Susan Li

April 12, 2017

The H-1B program allows employers to temporarily employ foreign workers in the U.S on a nonimmigrant basis in specialty occupations. This is the most common visa status applied by international students after they complete higher education in the U.S and work in a full-time position. For those graduates to apply for H-1B visa, their employers must offer a job and petition for H-1B visa with the US immigration department.

The Office of Foreign Labor Certification (OFLC) generates program data. However, I downloaded the dataset from Kaggle directly after it has been mostly cleaned. To make it as relevant as possible, I will be only looking at the data from 2016.

I decide to remove all missing values, so about 3% of applications were omitted.

## 'data.frame':    629311 obs. of  11 variables:
##  $ X                 : int  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 10 11 ...
##  $ CASE_STATUS       : chr  "CERTIFIED-WITHDRAWN" "CERTIFIED-WITHDRAWN" "CERTIFIED-WITHDRAWN" "CERTIFIED-WITHDRAWN" ...
##  $ EMPLOYER_NAME     : chr  "UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN" "GOODMAN NETWORKS, INC." "PORTS AMERICA GROUP, INC." "GATES CORPORATION, A WHOLLY-OWNED SUBSIDIARY OF TOMKINS PLC" ...
##  $ SOC_NAME          : chr  "BIOCHEMISTS AND BIOPHYSICISTS" "CHIEF EXECUTIVES" "CHIEF EXECUTIVES" "CHIEF EXECUTIVES" ...
##  $ JOB_TITLE         : chr  "POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH FELLOW" "CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER" "CHIEF PROCESS OFFICER" "REGIONAL PRESIDEN, AMERICAS" ...
##  $ FULL_TIME_POSITION: chr  "N" "Y" "Y" "Y" ...
##  $ PREVAILING_WAGE   : num  36067 242674 193066 220314 157518 ...
##  $ YEAR              : int  2016 2016 2016 2016 2016 2016 2016 2016 2016 2016 ...
##  $ WORKSITE          : chr  "ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN" "PLANO, TEXAS" "JERSEY CITY, NEW JERSEY" "DENVER, COLORADO" ...
##  $ lon               : num  -83.7 -96.7 -74.1 -105 -90.2 ...
##  $ lat               : num  42.3 33 40.7 39.7 38.6 ...

Throughout the analysis, I will attempt to answer the following questions:

What are the top occupations?

Technology related professions such as software developer, computer system analyst, programmer are among the most in demand occupations, analyst, accountant, engineer are among the second most in demand occupations.

Who are the top employers that submit the most application?

Infosys Limited leads by a large margin and submitted over 25000 applications last year. As a matter of fact, eight of the top 20 employers are Indian multinational IT companies.

Technology leads and technology analysts are in huge demand at Infosys, developers and programmers are liked by Tata, Google is mainly interested in software engineers.Deloitte and Ernst & Young apply visa for consultants and advisors.

What occupations make the most Money?

When I look at prevailing wage distribution, I found something interesting.

##      Min.   1st Qu.    Median      Mean   3rd Qu.      Max. 
##         0     57510     68410     89020     85180 329100000

Minimum wage is 0 and maximum wage is 329100000. I suspected ’0’s were missing values, and there are not many of them. But let’s have a look which company offered $329100000.

##         X CASE_STATUS      EMPLOYER_NAME           SOC_NAME
## 5275 5580      DENIED E AND D MEDIA INC. MARKETING MANAGERS
##                               JOB_TITLE FULL_TIME_POSITION PREVAILING_WAGE
## 5275 DIRECTOR, SOCIAL AND DIGITAL MEDIA                  Y       329139200
##      YEAR                 WORKSITE       lon      lat
## 5275 2016 SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA -118.4912 34.01945

For a marketing manager? I don’t understand. The application was denied anyway.

Majority of the prevailing wages were between 50K and 100K USD per annum.

physicians and surgeons enjoy the highest average prevailing wages that almost reach $175K per annum last year, computer and information systems managers take the second spot make approximate $163K per annum last year.

Which Employers pay the most?

When comes to the job title and employer, consultants hired by Deloitte enjoy the highest average prevailing wage, software engineer hird by Google are paid far more than the same job title hired by the other companeis.

Microsoft and Google offer the highest wages to their H-1B Visa workers. Their median wage exceeded $100K per annum, while the median wage of UST Global and L&T Technology around $60K per annum.

Which states and cities apply the most H-1B visas?

Expectedly, California hires the most workers on H-1B visas, followed by Texas, New York, New Jersey and Illinois.

This time New York City takes the lead by a large margin in the number of H-1B Visa applications. Not only high tech companies in New York hire H-1B visa workers, but also New York’s fashion industry is heavily reliant on immigrants, from top designers to creative staffs to the sewing workers.

A Map of H-1B Visa Applications

The End

It has been a great experience exploring H-1B visa petition data. With Trump’s Cracking down on the H-1B Visa program that Silicon Valley loves, I can’t wait to learn the data for 2017.