Study Says Foreign IT Workers are Paid More

Adding the study of immigrant labor, research at the University of Maryland runs counter to the widely held perception that the availability of foreign tech workers encourages companies to push salaries down, reports InformationWeek.

That would seem to contradict a study by New York University and the University of Pennsylvania reported Monday.

The Maryland researchers looked at skills and pay data on more than 50,000 IT professionals who participated in InformationWeek salary surveys from 2000 to 2005. They found that noncitizen IT pros are paid on average 5 percent to 9 percent more than American workers with similar levels of education and experience.

They found that noncitizens were paid more for their IT experience, while domestic workers were paid more for their level of education.