Wage Gap: Foreign IT Workers in U.S.

With an unemployment rate of more than 9 percent and significant underemployment, some argue highly skilled foreign-born workers should be restricted from entering the United States on work visas. But do foreign workers really depress the wages of American workers as some reports claim?

In this edition of Smith Business Close-Up with the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, Henry C. Lucas Jr. and Sunil Mithas discuss their recent study of more than 50,000 information technology professionals that provides evidence to support the employment of highly skilled foreign workers in the U.S.

Lucas is the Robert H. Smith Professor of Information Systems and chair of the department of Decision, Operations and Information Technologies. His research interests include information technology-enabled transformations of organizations, markets, industries and our daily lives. Mithas is an assistant professor of information systems. His research focuses on strategic management and impact of information technology resources which include IT investments and IT human capital.