Where High-Skilled Immigrants Are Most Urgently Needed

According to the latest data from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the vast majority of H-1B recipients in fiscal year 2020 worked in computer-related occupations. With almost 300,000 approved applications, such workers accounted for roughly 70 percent of all beneficiaries of the program, with jobs in architecture, engineering and surveying a distant second.

According to the latest Characteristics of H-1B Specialty Occupation Workers report, the median annual compensation for successful H-1B applicants was $101,000 last year, illustrating that the majority of these workers don’t exactly qualify as cheap foreign labor - an argument that many opponents of the H-1B program use to criticize it.