H-1Bs: Talent or low-cost labor?
H-1Bs: Talent or low-cost labor?
Date: Monday, January 31, 2005 1:38 PM
JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER
by Rob Sanchez
January 31, 2005 No. 1187
This Sacramento Bee article on H-1B is one of the most interesting ones
I have seen for quite awhile because it goes beyond the typical rehash
we see in the press so often.
The first thing you should notice is the fact that many other
professions besides programming are being undermined by H-1B. The list
below shows that the top H-1B employers in the SF Bay area are using
the visas to import foreign teachers. Ironically one of the most
outspoken critics of H-1B is Dr. Norman Matloff from UC Davis.
UC Davis
Intel Corp.'s Folsom site
Sacramento City Unified School District
Hewlett-Packard Co. in Roseville
Kim Berry of the Programmers Guild reports that he was misquoted:
He alleges that some companies hire lawyers to craft
newspaper want ads matching the exact qualifications of
the foreign worker they want to hire, and that when job
applications come in, they can make a technical claim that
none of the responding applicants have the right skills.
Kim sent me the following message. Although this misquote is a bad one,
it's counterbalanced with some good quotes from opponents of H-1B. What
Berry says about Green Cards is correct but unfortunately the
journalist used H-1B as the example.
I was misquoted - I am aware that LCA for H-1Bdoes not
require fake job ads or a claim of lack of qualified U.S.
workers. I was speaking of "RIR for GREENCARD" abuse.
So the urban legend of H-1B requiring any finding
continues...
This urban legend is repeated in the article. I assume that Chad
Aleshire was also misquoted since everyone I have ever talked to at the
DOL knows better.
The applications cited in this story were certified by the
U.S. Department of Labor, a finding that there were no
Americans available or willing to do the jobs listed, said
spokesman Chad Aleshire. Not every certified application will
necessarily lead to the hiring of a foreign worker; once
certified, the applications are sent to the Department of
Homeland Security, which conducts additional reviews, he said.
As we all know, Intel makes very little effort to find US workers if
they can hire cheaper foreign labor, so the statement below reeks of
corporate spin-doctoring. The "less than %5" percent figure this Intel
spokesman is using is very deceptive because in many Intel locations
the majority of their engineers are H-1Bs. The reporter should have
asked him what the percentage would be if janitors and secretaries were
taken out of the equation.
"We do hire a limited number of employees under H-1B visas,
after a vigorous search doesn't find qualified workers
available," said company spokesman Dan Francisco.
Of Intel's 48,000 employees in the U.S., said Francisco,
"less than 5 percent are on a H-1B sponsorship. ... The real
issue is the lack of highly qualified U.S. candidates."
Immigration attorney Joel Stewart provides the laugh of the day. In the
article he said:
Stewart supports the H-1B/green card system, and says federal
officials make sure prevailing wages are paid to foreign workers
by employers sponsoring them. He's convinced U.S. workers are
protected by the regulations on the visas, by the cap, and by
prevailing-wage requirements.
"There are a lot of protections," he said. "The only way to go
from here is to say you don't want anybody foreign working here.
Joel Stewart sings a different tune when he is talking to fellow
lawyers. Here is a quote from the ILW.com website a couple of years
ago:
"Employers who favor aliens have an arsenal of legal means to
reject all U.S. workers who apply.''
(Joel Stewart, "Legal Rejection of U.S. Workers," Immigration
Daily, April 24, 2000.)
Stewart has such chutzpah you can actually have quite a laugh after you
get over the anger!
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
http://sacramento.bizjournals.com/sacramento/stories/2005/01/31/story5.html
From the January 28, 2005 print edition
H-1Bs: Talent or low-cost labor?
Area employers seek foreign skills
Mark Larson
Staff Writer
Greater Sacramento employers, from schools to staffing firms to
multinational tech giants, have applied for thousands of visas over the
past three years that would allow foreign workers to take jobs here.
UC Davis, Intel Corp.'s Folsom site, Sacramento City Unified School
District, Hewlett-Packard Co. in Roseville and a handful of companies
that supply tech and medical labor were the top 10 local applicants for
the H-1B visas, according to federal records for the period from Oct.
1, 2001 to Sept. 30, 2004, covering applications from Sacramento,
Roseville, Folsom and Davis.
Companies seeking the three- to six-year visas for foreign labor say
they're filling jobs that can't be filled by Americans because U.S.
applicants lack education or qualifications.
