an H-1B employee was $5,919.13

While it is true that the DOLs enforcement of H-1Bs is primarily complaint-driven (though Congress has provided a mechanism for self-initiated DOL investigations), it is telling that among the cases investigated relatively few violations have been found to be labeled “willful” and/or result in debarment. DOL found employers either committed paperwork violations or misread employer obligations in a non-willful manner in the vast majority of the investigations conducted. In FY 2004, DOL found willful violations in only 11 percent (15 of 136) of its investigations that became final.

The violations typically found over the past dozen years rarely seem to be committed by any well-known companies. Of the $4.8 million owed in back wages in 2004, more than half (53 percent) came from findings against just 7 companies, none of whom are household names.

- H-1B PROFESSIONALS AND WAGES: SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT, NATIONAL FOUNDATION FOR AMERICAN POLICY (NFAP) Policy Brief, March 2006

It is claimed that the H1B visa is primarily used as a source of cheap labor. However the sources of these studies are conducted and reported by special interest groups that oppose H1B visa. No definitive governmental study, either by the GAO or the Congressional Research Service has proven these statistics to be true.

A recent report by John Miano for the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) asserts that computer programmers on H-1B visas are underpaid. The report contains a number of shortcomings that make it unreliable for use by policymakers.

The key flaw in the CIS study is that it utilized data that do not reveal what employers actually pay individuals on H-1B visas. The data showing what an employer pays an H-1B visa holder is contained on the I-129 form filed with USCIS. However, the information on that form is not publicly available. Instead, the CIS paper used the prevailing wage data that employers file with the Department of Labor (DOL) – even though employers do not necessarily pay H-1B visa holders just the prevailing wage indicated on the filing to DOL. In fact, the prevailing wage is a minimum requirement and is usually lower than what the H-1B visa holder actually receives, which makes it impossible for the CIS paper to conclude much of anything with regard to H-1B wages.

As noted earlier, under Section 212(n)(1) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), an employer hiring an individual in H-1B status must pay at least “the actual wage level paid by the employer to all other individuals with similar experience and qualifications for the specific employment in question” or “the prevailing wage level for the occupational classification in the area of employment, whichever is greater…” Therefore, any analysis that relies solely on prevailing wage data is inherently flawed.

To test the proposition that the prevailing wages listed on the DOL Labor Condition Application (LCA) are not representative of actual starting salaries, NFAP asked a respected law firm to select a random sample of H-1B cases from among its client base. The prevailing wage for each of the H-1B professionals was compared to the actual wage as it appears on the I-129 form filed with USCIS. The result? Among 100 randomly selected cases, the average actual wage was more than 22 percent higher than the prevailing wage. This is not meant to be definitive proof that actual wages are always, on average, 22 percent higher than prevailing wages. However, it does show, along with the other evidence in this policy brief, that any analysis that utilizes prevailing wage data to claim H-1B professionals are underpaid is fundamentally unreliable. Note that the data derived from the law firm do not take into account any increases in salary the H-1B professional may have received after starting his or her job.

Much of the argument of the CIS paper is a comparison of annual salary estimates from the Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) survey with information on salaries from the LCA forms filed by employers. Even beyond the mistaken notion of asserting employers pay no higher than the prevailing wage, there are additional problems with comparing H-1B wages to the OES, a government effort to collect salary information by occupation and geographic location. OES salary estimates include compensation, particularly bonuses, that employers are prohibited from including on the LCA filed with DOL, even if such bonuses are regularly given to employees. (Performance bonuses are fairly common in white-collar occupations such as programmer and by definition the LCA is for new employees.)

Moreover, OES salary estimates are for all workers at a firm, and not just new hires, which means one is comparing apples and oranges when placing OES data alongside H-1B visa holders or other newly hired employees. Related to this, OES estimates are not age-adjusted. These differences would tend to make OES salaries higher than what might be expected for salaries listed on the Labor Condition Application.

Interestingly, in NFAP’s review, none of the LCAs seeking foreign workers seemed to be for programmers of older, legacy software such as Fortran or COBOL – although there still are many such jobs in U.S. industry. If the reason a firm was seeking to hire H-1B programmers was simply to replace “more expensive” American workers, we might expect that older programming languages, known disproportionately by older programmers, would be in demand.

