H-1B hearing: Companies say foreign workers needed

InfoWorld ^ | Sept. 17, 2003 | Grant Gross, IDG News Service

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H-1B hearing: Companies say foreign workers needed
Visas for foreign IT workers will drop by two-thirds for 2004 unless Congress acts
 

 

By Grant Gross, IDG News Service

September 17, 2003

 

WASHINGTON -- The yearly number of foreign visas for IT workers and professionals coming into the U.S. will drop by two-thirds for 2004 unless the U.S. Congress acts, and an immigration lawyer group came to Congress Tuesday asking that the cap on H-1B visas not be allowed to slide back to pre-dot-com boom levels.

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Representatives of Intel Corp. and Ingersoll-Rand Corp. also argued that H-1B visas are needed to fill technical positions where they can't find qualified U.S. candidates, but one panelist told the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee that the visa program is taking money from the pockets of U.S. workers.

"The unemployment rate of electrical and electronic engineers has reached an all-time high," said John Steadman, president-elect of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers-USA. "This translates to hundreds of thousands of unemployed U.S. engineers. These are people who are degreed and capable U.S. engineers." Unemployment among electrical and electronic engineers reached 7 percent in early 2003, Steadman said.

The annual H-1B cap went from 65,000 in the U.S. government's fiscal year 1998 to 115,000 visas granted a year in 1999 and 2000, then up to 195,000 in 2001 and 2002. The capped H-1B numbers don't include some workers, such as those employed at universities and some research organizations, but the caps do affect how many IT workers U.S. companies can bring into the country. The American Electronics Association noted, however, that the IT industry's reliance on H-1B visas was falling, from 65 percent of the capped number in 2001 to 34 percent in 2002.

The number of H-1B visas, used by companies to bring IT workers from India, China and other countries to the U.S., would go back to a pre-1999 cap of 65,000 if Congress fails to act by Oct. 1. Stephen Yale-Loehr, the business immigration chairman of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, asked the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee to allow 115,000 H-1B visas for the U.S. government's 2004 fiscal year. The H-1B visa program, popular with technology companies, also allows other U.S. businesses to recruit hard-to-find professionals such as accountants, lawyers and doctors.

Backers of the H-1B program argued Tuesday that the visas aren't taking away U.S. jobs, because some technology companies still can't find qualified workers for some positions. Ingersoll-Rand has searched for more than a year to fill a plastics engineer and an industrial robotics engineer position, finally settling on a Canadian resident in both cases, said Elizabeth Dickson, advisor of immigration services for the industrial equipment manufacturer.

"It is hard to displace U.S. workers when you don't have any U.S. workers to choose from," Dickson said.

Intel attempts to find U.S. workers before bringing in a foreign worker with an H-1B visa, said Patrick Duffy, human resources attorney for Intel, but more than half of the graduate students in physical science programs at U.S. universities are from outside the country. About 5 percent of Intel's U.S. workforce are H-1B workers, Duffy said, and many of them eventually become permanent U.S. citizens.

"This small percentage is comprised of individuals possessing unique and difficult-to-find skills which can only be acquired through advanced, university-level education," Duffy added.

The U.S. technology industry will be in danger of falling behind other countries unless the country can continue to attract "the best and brightest" workers from around the world, Dickson said, "We are looking for a reasonable, market-driven H-1B policy," she added.

The debate between Steadman and the three other witnesses translated into conflicts on the Senate committee, with senators sometimes even expressing conflict within themselves. "We don't want to be a country that turns down Einstein, but we also don't want to be in a situation where we flood the market," said Senator Jeff Sessions, an Alabama Republican.

Steadman and Senator Diane Feinstein, a California Democrat, pointed to abuses of H-1B visas and of a related program, the L-1, which allows companies to transfer employees from outside the U.S. to fill high-level positions. Some companies have used the L-1 visas to import IT workers who are then hired out to other companies, Steadman charged, and Feinstein questioned whether some companies employing H-1B workers were paying the prevailing wage as required. Numerous workers in California have complained to Feinstein that they've been replaced by foreign workers paid a third of their salary, she said.

"My view is (the H-1B cap) should go back unless we are able to produce some stronger safeguards," Feinstein added. "I'm elected to represent people from California, who are losing their jobs big time."

Senator Saxby Chambliss, a Georgia Republican, said he plans to introduce legislation this week to close loopholes in the L-1 visa program.

Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, noted that the sunset of his legislation to expand the H-1B cap to 195,000 will also result in the loss of a $1,000 fee per H-1B application, which has been used for training and scholarship programs in the U.S. Since 1998, when the cap was expanded from 65,000 to 115,000, more than $692 million has been raised by the H-1B fee, providing training for 55,000 U.S. workers and scholarships for 12,500 students in science and engineering.

