H-1Bs, by the numbers

http://blog.phds.org/2007/6/26/h-1bs-by-the-numbers

Here's an interesting resource: a Department of Labor site that lets
you see who is hiring H-1Bs and how much they are paying them (http://
www.flcdatacenter.com/CaseH1B.aspx). The UI is awful - looks like the
DoL could use some better programmers - but if it hurts your eyes too
much, you can download all the raw data and write your own. (In fact,
I think that would make a good project, and I bet one could get funded
to do so)

A few examples. H-1B hires last year:

**Universities**
* Harvard: 380
* Duke: 313
* Stanford: 364
* University of California system: 1684

(Hires at the above places appear to be largely lab techs and
postdocs)

**Tech companies**
* Google: 350 (in California). Salaries range from $80K to $120K
* Intel: 367 (in Oregon), 682 (in California)
* Apple: 215 (in California)
* (Whoa!) Microsoft: 4100 (in Washington) Salaries start around $75K

Here's an interesting project idea:
* Download the data sets, merge the efile and fax data
* Normalize the employer names so you can do a search for, say, all
Microsoft hires in the US
* Match school names to IPEDS codes so you can do things like get
breakdowns of H-1B hires as a function of faculty size, etc
* Extract postdoc salaries and post them by institution
* Look at compensation relative to prevailing wages - who's hiring
high-end people vs. low-end people?
* Overall, how are academic institutions (who are exempt from caps)
using H-1Bs? What kinds of people are they hiring?

I suspect that at least some of these questions have already been
answered and that there may already be cleaned-up versions of the data
set floating around econ departments. I bet Ron Hira (http://
print.rit.edu/people/profile.php?page=59) would know about such
things.

http://blog.phds.org/2007/6/26/h-1bs-by-the-numbers

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