NFAP recreated the CIS paper by making editing decisions in inclusion of job titles as being in the “computer programmer” occupation similar to those decisions in the CIS paper. NFAP confirmed, by duplicating the paper, that the CIS report used exclusively the “minimum” salary listed on the LCA, which generally corresponds to the prevailing wage. However, as noted, there is actually little reason to believe that the minimum salary on the LCA – the prevailing wage – is what H-1B professionals hired under these Labor Condition Applications are actually paid. As noted earlier, the employer must pay whichever is higher, the prevailing wage or the “the actual wage level paid by the employer to all other individuals with similar experience and qualifications for the specific employment in question.” Moreover, the employer must bid for the services of the professional against other firms that may wish to hire him or her.

On the LCA, employers often list a maximum salary they intended to pay, as well as the minimum they would pay the H-1B professional. CIS examined the minimum, which biased the results significantly downward. CIS could just as easily have taken the average of the minimum and maximum salaries listed on LCAs. For illustration purposes, it is possible to compute such an average even by assuming that where no maximum was listed that the maximum is no higher than the minimum. This is a very strict assumption, as it is unlikely that the majority of employers specifying just a minimum salary would pay just that minimum. Nevertheless, even taking this overly conservative approach of counting the minimum salary as the “maximum” where no maximum salary is listed, such an analysis yields average H-1B programmer wages of $66,885 – 36 percent more than the average minimum salary specified, which the CIS paper asserts is the salary paid by employers – and 3 percent more than even the problematic (as explained above) average OES salary for programmers cited in the CIS paper.

A final clue as to the unreliable character of the conclusions in the CIS paper is the illogical differences in wages supposedly paid by similar companies located in the same geographic locations. For example, it would take less than 20 minutes to drive from the headquarters of Intuit to Siebel Systems, yet according to the CIS paper, as compared to the OES average, Intuit pays its employees on H-1B visas nearly $30,000 more than Siebel pays its H-1B visa holders. Similarly, according to the CIS paper, relative to the
OES average, Adobe Systems typically pays its H-1B professionals nearly $40,000 more than the Oracle Corporation pays its H-1B employees, even though both are S&P 500 companies whose headquarters are located within a 30-minute drive of each other. Given that H-1B professionals can move from one employer to the next and the lack of evidence that employers maintain different pay scales for foreign nationals in the United States, such results demonstrate the shortcomings of the analysis and data used in the CIS paper.

Mr. Miano, the author of the CIS paper, had previously formed the Programmer’s Guild to lobby against H-1B visas. The decision to base an analysis of H-1B wages solely on prevailing wage data is puzzling given its limitations.

(1) Countries are finally realizing that their future prosperity depends not on natural resources or even on financial capital, but on human capital. Companies have been battling for years to attract and keep the best people. Now countries are engaging in the same fight.

(2) It wasn't much of a scrap until recently. Only the United States, Western Europe, and Japan - for a while - were even contenders. They didn't beat up on one another too badly vying for the best talent because there was enough to go around. Their economies weren't sufficiently info-based to make talent as critical an advantage as it has become, and the economy wasn't sufficiently global for human-capital supremacy to be crucial. Now all those factors have changed; many countries are in the hunt, and they're all after the same thing.

Since this is a fundamentally new fight, no one is sure what will win it. But we can already identify some fairly deep and difficult questions the fight raises. How countries answer them will help determine national wealth and power.

(3) How long will any country tolerate Info Age protectionism?

(4) We have similar rules in the United States, such as our skinflint distribution of H-1B visas and immigration rules that favor family connections over skills. Why do such rules exist at all? In the Industrial Age we protected manufacturing workers with tariffs and quotas, but we can't put duties on bits and bytes, so in the Info Age we protect knowledge workers by restricting immigration.

No country can have world-class workers if it continually protects them from world-class competition.

(4) What, ultimately, is a national economy? Is it good for a country if its companies prosper by offshoring high-value intellectual work? What if a nation's high-value employees are working in that nation for other nations' companies? Or if highly skilled immigrants perform high-value work and send their earnings home? The answers aren't obvious, but they are important.

This international fight for talent will get much more serious. With luck, it will lead to something new: a free market in brainpower. That may not come to pass- but wise nations will prepare for it.

