From the article:
A new paper from the Center for Global Development finds that from the early 1990s to 2010, the H-1B visa program resulted in net gains for the United States and India.
By the mid-2000s, more than half of the H-1B visas were going to Indian applicants, though there's evidence that interest in U.S.-based jobs may now be falling among Indian workers under the Trump Administration.
The study estimates that U.S. workers across all sectors on average were better off by about $431 million in 2010 when you take into account the increased productivity and innovation within the tech sector due to foreign workers. That amounts to $1,345 per each additional H-1B worker, according to Gaurav Khanna, CGD senior fellow and assistant professor of economics at the public policy school at the University of California-San Diego.
“A lot of these gains are because of the fact that the tech sector is also where a lot of the innovation happens in the economy,” Khanna, who co-authored the paper with Nicolas Morales, told Fortune. “What that does is raise the productivity of other parts of the economy as well.”
Better products, like software, lead to higher outputs from workers.
“For example, bankers on Wall Street may not realize that their software is better because the U.S. can attract global talent and produce better IT products,” he said.
Read full article here.
