The Secret Way Silicon Valley Uses the H-1B Program

Cisco Systems Inc. applied for about 3,000 H-1B visas in fiscal 2016, intending to hire people to work at its sprawling, utilitarian campus in suburban San Jose. These were good jobs — many of them for management-level logisticians and operations research analysts — and they paid well. The average annual salary was about $120,000. At the upper end, the company planned to pay a “senior corporate strategy director” $197,000 a year.

But these applications don’t tell the whole story of how Cisco planned to use the controversial visa program to supplement its workforce. The visa requests it submitted accounted for only 40 percent of the applications from 2016 for temporary visas for jobs to be located at its headquarters. The rest were submitted by IT firms, mostly from India, seeking to place workers with the company — about 250 companies in total. The only indications that Cisco had anything to do with these applications were the addresses listed as the place of employment— a piece of data that's not included in the aggregated statistics on H-1B applications released by the Department of Labor. Silicon Valley companies don’t mention workers employed by contractors, also known as the contingent workforce, when discussing how they use the program, meaning the picture they give is incomplete.