Ron Hira, a public policy professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology and researcher on H-1B issues, said the use of the LCAs "creates a significant and systematic bias that under-reports the offshore outsourcing firms' use of the H-1B program."
"It's very clear that companies like Infosys regularly include many more than one person for each LCA, while companies like Microsoft almost always include not more than one worker on each LCA," Hira said. "As a result of their dubious choice, they are understating the use by offshore outsourcing firms and overstating the use by companies like Microsoft."
Computerworld publishes an annual list of top H-1B employers that relies on USCIS data, and typically an offshore outsourcing firm will lead the list. In the Brookings report, Microsoft leads the list of top H-1B employers.
John Miano, the founder of the Programmers Guild, has also looked at the locations in LCA data and said the problem with them is that employers can file them without getting the visas, and an LCA can apply to multiple employees.
Miano, using data about H-1B use and LCA on data.gov that disclosed usage by state, found that California led the list at 16%, followed by New York at 15%, in a post published by the Center for Immigration Studies.
Patrick Thibodeau covers cloud computing and enterprise applications, outsourcing, government IT policies, data centers and IT workforce issues for Computerworld. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @DCgov or subscribe to Patrick's RSS feed. His e-mail address is pthibodeau@computerworld.com.
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