Tear-Jerker Series: Part 3 - New Hamphire
Tear-Jerker Series: Part 3 - New Hamphire
Date: Tuesday, October 14, 2003 11:34 AM
JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER
www.ZaZona.com
This is Part 3 in a series of articles that pull on our compassionate
heart-strings as we follow the plight of companies since the H-1B
yearly cap was reduced from 195,000 to 65,000. These articles are part
of the media campaign to restore the H-1B cap to 195,000 per year.
Robin Vermette, immigration services manager at Orr & Reno, a law firm
in Concord, warned, "We're going to see the H-1 cap seriously effect a
lot of companies." He seems to be very distraught that companies might
be forced to hire American citizens if the yearly quota of 65,000 is
reached.
Vijay Govindarajam, a professor at the Tuck School of Business at
Dartmouth said that if companies can't hire H-1Bs they will fire more
American citizens. That sounds sort of crazy until he explains that
many companies that Americans work at today have been started by
immigrants. Is Vijay implying that companies run by immigrants will
fire American citizens to exact revenge?
http://www.cmonitor.com/stories/news/state2003/101203hihgtechvisas_2003.shtml
Cap on visas worries companies with foreign workers
Limits meant to lower unemployment
Sunday, October 12, 2003
BY OMAR SACIRBEY
Valley News
Officials with some technology companies in New Hampshire and local
economic and immigration analysts are debating the wisdom of Congress's
decision to let limits on employment visas available to foreign workers
with high-tech skills slide back to levels at which they stood a few
years ago.
Software developers Fluent Inc. and Numbers Only Inc., as well as
biotechnology firm GlycoFi Inc., all in Lebanon, have frequently turned
to foreign workers for their engineering and scientific skills,
recruiting many of them during the technology boom of the middle and
late 1990s.
While today's sputtering economy has resulted in a larger pool of U.S.
technology and science workers that companies can draw from, some have
expressed concerns that lowering the visa threshold could hamper
recruitment efforts when the next tech boom happens and even limit
employment opportunities in the long run.
"We look for the best talent in the world," said Donna Brazos, human
resources manager at Fluent, which employs about 200 people, 15 percent
to 20 percent of whom work here on H-1B visas, one of several visa
classes and one that foreign science and technology workers commonly
use to enter the U.S. "It might delay when you can hire someone."
"We're going to see the H-1 cap seriously effect a lot of companies,"
said Robin Vermette, immigration services manager at Orr & Reno, a law
firm in Concord.
Make or take jobs?
Congress, responding to the pleas of technology companies that said
they could not find enough computer workers, engineers and scientists
to meet the labor demands created by the dot-com boom of the 1990s,
passed the American Competitiveness and Workforce Improvement Act of
1998.
The new law raised the number of H-1B visas that could be issued from
65,000 to 115,000 for the fiscal years 1999 and 2000, and then up to
195,000 for 2002. The law also required employers to pay a $500 fee for
their H-1B workers, with the money going to training and educational
programs for U.S. workers.
The H-1B visa class was originally established in 1990 and applies to
scientists and computer-related workers, along with several other job
categories, including health care workers, architects, theologians,
lawyers, writers and fashion models. An H-1B allows a foreign worker to
stay in the U.S. for up to six years.
But with the unemployment rate of American technology workers hovering
between 6 percent and 7 percent, according to the U.S. chapter of the
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in Washington,
Congress allowed the Oct. 1 deadline for renewing the 195,000-visa cap
to come and go without action. The decision in effect cut the number of
H-1B visa entries to the United States back to 65,000.
Opponents of higher H-1B numbers argued that foreign workers were
taking American jobs at a time of high engineering unemployment due to
the folding of dot-com and telecommunication companies.
Those who favored maintaining the higher visa levels worry, however,
that going back to the old limits would deprive American companies of
opportunities to recruit the most talented tech workers in the world.
"One of the great things about the U.S. is its willingness to accept
talent from anywhere in the world, and give them the same opportunities
you give to the local person," said Vijay Govindarajam, a professor at
the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth who came to the United States
more than 25 years ago and today is considered one of America's
foremost experts on globalization. "You tend to attract very high
talent when you have such a policy."
