Two articles on H-1B
Two articles on H-1B
Date: Friday, July 05, 2002 12:31 PM
*** H-1B NEWSLETTER ***
Get the Facts on H-1B at
www.ZaZona.com
Mark Mendlovitz has been an opponent of H-1B for a long time. He made some
very good points in the first article.
SCIENCE JOURNAL
By SHARON BEGLEY
Angry Engineers Pin Shortage
On Low Pay, Layoffs, Age Bias
Hundreds of readers wrote to comment about my June 7 column1 on the
projected shortage of engineers -- most of them angry engineers.
While some lamented the uninspiring college curricula that turn off
would-be engineers, the majority echoed Andy Moore, 47, who got his B.S.
in mechanical engineering.
"I would not recommend the profession," he says. "Companies view
engineers as labor to be discarded when times are tough. Industries such
as aerospace want seasoned, innovative engineers during peak periods and
then discard them when the contracts end. I am surprised they get anyone
at all."
Among the engineers I heard from, gripes focused on salary stagnation,
age discrimination and the infamous boom-and-bust cycle in the field.
Although I pointed to the high starting salary for engineers, few were
impressed.
"My salary was only $1,000 or $2,000 more than a new graduate with a
master's" after 11 years at IBM, one job-hunting engineer noted.
One civil engineer stuck with the field for only five years after
graduate school. Fed up with minuscule pay increases and hitting a
salary plateau, he now does equity research, a profession he says is
full of engineering refugees. He and others cite the influx of
foreign-born engineers as a reason for the stagnating salaries.
"If the captains of high tech are worried about the next generation of
engineers, they have only themselves to blame," agrees Mark Mendlovitz,
who taught engineering at Southern Methodist University. "They lobbied
Congress for an endless supply of H-1B visa holders to work long hours
at below-market wages, [with the result that] programmers and engineers
saw their wage growth suppressed and careers shortened. Potential
engineers are reading the writing on the wall and choosing more
lucrative and stable careers in business, medicine and law."
Many believe engineers are often victims of age discrimination. Steve
McMeekin, an electrical engineer who has done hardware and systems
design for 24 years, calls predictions of an engineer shortage "a
crock," citing his highly skilled, motivated engineer friends who can't
find work. "Their only problem is they are over 40," he says.
"When CEOs lament the decline in engineering enrollment," says Michael
Duffy, who has a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering and spent 16 years at
it, "I always think of the older talent they've tossed aside."
The message: Too many firms treat 40-something engineers as obsolete.
The smart engineers become patent lawyers. The periodic cry of "engineer
shortage!" is a ploy to obtain talent on the cheap and replace
middle-aged engineers with new grads trained in the latest techniques,
hundreds of readers claimed.
Anyone trying to gin up student interest in engineering through role
models should read my mail. Arnold Krell, a retired electrical engineer,
says, "I refused to allow my two children to become engineers," citing
salary ceilings and competition from younger, less-expensive workers.
James Jordan, a 20-year software vet, suspects that "today's youngsters
have seen how their parents have been treated by high-tech industries,
as disposable wage slaves who work long hours at high-stress jobs only
to face forced early retirement sans pension."
The periodic layoffs of engineers, with thousands dumped in the
aerospace-defense contraction of the late 1980s and now in the dot-com
and telecom meltdowns, have left a sea of bitterness. As Ed Boakes, who
holds an M.S. in electrical engineering and works at a telecom supplier,
asks, "Why bother to go into engineering at all? If you get a job,
you'll soon be laid off. I worry every day that today may be my last of
work."
During his 25 years in engineering, Mark Miller saw 10 waves of layoffs.
Now a stock analyst, he compares engineers to migrant workers: "In
aerospace, defense and electronics, technical employment ebbs and flows
with the economy and defense contracts."
One Lucent engineer told me he and his colleagues "watch in envy as the
salesmen earn six-figure commissions and Hawaiian 'sales meetings' by
taking orders for systems we designed that they don't even understand."
Jack Cummins, an aerospace engineer for 15 years, puts it this way: "Why
design things when you can work fewer hours, make more money and have a
better life by being a sales weasel? The dark side pays better."
Maybe the drop-off in engineering grads reflects a big no-confidence
vote in large companies by some of our smartest students. All you CEOs
worried about where tomorrow's engineers will come from: Are you
listening?
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2002/07/01/story6.html
>From the June 28, 2002 print edition More Print Edition Stories
Tech: Don't shrink cap on visas
Congressman wants jobs for Americans during the downturn
Robert Mullins
The continuing slump in Silicon Valley's tech economy has prompted a call
for change in U.S. immigration policy on hiring foreign workers. But tech
companies are resisting the change.
Two years ago, tech companies lobbied Congress to raise to 195,000 the
maximum number of H-1B visas that would be issued annually by the U.S.
government. But with beleaguered businesses laying off staff rather than
hiring, relatively few H-1B visa applications have been made in the last two
years.
That has led one congressman to call for rolling back the H-1B ceiling so
that available jobs go first to Americans.
The tech lobby argues that the ceiling should stay where it is so companies
can hire whom they need when -- as they all hope -- the economy rebounds.
