News
Impacts of H-1B visas: Lower prices and higher production – or lower wages and higher profits?
February 16, 2017
A new NBER report by John Bound, Gaurav Khanna, and Nicolas Morales is cited in this *Atlantic* piece on the impacts of H-1B visas on the tech industry. Bound et al., who looked at impacts during 1994-2001, conclude that high-skill foreign workers in the US on H-1B visas led to more innovation, cheaper products, and higher tech profits, but also to lower wages and employment for US-born workers given the availability of cheaper labor. They say: “In the absence of immigration, wages for US computer scientists would have been 2.6 percent to 5.1 percent higher and employment in computer science for US workers would have been 6.1 percent to 10.8 percent higher in 2001.”