Immigration is among the top issues during this election cycle, but Republican presidential candidates Donald Trump and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida both have their facts wrong when it comes to H1-B visas.

During the Republican debate on Wednesday, both characterized the visa program as damaging to American workers. Rubio defended his support for the I-Squared bill, which would triple the number of H1-B visas offered annually for skilled foreign workers, but added a caveat, calling for companies that want to hire a skilled worker from overseas to first advertise the job for 180 days to ensure Americans have an opportunity to apply for the job first.

“You also have to prove that you’re going to pay these people more than you would pay someone else so that you’re not undercutting it by bringing in cheap labor,” Rubio said during the debate.

The H1-B visa program is capped at 85,000 annually for the entire U.S., so tech companies like Facebook and Microsoft have lobbied hard in recent years to expand the program. Technology companies represent the majority of firms that every April race to apply for the small pool of such visas available through the system, according to employment site and immigrant labor database MyVisaJobs.com.

Trump is very critical of the temporary work visas, saying on his website that tripling the number of visas "would decimate women and minorities" and calling Rubio the “personal senator” of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Trump’s site also calls for companies to increase pay for foreign workers they hire through the system to “force companies to give these coveted entry-level jobs to the existing domestic pool of unemployed native and immigrant workers in the U.S., instead of flying in cheaper workers from overseas” – a position he reiterated during the Republican debate Wednesday.

But experts say the visa system is not damaging American salaries or their chance at getting a job in Silicon Valley. Jonathan Rothwell, a fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, points out that “H1-B workers are paid at least as well as their American counterparts” and the unemployment rate for computer workers is not high relative to other occupations. Salaries for tech occupations have also increased faster than wages for other jobs during the past decade despite the use of the skilled immigrant workers, he says, citing research he completed in 2013.

“Skilled computer jobs are among the hardest to fill and the vacancies stay open for the longest period of time,” he says, adding that Rubio’s proposal for companies to wait 180 days is “an absurdly long period of time to wait to fill a skilled position.”

Indeed, a recent report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics states that the U.S. is not graduating enough students with skills in science, math and technology to meet the growing demand for tech company workers – a point confirmed by data from the 2015 U.S. News/Raytheon STEM Index. The U.S. will need “approximately 1 million more STEM professionals than the U.S. will produce at the current rate over the next decade if the country is to retain its historical preeminence in science and technology,” according to the BLS report.

Occupations in science math and technology are projected to grow by 17 percent through 2018, compared with 9.8 percent for other occupations, according to the Department of Commerce.

Data from MyVisaJobs shows that the top 25 companies sponsoring H1-B visa workers – including Google, Apple and Microsoft – offer foreign workers an average salary that is competitive with wages offered to Americans for tech occupations. The national average salary for a software engineer, for instance, is $90,000, according to employment site Glassdoor.

USN&WR/Source:MyVisa.jobs

The H1-B visa system does have its flaws, however. Foreign workers can become dependent on the company sponsoring them while they apply for full citizenship, says Neil Ruiz, executive director of the Center for Law, Economics and Finance at George Washington University. This sponsorship can make it difficult for workers to seek more competitive pay or a better job opportunity during that waiting period, which can take “10 years for someone from China or India, where many foreign tech workers come from,” Ruiz says.