High-Skilled Foreigners Not Better Or Brighter Than U.S. Workers

TechCrunch – While America’s political and business elite are pressing Congress to ease high-skilled immigration laws, a new study argues that foreign workers aren’t necessarily better or brighter. “The immigrant workers, especially those who first came to the United States as foreign students, are in general of no higher talent than the Americans, as measured by salary, patent filings, dissertation awards, and quality of academic program,” writes University of California-Davis professor Norman Matloff.

While technology leaders, such as Bill Gates, often complain that they must bait the best foreign workers with luxurious salaries, Matloff says that data doesn’t back this up. To illustrate just how little big tech companies actually value foreign workers, he presents a graph of the share of percentage of foreign workers that make substantially more than their native colleagues. At Google, for instance, only 12% of foreign workers are making 1.45 times the average worker in their field. Read More