-- The global fight for top talent From the United States to Saudi Arabia, countries are finally recognizing that human capital is crucial By Geoff Colvin, senior editor at large, December 4 2007

To whomever is de-facto spamming this forum with thousands of words of quotes from various articles:

Your arguments are an attempt to overcome quality problems with quantity.

There is a bulletproof, ironclad way to cut through the nonsense: Are IT wages rising faster than the rate of inflation?

Economic principles are crystal clear on this point. A shortage in supply leads to increased costs in the marketplace. The increased costs lead to avoidance behaviour on the part of buyers, thus decreasing demand. They also lead to longer-term increases in supply. Eventually supply and demand rebalance.

This is Adam Smith's Invisible Hand. It's fundamental to open markets. Everyone knows these things.

So what do marketplace surveys show? Salaries in IT are up only slightly. There are numerous good sources for this data and I won't attempt to tout any one particularly.

Salaries being up only slightly demonstrates that the IT labour shortage is way overstated. The kindest interpretation of this is that prominant IT executives are taking small, local circumstances and giving them too much importance. The larger and more sinister interpretation is that the IT industry wishes to effectively cap wages by dumping lots of supply into the marketplace.

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts12042007.html

Thank you, Brian. I fully agree with what you said regarding the spammer. It must have hit close to home for this person.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/us/29immig.html?em&ex=1196571600&en=e85daf285baf73eb&ei=5087%0A

(1) During 2006, nearly 1.3 million people were granted lawful permanent resident status.

There were 1,266,264 immigrants who were granted legal residence in 2006. Of those, 447,016 (35.3 percent) were new arrivals who entered the country in 2006, and 819,248 (64.7 percent) were status adjusters. The status adjusters arrived in the United States in any year before 2006, but their applications were approved during 2006.

(2) Employment-preference immigrants accounted for nearly 13 percent of all lawful permanent immigration in 2006.
The 159,081 immigrants who received green cards through sponsorship from their US employers accounted for 12.6 percent of all LPRs.

The share of employment-preference immigrants is significantly smaller than that of family-based immigrants and has varied between 3.3 percent (59,525) in 1991 and 22 percent (246,878) in 2005 (see Figure 2).

However, 87,702 (or 55.1 percent) of the employment-sponsored immigrants in 2006 were spouses and children of principal applicants.

-- Spotlight on Legal Immigration to the United States By Gretchen Reinemeyer and Jeanne Batalova | Migration Policy Institute, November 2007
www.migrationinformation.org/USfocus/display.cfm?id=651

(1) Also encouraging is the fact that the after-inflation median income of all tax filers increased by an impressive 24% over the same period. Two of every three workers had a real income gain--which contradicts the Huckabee-Edwards-Lou Dobbs spin about stagnant incomes. This is even more impressive when you consider that "median" income and wage numbers are often skewed downward because the U.S. has had a huge influx of young workers and immigrants in the last 20 years. They start their work years with low wages, dragging down the averages.

(2) The key point is that the study shows that income mobility in the U.S. works down as well as up--another sign that opportunity and merit continue to drive American success, not accidents of birth. The "rich" are not the same people over time.

The study is also valuable because it shows that income mobility remains little changed from what similar studies found in the 1970s and 1980s. Some journalists and academics have cited selective evidence to claim that income mobility has declined in recent years.

(3) "The basic finding of this analysis," says the Treasury report, "is that relative income mobility is approximately the same in the last 10 years as it was in the previous decade."

-- Movin' On Up: A Treasury study refutes populist hokum about "income inequality." Opinion Journal, November 13, 2007

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts12042007.html

DRIVING JOBS AND INNOVATION OFFSHORE: THE IMPACT OF HIGH-SKILL IMMIGRATION RESTRICTIONS ON AMERICA, NATIONAL FOUNDATION FOR AMERICAN POLICY (NFAP) POLICY BRIEF, DECEMBER 2007
http://www.nfap.com/pdf/071206study.pdf

@Perry
This is what I hear you say:
"I am a middle level manager" "I have to .. deliver.. projects .. within budget. Bottomline - Without these H1b folks working, I wouldn't be able to"
So basically the H1b folks let you work 'within' your budget?? Have you ever thought that if you/your business had budgeted for decently-paid local workers you would not have had this 'problem'.