The immigration debate is expected to heat up again with the release this week of an employment report showing that the U.S. engineering workforce is almost fully employed. The data runs contrary to the views of pundits who contend that low-wage-paying countries are eating our lunch in high-tech.
The Cyberstates report released this week by the by the American Electronics Association shows that the national unemployment rate for engineers is under 2 percent. Overall, the high-tech industry added 150,000 jobs in 2006 for a total of 5.8 million in the United States, according to the study, which pulls data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. It’s the highest number of high tech jobs in the country since 2002, and well below the 2000 people of 6.58 million high-tech jobs.
Economist Jared Bernstein with the Economic Policy Institute in Washington D.C, told The San Francisco Chronicle that there is no labor shortage crisis that should drive Congress to raise the caps on H-1B visas granted each year to foreign workers. “The minute you hear somebody shout ‘Labor shortage!’ you don’t pull the H-1B lever.”
One of the most interesting bytes of data produced by the study are the average wags and number of high-tech jobs by state. The differences seem a bit larger than variations in the cost of living. For instance, in California in 2006 the average high-tech wage was $95,424. By contrast, in Florida, it was $61,141; and in North Carolina, it was $69,660.
Cyberstates 2007: A Complete State-by-State Overview of the High-Technology Industry, costs $250 for non-AeA members.
U.S. High-Tech Employment
| Â | 2005 | 2006 | Percent Change | Numeric Change |
| Electronics Manufacturing | 1,321,500 | 1,326,600 | +0.4% | +5,100 |
| Communications Services | 1,372,300 | 1,359,000 | -1.0% | -13,300 |
| Software Services | 1,433,300 | 1,521,800 | +6.2% | +88,500 |
| Engineering and Tech Services | 1,500,300 | 1,566,600 | +4.4% | +66,300 |
| Total High Tech | 5,627,300 | 5,773,900 | +2.6% | +146,600 |
Source: AeA Cyberstates Report, 2007
Note: Data are rounded.
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The reason that it looks like our engineering workforce is fully employed is that two very large groups are not being counted in this calculation: a) those who were driven out of engineering professions in the last 7 years and are doing some other work or gave up, and b) those who are grossly underemployed, working below the level of income and responsibility they would have been able to expect otherwise. Count those, and the numbers are dire. So, we definitely don’t need to raise the H-1b cap, we merely need to recover and redeploy our native talent who got battered in the last few years.
[…] You mean a rising tide of salaries doesn’t lift all ships? An interesting finding, but it won’t change the debate. What’s happening now is pure, partisan hardball. […]