Abstract

This paper seeks to understand how high-skill foreign IT professionals assimilate in the United States by examining the wage trajectories of foreign and American information technology (IT) professionals. While prior research shows that on average foreign IT professionals earn more compared to US citizen IT professionals, our focus here is on temporal evolution of differences in wages to understand how the wages of foreign and American IT professionals evolve over time. We use data on skills and compensation of more than 50,000 IT professionals in the U.S. over the period 2000-2005 to test our hypotheses. The results indicate that IT professionals on H-1B or other work visa earn a significant salary premium over the entire duration of work experience when compared with IT professionals with U.S. citizenship. Interestingly, the difference in wages appears to grow over time suggesting that foreign IT professionals with substantial work experience on work visa earn significantly more premium than those with less work experience. The IT professionals on H-1B or other work visa exhibit steeper wage trajectories than either greencard holders or American workers; the wage trajectories of greencard holders and American workers have similar slopes. The wages of IT professionals on H-1B or other work visa with somewhere between 15-20 years of work experience is higher than that of greencard holders. We discuss implications for researchers, policy-makers, managers and individual workers.