Rather than saving American jobs, the cut in visas could have the
opposite effect, Govindarajam argued, since many companies that
Americans work at today have been started by immigrants.
"The immigrant is not taking the jobs away, but making the pie bigger,"
said Govindarajam, who said he was skeptical that a lower limit on H-IB
visas would raise employment among American tech workers. "If you bring
talent in, they open up opportunities for others, including local
workers."
Telling the story
That phenomenon may be repeating itself here with North Brunswick,
N.J.-based Numbers Only.
Founded in 1996 by a pair of Indian immigrants, Hari Polavarapu and
Kameswara Vysyaraju, Numbers Only now employs more than 75 people,
including eight in West Lebanon, where the company chose to locate its
research and development hub in 1999.
Among its products, Numbers Only develops software that helps hospitals
track their inventory on handheld devices, and it counts
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center as one of its clients and IBM and
Microsoft as partners.
Half of the company's Lebanon employees are here on H-1B visas,
recruited a few years ago during the Internet boom. Now, Polavarapu
says he intends to hire between 10 and 20 more workers in West Lebanon,
mostly "senior-level engineers" who can work in research and
development as well as product support, before the end of 2004. But he
expects to find them locally, not abroad.
"Our recruitment needs are not large," said Polavarapu, who came to the
United States on a student visa and graduated from the University of
Wisconsin with an master's degree in management technology in 1992.
"We feel confident that we can recruit those people locally," he said,
adding that, "we are not adverse to hiring graduate students."
While some companies have been open about talking about how foreign
workers fit into their companies, others have been reluctant to.
Officials at GlycoFi, for example, a Lebanon-based biotech company with
30-plus employees from Austria, Germany, Poland, Sweden, South Africa,
China and India, as well as the United States, declined to be
interviewed for this story.
"Some of the companies are concerned about public criticism that they
use foreign workers when there are so many unemployed American
workers," said Allan Wernick, director of the Citizen ship and
Immigration Project at the City University of New York.
"It makes them feel the public will see them as anti-American."
Wernick said the opposite is true, since workers brought here would
spend their money here.
Wanted: science and math
Officials with Upper Valley technology companies say the new cap will
have a limited effect on them, at least in the short term, since most
are doing little hiring right now, and because there seems to be a
fairly large pool of unemployed tech workers in the area.
"Frankly, the impact would be minimal if not zero, because there's a
good, strong pool of local talent we can tap into," said Randy Britton,
a marketing director for Tally Systems, a Lebanon-based software
company that employs about 70 people, only a handful of whom are here
on either H-1B visas or green cards.
"We've seen a change during the whole dot-com bubble. Then, there was a
huge demand for IT skills. That's what fueled the whole H-1B push,"
Britton said. "We haven't had much need to look around."
Still, the new law could force companies to reconsider their hiring
strategy. For example, companies could be inclined to start looking
sooner than usual for candidates who hold H-IB visas.
"By March or April next year, there won't be many H-1B visas left,"
said Orr & Reno's Vermette.
The change has highlighted what some say is America's failure to
educate enough of its own citizens in math and sciences - something it
should focus on, rather than limiting the number of foreign workers
allowed in the country. "We have many brilliant people in this country,
but we need more," said Tuck's Govindarajam. "It's the kind of short-
sighted thinking that has hurt other countries."
"We're dealing with a high level of education that can't be found
around here," said Vermette. Not enough U.S. citizens are graduating in
math and science fields to keep up with the demands of the technology
markets, she said.
Fluent looks to hire employees with advanced engineering degrees,
Brazos said, noting that many of its job candidates were educated in
the United States but born and raised abroad and have foreign
citizenship.
"The majority of the (engineering) resumes we get are not from
Americans," Brazos said. "We have a pretty diverse group of workers."
With the bursting of the dot-com bubble and an increased awareness that
there is a need for more math and science training in the United
States, Polavarapu of Numbers Only said he doesn't expect the demand
for foreign technology workers to ever resemble what it was a few years
ago.
Still, he acknowledges that nothing is certain in high-tech, and
companies like his might find them selves scrambling for tech workers
again.
"We don't know what will happen in five years," he said. "If it
changes, we will face the issue again."
Sunday, October 12, 2003
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