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It would be easier to separate
sheets of wet tissue paper pounded flat by a hammer than to
separate fact from fiction in the H-1B debate.
Employers say foreign workers fill gaps left by a dearth of
qualified U.S. residents.
Unemployed IT workers and their allies say there's no labor
shortage. They claim that employers are just trying to cut IT
costs and drive down wages by hiring foreign workers at lower
pay rates.
The truth lies somewhere in between, but clarifying the issue is
difficult because emotions run high and statistics are either
contradictory or dated. For example, the Immigration and
Naturalization Service (INS) stopped tracing H-1B data after the
Sept. 11 attacks. Other oft-cited numbers were issued in 1998 or
early 2000.
Still, the available data does bear out that H-1B workers are
often younger and better educated than their American peers and
are seeking permanent resident status. Most H-1B holders in the
computer industry are hired to fill systems analyst and
programming jobs. Some receive the prevailing wage, while others
make less working in job shops. But the numbers are meaningless
to many.
"The problem with the whole issue is that it gets into matters
of immigration," said Robert D. Austin, assistant professor of
IT management at Harvard Business School. "And that turns into
us vs. them."
So it's not surprising that the debate often drifts into
rhetorical battles, giving rise to such unsubstantiated extremes
as the charge that all the H-1B workers in a New Jersey office
cheered as across the Hudson River the World Trade Center towers
fell.
The following are some of the arguments on each side:
• Companies have created an indentured servant class out of H-1B
visa holders, according to Norman Matloff, a professor at the
University of California, Davis.
• Companies don't hire average IT workers, but rather engineers
with advanced degrees, said Paula Collins, director of
government relations for human resources and education at Texas
Instruments Inc.
• Companies would rather hire U.S. residents because it costs
$1,000 in fees to hire an H-1B holder, said Margaret Wong, an
immigration lawyer in Cleveland.
According to the last INS report regarding which companies hire
the most H-1B workers, covering October 1999 to February 2000,
Motorola Inc. (618), Oracle Corp. (455) and Cisco Systems Inc.
(398) topped the list. Others in the top 25 included Intel Corp.,
Microsoft Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. Most of those
companies wouldn't comment.
Cisco said that the INS numbers are out of date, noting that it
has backed off its H-1B program and has actually done little
hiring of any kind recently. Layoffs caused by the downturn have
increased the number of qualified U.S. workers in the
marketplace, Cisco said.
"Basically, we have been a user of the program almost
exclusively to hire electrical engineers, all of whom or most of
whom have master's degrees or Ph.D.s," said a Texas Instruments
spokesman. Statistics do show that more foreign nationals
receive advanced degrees in engineering, computer engineering
and computer science.
In the 2000-01 academic year, foreign nationals took 60.4% of
computer engineering master's degrees. They earned 68.9% of
computer science and 51.8% of combined computer science and
engineering master's, according to Richard Heckel, technical
director at Houghton, Mich.-based Engineering Trends Inc. His
firm tracks graduate information from U.S. engineering colleges.
As for Ph.D.s, foreigners took 66.1% in computer engineering
degrees, 54% in computer science and 54.3 % in combined computer
science/engineering.
But that matters only if you believe the companies; Matloff, a
vigorous critic of H-1B visas, says he doesn't. His research
shows that only 1% of H-1B holders have Ph.D.s and only 7.5%
have master's degrees.
U.S. Labor
Dept. Rules for H-1B Visa holders
* A company must compare the
prevailing wage for a position to the actual wage it pays other
workers in similar positions. It must then pay the H-1B holder
the higher of the two.
* A company must post notice of its
intent to hire H-1B visa holders and inform other employees and
anyone who negotiates salaries for them. If there is no one who
negotiates for all employees, then the company must post two
notices in places visible to all workers for at least 10 days.
* Companies that violate these rules
are subject to fines.
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