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Hiring Today's Workers, Educating Tomorrow's
by Aliya Sternstein
Technology companies that think the immigration system severely restricts them from employing smart, foreign-born individuals and many groups that oppose boosting the number of skilled-worker permits agree on one thing: The nation's elementary and secondary schools are failing to produce enough homegrown mathematics and science whizzes.
"If our schools are not working well, then we need to fix the schools," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors strong immigration enforcement. "Importing the foreign labor doesn't help fix the long-term problem for the country of doing a better job in math and science education."
He said employment-based green cards and visas remove the incentive for businesses and society to mend the education system. Businesses counter that they are just as concerned, if not more concerned, about repairing the state of U.S. science, technology, engineering and mathematics education -- or STEM education -- as they are with hiring more skilled foreign workers.
"For us, the changes in the immigration law are about facing the challenges that exist today," said Robert Hoffman, a vice president with Oracle. STEM funding; improving the quality of education in elementary and secondary schools; and increasing young people's interest in math and science are the "long-term response to our skilled-worker challenge."
But tech companies won't see tangible results of any teaching turnabout for a decade or two. "Do the math. ... No pun intended," Hoffman said. Fourth grade is where children typically start to lose interest in math and science. If the United States reverses that trend, even as early as this year, today's fourth-graders will not enter the workforce until around 2019, he said.
"So what do we do in between?" Hoffman said. "The answer is we need to recruit and retain, starting with the foreign-born individuals who are coming out of our universities."
The H-1B Question: To Cap Or Not To Cap
In April, House and Senate members introduced identical bills that would amend current immigration law to provide market-based caps for skilled worker visas, or what are called H-1B visas. The measures also would let employers obtain green cards for new hires who are studying science, technology, engineering or mathematics.
In introducing the Senate version, John Cornyn, R-Texas, said news that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service hit the 2008 cap for H-1B workers in the record time of one day "makes clear that we urgently need to reform our policies for highly-skilled workers in the scientific and technology fields. Because the U.S. has already met the cap for H-1B visas, foreign students graduating from our universities this spring are virtually shut out of the U.S. job market."
According to the Information Technology Association of America, the scarcity of H-1B visas is causing tech companies to delay and cancel projects, or expand overseas.
Yet there are critics of the skilled-worker program who categorize the current set-up as a scheme to import cheap labor. Norman Matloff, a computer science professor at the University of California at Davis, said: "It is fully legal to use H-1Bs as cheap labor. ... The law says you have to pay [H-1B holders] the prevailing wage, but the definition of that term is riddled with loopholes, so the 'prevailing wage' is not the true market wage." Unlike other adversaries of the H-1B program, he does not agree that U.S. elementary and secondary schools are unable to generate enough talent.
Matloff asserted that the United States does not have a tech labor shortage. He cited recent reports showing that salaries for new tech graduates, adjusted for inflation, have been flat since 1999. "If we had a shortage, wages would be shooting upward."
Krikorian said the government needs to decrease the number of H-1B visas and tighten the standards so that only very highly skilled individuals are allowed entry.
An April report by his organization on the wages and skill levels of H-1B computer workers found that in fiscal 2005, prevailing wage claims for such visas "averaged $16,000 below the median wage for U.S. computer workers in the same location and occupation."
Using the Labor Department's skill-based prevailing wage system, employers "classified most workers -- 56 percent -- as being at the lowest skill level -- Level I," the paper continued. "This suggests that most H-1B computer workers are low-skilled workers who make no special contribution to the American economy, or that employers are deliberately understating workers' skills in order to justify paying them lower salaries."
The Tech Industry's Bottom Line
Tech companies dispute the analysis, saying that the numbers are incomplete, outdated and cherry-picked. The companies maintain that they are required by law to pay foreign and U.S. workers the same salaries.
They also must pay extra to hire H-1B workers so the companies are not profiting from the program. U.S. employers typically spend thousands of dollars to secure an initial H-1B approval.
Hoffman said critics of the H-1B program have made a good case for starting discussions with the Labor Department and Congress to achieve better enforcement. "We would be all for [stricter enforcement] without imposing undue costs on employers for hiring H-1B workers," he said.
The U.S. division of the engineering group IEEE is reformulating its high-tech immigration and H-1B positions and thus is not saying much about the issues publicly, IEEE-USA spokesman Chris McManes said.
"But I can tell you that we do support" new H-1B legislation introduced by Sens. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., and Charles Grassley, R-Iowa. The legislation would give priority to American workers and increase H-1B oversight to ensure that companies are not hiring foreign workers at lower wages. "We favor permanent immigration over temporary guest-worker programs for helping to meet our nation's high-tech workforce needs."
Hoffman said that without higher H-1B and green card allotments, tech companies "either let jobs go unfilled -- we have roughly 1,000 job openings here in the U.S. at Oracle -- or we go where the workers are, which is moving the work offshore. And those aren't the best choices for us."
The Oracles and Microsofts can afford to move operations overseas, but small businesses and startups -- think Google circa 1998 -- may be forced to relocate entirely, Hoffman said. "We ask for these reforms to lower our costs of doing business but, more importantly, in the interest of growing our economy." Moving innovation elsewhere "would sap the economy," he said.
The Potential Upside For Developing Nations
For Oracle, the current backlog of green-card applications is even more troublesome than the H-1B cap because the green-card crisis impacts employees already working for the company in the United States. "What we worry about is that those who are holding H-1B visas -- and are waiting for a green card -- are picking up and leaving out of frustration," Hoffman said.
Krikorian's response to tech jobs moving elsewhere: "I'm not against India having a software industry. I want them to develop. That is how economic development has worked for hundreds of years."
The American Council on International Personnel, which represents large multinational employers, said lifting the cap on H-1B visas actually would help developing countries.
It "allows global companies from all countries to transfer employees to the United States to work on projects" if they have a U.S. office, council Executive Director Lynn Shotwell said. "For some companies, especially in the financial and consumer goods industries, the goal is to send [employees] back" after temporarily working in the United States for training.
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