The Effects of Temporary Immigrant Labor on the Information Technology Industry

There are a significant number of H-1B immigrants who are employed through specific outsourcing companies upon which United States’ companies then contract with for contract labor. According to Thibodeau & Machlis (2012), the top United States companies that employ H-1B immigrants are “offshore outsourcing companies”, including Cognizant and Infosys, which each employ approximately 5000 H-1B immigrants who are then contracted out to other United States companies for specific jobs. The fact that most H-1B immigrants are not employed directly by the United States companies for which they are working, implies that there will be some discrepancy between the temporary immigrant workers and the native workers in terms of: types of jobs, wage rate, and job security. Therefore, this paper aims to study how the recession of 2008 affected the market for workers in the IT industry, specifically focusing on the number of jobs lost or retained by temporary immigrant workers compared with those of native workers