Critics howl that the H-1B visa is simply a tool that allows employers
to get cheap labor from other countries. They say the visas come at the
expense of U.S. techies, teachers and others who are being bounced out
of their careers.
The applications cited in this story were certified by the U.S.
Department of Labor, a finding that there were no Americans available
or willing to do the jobs listed, said spokesman Chad Aleshire. Not
every certified application will necessarily lead to the hiring of a
foreign worker; once certified, the applications are sent to the
Department of Homeland Security, which conducts additional reviews, he
said.
UC Davis, Intel lead
Topping the list was University of California Davis with 636
applications, primarily for post-graduate researchers or professors,
according to H-1B applicant data the Business Journal obtained from the
Labor Department.
"We depend quite heavily on international research, and almost all of
the H-1B applicants have a Ph.D.," said Wesley Young, director of
services for international students and scholars. "Many of the
best-qualified are not U.S. citizens."
Some on the faculty speculated that increased enrollment and grant
funding in recent years has spurred a need for more researchers and
teachers, in turn igniting the rising demand for H-1B sponsored
workers. For the 2002-2003 school year, UC Davis was awarded $426
million for research from federal and other sources, up from $357
million the previous year. For 2003-2004 its research awards total sank
slightly to $421 million, according to data posted on the school's Web
site.
At least one UC Davis computer science professor says H-1B visas give
the university a way to get research done cheaply.
Other local schools making the top 10 were Sacramento City Unified
School District, sixth with 73 applications for math, science,
chemistry and special-education teachers; and California State
University Sacramento, tied for eighth on the list with 53 visa
applications for assistant and associate professors or lecturers.
Intel's Folsom campus -- one of the region's largest employers at 6,500
workers -- was second on the list with 485 H-1B visa applications over
the three-year span, most of them for electronics, design and software
engineers. The company's immigration specialist in Folsom also filed
for hundreds more visas for engineering jobs at many of Intel's other
sites in the West, including Santa Clara; Fremont; Hillsboro, Ore.;
Austin, Texas; and Rio Rancho, N.M.
"We do hire a limited number of employees under H-1B visas, after a
vigorous search doesn't find qualified workers available," said company
spokesman Dan Francisco. In 2003, Francisco said, 1,273 of the 2,027
engineers who were awarded doctorate degrees from U.S. universities
were foreign nationals, and more than 9,000 of the 15,000 master's
degrees in engineering went to foreign students.
Of Intel's 48,000 employees in the U.S., said Francisco, "less than 5
percent are on a H-1B sponsorship. ... The real issue is the lack of
highly qualified U.S. candidates."
H-P apps filed from Sunnyvale
Hewlett-Packard Co. in Roseville was tied for eighth on the local list,
but the applications were filed from Sunnyvale, not the local campus.
Department of Labor data for federal fiscal year 2004 showed 17 visas
for the Roseville site, while data compiled on the Web site
www.H1B.info showed 36 more Roseville visas for the previous two years.
H1B.info, which opposes H-1B labor as a threat to U.S. jobs, said it
obtained those data from the Department of Labor via a Freedom of
Information Act request.
Hewlett-Packard's Roseville site has cut staffing from 6,000 to 4,000
in recent years. In 2003, after its merger with Compaq, the company
moved 500 manufacturing jobs from Roseville to Houston for efficiency.
Digital GlobalSoft Ltd., which placed seventh with 59 visas for
Roseville, made its federal applications from Marlboro, Mass. That
India-based company was bought out last year for $378 million by
Hewlett-Packard. It had been Compaq Computer Corp.'s partly owned
Indian subsidiary. Now known as HP Globalsoft, it has become part of
H-P's global software delivery system.
Techies, nurses in demand:
Sacramento-based Teksoft Inc. is the biggest local tech labor supplier,
and ranked fourth with 116 applications over the previous three years.
Also placing were Folsom-based Cognitim Inc., fifth with 82; and
Folsom-based EA Consulting Inc., 10th with 34.
Third place went to Professional Medical Staffing Home Care Inc. of
Sacramento, previously known as Professional Medical Co., which sought
a total of 136 visas for certified nurses, nurse assistants and other
caregivers over the three years.
A continuing shortage of nurses to meet population growth in the state
and new staffing regulations have driven up demand and led some
hospitals and other medical providers to seek help abroad.
