Last Monday there was an interesting discussion of H-1B and related issues on KALW, an NPR affiliate run by the San Francisco Unified School District. Some of you may recall that back in April I was a guest on the main NPR affiliate in San Francisco, KQED.

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Immigration officials have begun auditing firms that hire H-1B and L-1 visa holders to ensure that the person holding the visa and the company that applied for the visa match (among other things). But the audits won't solve the bigger issue of paying those H-1B visa holders lower-than-market wages.

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Senate Immigration Subcommittee Chair Senator Chuck Schumer has not said anything about increasing the H-1B cap, so far as I can tell. There have been news articles on this in the last few weeks, and to my knowledge Schumer has made no public statements in this regard. The quote included in the Computerworld article is: We must encourage the world's best and brightest individuals to come to the United States and create new technologies and business that will

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BusinessWeek was originally going to do a piece on the various players in the H-1B reform movement, but decided to focus on me instead. The article entitled “An Academic's Labor Helps Fight H-1B Visas" ran on June 28, and of course, I do have some comments.

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Last week two researchers, Prasanna Tambe of the NYU Stern School of Business and Lorin Hitt of Penn's Wharton School, released a working paper that found that the presence of H-1Bs lowered wages for Americans by as much as 6%. But then things were suddenly shut down. According to a CNN broadcast transcript, the paper was suddenly withdrawn from public access at the Social Science Research Network, and the authors are no longer giving interviews.

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There was a column in the Wall Street Journal today by "Numbers Guy," Carl Bialik, concerning the claim by NFAP/Stuart Anderson that each H-1B worker creates five new jobs, oft-repeated by the industry lobbyists. It's amazing that an assertion as obviously flawed as this one, with textbook statistical errors, has gotten so much attention. But then that's why the lobbyists are paid the big bucks.

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I've written often about studies conducted by Vivek Wadhwa with various coauthors. We agree on many issues and disagree on others. But his newest report discussed in a New York Times blog, finds that many Chinese and Indian tech workers in the U.S. plan to return home, which he believes will be a huge loss to the U.S. But Vivek's characterization of this exodus as "America's Loss" is quite baffling.

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Ever since 1992, when I started writing about H-1B, I've been stressing that not only is H-1B centrally about cheap tech labor, cheap tech labor is in turn centrally about age. Younger workers are cheaper than older ones, both in wages and health insurance costs. Of course, in addition, the younger H-1Bs are even cheaper than the younger Americans. Result: An employer may hire a 24-year-old H-1B instead of a 24-year-old American, and usually will hire that 24-year-old H-1B instead of a 35-year-old American.

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Last week a New Jersey employer was indicted on charges of H-1B fraud. However, I almost never report on such incidents, as I regard them as irrelevant to the big H-1B picture.

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Many opponents of H-1B visas have correctly noted that the Sanders/Grassley amendment put in the Senate Stimulus Bill has a number of weakening provisions. But even those considerations pale in comparison to the core issue, which I believe is the historic, symbolic significance of the Sanders/Grassley amendment. For the first time since the establishment of the H-1B program in 1990, a house of Congress (the Senate here) has gone on record as characterizing H-1B to be a Bad Thing.

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