Dec. 4, 2006 – Page 3222
In 1993, British computer programmer John Kemp decided he’d like to try living in the United States. He got a job with a software contracting company under a type of U.S. visa, known as an H-1B, reserved for foreigners with specialized skills that are in short supply in the United States. Soon his services were hired out to an American insurance company, which paid him $30,000 — roughly double what he had been making in England.
Kemp soon learned, however, that he and his team of 10 H-1B visa-holding programmers in his contracting “body shop” (most of them from India) were being paid only half what U.S. programmers earned at his level. He quit in protest — only to be hired directly by the insurance firm two months later, at double his former salary.
“Now that I’ve been married to a U.S. citizen for almost 11 years, and have two American children, I can look back and smile about this experience,” Kemp wrote to the influential technology e-mail discussion group hosted by Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor David Farber. But, he added, he’s convinced that the H-1B program is now simply a way “to supply cheap labor to American companies.”
Nobel Laureate economist Milton Friedman, who died on Nov. 16, would have agreed. “There is no doubt,” he told Computer World in 2002, that the H-1B program “is a benefit to their employers, enabling them to get workers at a lower wage, and to that extent, it is a subsidy.”
Stories like Kemp’s mess up the clean logic of the tech industry — which, since the midterm elections, has reprised its vigorous campaign to get Congress to increase the annual cap on H-1B visas. This year, the visas became available on April 1, and the 65,000 limit was reached by May 26. To meet demands of the tech boom, the annual limit had been raised to 115,000 in 1999 and 2000 and to 195,000 from 2001 through 2003; it fell back to 65,000 in 2004.
To hear Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and others describe it, H-1B visas are the lifeblood of the tech sector. A Nov. 15 study by the National Venture Capital Association found that immigrants started 25 percent of U.S. venture-backed companies during the past 15 years, including eBay, Yahoo! and Google. Public companies founded by immigrants, moreover, account for $500 billion in market value. Their point: H-1B visas don’t cost American jobs — they create them.
In 2005, according to the American Association of Engineering Societies, U.S. universities awarded 55 percent of master’s degrees and 67 percent of Ph.D.s in electrical engineering to foreign nationals. Why, Gates and others argue, should we send all that talent back home to compete against the United States?
The election was the second setback this year for the technology lobby on the issue. Republicans had been responsive to the urgent pleas of corporations to raise the ceiling on H-1B visas. That is, until the issue got tangled up with the larger immigration debate. Now, if the Democrats even consider raising the limit, they’ll likely take their time, tying the issue to efforts to bolster training for U.S. workers and enhancing math and science education, particularly for women, minorities and others under-represented in the tech sector.
When incoming House Speaker
In many ways, the H-1B issue is an up-market version of the debate over unskilled immigrant labor — except, rather than needing foreigners to do work that U.S. citizens don’t want to do, companies need them to do work those citizens presumably can’t do.
But, as Kemp’s story reveals, the reality can be quite different from theory. Tech industry officials talk up how H-1B visas tap into the wealth of foreign talent at U.S. universities — but they don’t say much about the computer programmer body shops that cycle H-1B visa holders through major U.S. corporations, and do so at the expense of career-minded and more qualified U.S. workers. Critics also say it’s far too easy for companies to win H-1B visas for jobs that could be readily filled by qualified U.S. workers.
Of course, there is no “right” number of H-1B visas — just as there is no static number of available jobs. But what if Gates got his wish to remove all limits on foreign specialized workers? It’s hard to argue that cheaper skilled labor wouldn’t flood into this country, lowering salaries and reducing incentives for U.S. workers and students.
This is why the H-1B program has always been linked to creating more opportunities for the domestic workforce. Since 1998, companies have had to pay fees, now totaling $1,500 per H-1B application, that finance scholarships, federal job training, and math and science education programs. The Government Accountability Office has given those programs high marks for attracting women and minorities into computer science, engineering and math fields.
In the new Congress, any effort to increase opportunities for foreign workers will probably have to ride alongside further efforts to increase opportunities for skilled workers who already live here.
Mike Mills is CQ’s executive editor for electronic publishing.