Teksoft's Tami Tangasmay said the demand for H-1B visas among his
clients has been "flat, actually." He supplies foreign workers to H-P
and to various Bay Area information technology companies.
"Many of the (U.S. technology) jobs are being outsourced. I'm talking
to people in India, (and) they're not much interested to come here," he
said. "The market in India is really going up, with a more favorable
exchange rate" with the U.S. dollar.
But Tangasmay said most foreign workers getting H-1B visas end up
getting permanent resident status, commonly called a green card,
because they want to stay and work in the United States.
Kim Berry, a local engineer activist, contends that the proliferation
of H-1B visas to sponsor foreign-born tech workers is eliminating jobs
once filled by higher-paid Americans.
He alleges that some companies hire lawyers to craft newspaper want ads
matching the exact qualifications of the foreign worker they want to
hire, and that when job applications come in, they can make a technical
claim that none of the responding applicants have the right skills.
That tactic, he said, opens the door for the argument that no qualified
Americans are available for the work and an H-1B visa should be
granted. He has said some local companies use the ploy.
State technology contracts are competitive, said Berry, and companies
using H-1B workers win those contracts because the lower pay for
foreign employees allows them to cut their bids. "This is just
displacing more and more Americans out of their careers," he said.
Last year, Gov. Schwarzenegger vetoed legislation limiting state
agencies' ability to hire foreign labor for their contracts.
Needed visa to stay
Catherine Yang, a UC Davis professor who teaches business data
information management, is from China. Upon completing her doctorate
degree at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, she wanted a
teaching job in this country.
"Without the visa I wouldn't be able to teach," she said. She's on the
first year of a three-year H-1B visa, and can get it renewed for three
years. Within that six-year period, she can apply for a green card.
Joel Stewart is a Miami-based attorney who has written extensively
about federal law governing corporate use of foreign labor. The federal
cap for H-1B visas is 65,000 a year, and Stewart said the cap for this
federal fiscal year -- which began in October -- was reached in
December.
Stewart said the system is backlogged with applications, but for an
extra $1,000 "premium processing" fee paid by an employer, a visa can
be approved in a few weeks. Filing fees have risen from $1,000 to
$1,500, he said, but companies of less than 25 employees pay $750.
He attributed the high number of H-1B visa applications at Davis to
"rotating" professors, who come from other countries for schooling,
then return home to work.
Stewart supports the H-1B/green card system, and says federal officials
make sure prevailing wages are paid to foreign workers by employers
sponsoring them. He's convinced U.S. workers are protected by the
regulations on the visas, by the cap, and by prevailing-wage
requirements.
"There are a lot of protections," he said. "The only way to go from
here is to say you don't want anybody foreign working here.
"You might ask why the U.S. companies want to hire foreign workers. I
think the answer is clear. They bring a lot of new ideas, freshness,
intellectual power and work ethic to the U.S.," he said. "Most of the
great American thinkers, inventors, were foreigners themselves. Just
imagine if we had banned Einstein from the U.S."
'H-1B is about cheap labor'
UC Davis computer sciences professor Norm Matloff couldn't disagree
more. "In almost all cases, H-1B is about cheap labor," he said.
The only exception he cites is visas given to the "best and brightest"
from other countries. "For people who are of truly outstanding talent,
I think we should roll out the red carpet for them," said Matloff. "I
have a pretty high bar for that."
But he has a problem with the school bringing in foreign nationals to
do post-graduate research, the research not done by professors.
Salaries for those jobs are set too low to attract Americans, he said.
Matloff doesn't necessarily dispute Stewart's contention that foreign
workers on H-1B visas get the same pay Americans would for the same
job. "They set the salaries so low, they're more attractive to foreign
nationals than they are to Americans," he said.
Matloff also argues that there is no shortage of qualified candidates
in America. "In the computer science department, we get 50- to
100-to-one ratios of (professor) applications to openings."
He likens the technology industry's wage issues to those at hamburger
chains. He's found that chains paying higher wages employ U.S.
teen-agers and old folks, while those paying lower wages employ foreign
nationals.
Meanwhile, computer science enrollment at UC Davis, Stanford and MIT is
"way down, about 35 percent or so in the last few years," added
Matloff. He theorizes that students see the program like a liberal arts
degree -- nice to learn, but nothing that will lead to a high-paying
job.
Low pay for tech work "is absolutely a mindset" among employers,
Matloff said. "It's cheap labor, period."
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