H-1B is a type of visa issued by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization
Service to foreign workers to fill a job in the United States that an
employer claims it has been unable to fill with an American citizen. The
foreign worker can hold a job in the United States for three years and get
one three-year extension if needed. At the end of the six years the worker
can apply for permanent residence in the United States or return to his or
her home country.
During the tech boom of the late 1990s, Silicon Valley employers and others
lobbied Congress to raise the ceiling from 65,000 visas in 1998 to 115,000
in 1999 and 2000; and then to 195,000 visas in 2001 and 2002.
But just as the higher ceilings were taking effect, the economy entered a
recession in March 2001; companies cut their work forces of both H-1B and
non-H-1B workers. The downturn has been particularly deep in Silicon Valley.
The unemployment rate in Santa Clara County, the heart of Silicon Valley,
was 7.1 percent in May, more than double the 3.4 percent rate of May 2001,
according to the state Employment Development Department. The statewide and
U.S. jobless rates also are higher than a year ago.
With companies employing fewer people, the number of H-1B visas granted has
fallen well below the higher ceilings (see chart, this page).
The decline has prompted U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo to introduce legislation to
lower the ceilingto its 1998 level of 65,000 annually.
"Importing hundreds of thousands of foreign workers at a time of growing
unemployment in America is obviously absurd," the Republican from Colorado
writes in an prepared statement.
American companies are using the H-1B program to import foreign workers whom
they pay less than American workers, Mr. Tancredo says, a charge vehemently
denied by some businesses.
"That kind of raises the hair on the back of my neck," says Heidi Wilson,
corporate immigration manager for Sun Microsystems Inc., of Palo Alto, a
developer of software and maker of computer servers and other equipment.
"There are protections in the H-1B program that prohibit us from paying
`cheap wages,'" she says.
To hire someone through an H-1B visa, Sun must document with the INS that
the wage it will pay that person will be at or above the prevailing wage for
that position in the labor market, Ms. Wilson says.
Sun is defending itself against an accusation that it discriminated against
Americans in favor of H-1B visa workers in imposing layoffs. The San Jose
Mercury News reported June 24 that the U.S. Justice Department was
investigating one such claim by a laid-off Sun worker.
Ms. Wilson declined to comment on specifics of the case, but a company
spokeswoman, Diane Carlini, told The Business Journal that the 3,900 Sun
workers laid off in the past year by the 39,000-employee firm included some
holding H-1B visas and some without such visas. Ms. Carlini did not provide
a breakdown of each, however.
Defenders of H-1B dismiss Mr. Tancredo as pandering to anti-immigrant
sentiments in reaction to the economic downturn.
"When the economy is down, you have politicians like Tancredo who are
isolationist who try to take the opportunity to [argue to] close down the
borders," says Jeff Lande, vice president of the Information Technology
Association of America, a Washington, D.C.-based trade group for tech firms.
Mr. Lande and others don't see much chance that Mr. Tancredo's bill will
pass, but acknowledge that Congress has to reauthorize the H-1B visa program
in 2003. The ceiling reverts back to its 1998 level of 65,000 unless
Congress passes a new bill before the current program expires Sept. 30,
2003.
But Mr. Tancredo is not alone in alleging that some companies use H-1B to
import cheap labor.
Norman Matloff, a professor in the department of computer science at the
University of California at Davis, cites a variety of studies that show H-1B
workers are paid anywhere from 15 percent to 33 percent less than their
non-H-1B counterparts.
A report commissioned by Congress from the National Research Council, Mr.
Matloff noted, found that "H-1B workers requiring lower levels of IT skill
received lower wages ... and smaller pay increases than would be typical for
the work they did."
"The H-1B program is about cheap labor, pure and simple," Mr. Matloff writes
in an e-mail interview.
But specific employers in the Bay Area report no such disparity.
OmniPros Ltd., of Pleasanton, employs about 70 people, about 40 percent of
whom are H-1B workers, says Pawan Bahuguna, chief executive officer of the
software services company.
While individual H-1B workers may make more or less than their American
counterparts, "If my payroll was audited to see the salary difference
between H-1B workers and Americans, you would find it would pretty much even
out," Mr. Bahuguna says.
H-1B defenders also say foreign workers are needed to fill highly-skilled
jobs because there aren't enough people graduating from American schools
with degrees in specialized fields to fill job openings. Furthermore, many
of those attending American schools are foreign students anyway who would
have to apply for H-1B status to work here once their student visa expired.
Kleber Sales is one such person. The 30-year-old native of Brazil came to
California in 2000 to study software engineering at UC Santa Cruz. That
degree, plus career experience in software development from back home in
Brazil, qualified Mr. Sales for a software engineering job at Open Harbor
Inc., of San Carlos, a provider of technology that allows companies to
manage global trade operations online.
"There was a huge demand for professional Internet developers, and I had the
experience in the area that they were looking for," he says.
Being able to work in America under an H-1B visa has been good for his
employer and for him.
"I like to work here, learn a lot and have fun," Mr. Sales says.
Robert Mullins is a member of the Business Journal's technology team.
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