OUTSIDE INFLUENCES

Will To Compete

Wed. Apr. 16, 2008


The chairman of Compete America, a business coalition seeking access to skilled foreign workers, was not in town last week when the Homeland Security Department announced it had run out of high-skilled H-1B visas for the year. He was in Brussels talking to European Union officials about a proposed “blue card” work visa, which would be accepted in all participating countries.

“I told them, ‘You’ve got to find a way to talk about this issue and characterize it without drawing in the broader issue of migration,’” said Robert Hoffman, who is also vice president of government affairs at Oracle. “Don’t call it migration. Call it something else.”

Hoffman should know. For years, he and other Compete America representatives have been trying, without success, to disassociate the coalition’s needs from the hot-button immigration debate. Three years ago, the group posed a relatively modest request to Congress to “recapture” unused H-1B visas from previous years. “We were told to wait for the big bill,” Hoffman said, referring to a comprehensive immigration bill to allow illegal immigrants to earn green cards. That bill, which Compete America did not endorse in its entirety, died in the Senate last year.

This year, Compete America is hoping a similarly humble bill can make its way through Congress. House Democratic leaders have informed the group that if H-1B relief moves at all, it will be rolled into a broader bill addressing low-skilled work visas, border enforcement, and short-term visas for illegal immigrants — all controversial ideas.

“The legal, employment-based immigration issue, for sure, got taken hostage,” said Sandra Boyd, who chaired Compete America for nearly a decade. “It’s an economic issue. It’s a competitiveness issue. [Others] think you’re trying to solve a border issue. It’s such a frustrating place to be.”

“We don’t profess to know the solution to 12 million undocumented immigrants,” said Hoffman, who religiously sticks to the coalition’s twin requests of more H-1B visas and employment-based green cards.

Not everyone agrees with the narrow vision, including the White House. Last year, administration officials put intense pressure on Compete America to endorse the Senate’s comprehensive immigration bill. The coalition refused because the bill would have doled out work visas using a point system bitterly opposed by its member companies.

“You want to talk about taking us off message, the point system did it,” Hoffman said. “We were prepared to come out guns blazing in favor of the bill.”

Instead, Compete America members had “long and difficult conversations” in which they decided to support progress on the bill only. “We were for moving forward in the process. We weren’t saying, ‘Kill the bill.’ … That’s a bit of a nuanced argument,” Hoffman said.

Boyd said the coalition, with liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans, would have fractured had it not stuck to its guns. “Our point to the White House was, ‘We can potentially bring to the table people who wouldn’t ordinarily be part of the discussion.’” The strategy has its downsides. Lawmakers and lobbyists from other trade groups have expressed frustration that Compete America will not engage in talks about broader immigration proposals.

“You have to talk the bigger picture. … Realistically, that’s where a lot of these things are going to take place,” said Paul Kostek, vice president for communications at IEEE-USA, an engineers association that opposes an H-1B visa increase but supports a boost in employment-based green cards.

Kostek said immigration is a “messy situation,” and advocates dealing with any part of it should be willing to get their hands dirty.

Any proposal dealing with green cards or temporary work visas must make its way through the House and Senate Judiciary committees, where its merits inevitably will be judged through an immigration lens.

Compete America has tried to dilute that by placing bills in other committees that focus on education and science. “We want to be in lots of different places,” Boyd said.

Boyd’s own career path mirrors Compete America’s evolution. She now works for the nonprofit Achieve, which focuses on raising academic standards in U.S. schools.

“I’m doing what I always said we were committed to: growing the [workforce] pipeline,” she said.

Formerly known as American Business for Legal Immigration, the coalition underwent a makeover in 2004, when it hired The Fratelli Group, a public relations firm. The firm’s first suggestion was to change the group’s name.

Fratelli also hatched regular Compete America e-mail alerts bearing the title, “It’s About Innovation.” It rebuilt the group’s Web site to focus on higher education, offering up-to-date statistics on engineering and science graduates at U.S. universities.

But even in this context, emotional immigration issues are bound to surface, according to U.S. Chamber of Commerce Director of Immigration Policy Angelo Amador. Amador is a member of the Compete America steering committee, but he also is heavily involved in other immigration matters.

Amador said the public ultimately will pose the same raw questions about immigrants without mulling whether they are legal, highly educated or low-skilled.

“This is irrelevant of a guy who has an engineering degree or the guy who comes to work in construction. They’re both dark. One comes from India. One comes from Mexico. ... They both speak with an accent. And you might be unemployed. It’s a hard issue, and you have to address it.”

by Fawn Johnson

Wed. Apr. 16, 2008