Hatch said the Senate should not tolerate fraud and abuse in the H-1B program, but he questioned whether it alone was causing the U.S. unemployment problems. He questioned whether the facts supported accusations that companies are using the H-1B visa program to hire cheap labor. The average H-1B worker salary is $55,000, while the average salary of a U.S. worker with a bachelor's degree is $46,000, Hatch said.

But Steadman said Hatch wasn't comparing similar numbers. Engineers typically earn a much higher salary than most other professions requiring bachelor's degrees, he said, and the presence of foreign workers is depressing wages.

Yale-Loehr also noted that 22,000 H-1B applications are pending from last year, and close to 7,000 visa spots were set aside for Chile and Singapore in recent U.S. free trade agreements with those countries. If Congress doesn't raise the 65,000 cap, only about 36,000 new H-1B visas will be available in 2004, he said.

But Steadman urged Congress to look for a longer-term solution to the lack of qualified engineers and IT workers than raising the H-1B cap again. He encouraged Congress to invest more money in programs that encourage U.S. students to study engineering and science. He also asked Congress to strengthen the U.S. Department of Labor's ability to investigate H-1B abuses, as is required in the U.S. Jobs Protection Act, introduced in Congress in July.

Steadman also suggested the H-1B visa program contributes to companies outsourcing jobs and moving them outside the U.S. Some companies use the H-1B workers' contacts in their home countries to set up outsourcing deals, he said.

"These are difficult times for IT and electrical engineering professionals in the U.S.," said Steadman, an engineering professor from Alabama. "But there is a lot more at risk here than jobs for our members. If we continue down this path, the end result is the United States will make itself increasingly dependent on foreign technical expertise, both here and abroad."

 

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[A. Pole]

It's even worse, if they are looking for someone with Doohickey version 6.0 experience, they won't bother with someone who has extensive experience with Doohickey 5.0.

Maybe you should just lie (as H1-B applicants do).

[Steel and Fire and Stone]

Anyone involved in this (IT) industry knows that the "...we can't find smart Americans.. they don't study math/sciences..aren't any qualified available.." argument is wholly falicious. The Fortune 100 consulting company I work for has a well known policy of "moving work to where it can be most efficiently performed.." meaning India, Canada, or in a pinch .. Texas using H1B's. They just attempted to outsource my entire account (over 200 employees, about half which are already H1Bs) to India, but the client wouldn't allow it.

I haven't wasted my time writng a politician in a long, long time. But the stuff these Republicans are saying is so false, they have to know it. Finestein gets to take the "high road" of truth?? I'm writing the White House, my local Congressman, my California Senators, and these loser GOP *@#*$*#$@! Senators, and telling them one simple message: My vote in the next national election moves with the H1B and L1 program. If the GOP persists in selling my industry and my job to the lowest international bidder, I'm done with them.

SFS

[ninenot]

Meet TexDawg--a man who has NO USE for employed Americans.

[ninenot]

Yup.

As an HR pro, I can write a job description that you will NEVER match.

Further, the project managers always down-size their labor cost estimates to look good--thus, the salary pegs go down a few notches.

Since I am an 'outside' HR type, I've seen it hundreds of times---"we want X, Y, Z, A, B, C, all for $XX,000.00" And one finds rather quickly that the people they want are actually $XX,000.00 plus around 25%.

They manage to hire some yock that can't do the job--and wonder why the hell THAT happened...

[ninenot]

Ingersoll-Rand never heard of Cincinnati Milacron's layoffs of engineers? They never heard of Phillips Plastics (Wisconsin) layoffs of engineers?

Or are their HR people too lazy to use a Thomas Register, find the appropriate local newspapers, and place an ad?

Maybe the HR folks are too, ah, dense to utilize the professional engineering society's placement service.

Jeez. It's not THAT hard.

[ninenot]

but the HR bubble-head chycks don't know that

Go to an HR professional society meeting some day. THere are NO men left in the biz to speak of.

EEO made it so.

[lelio]

Since I am an 'outside' HR type, I've seen it hundreds of times

Don't forget that a lot of people placing the ads or acting as headhunters don't know the space either. So someone somewhere once said in passing "We're using Brand X's Version Q of Product M" and then suddenly that's a requirement.

The people making up the ad to run in the paper or in the HR department that screen applicants aren't skilled enough to realize that someone with Brand Y's product of the same kind can probably catch on.

And to be fair to them, there's a lot of clowns out there that muddy up the waters. They're proficient in their narrow field but can't see the forest for the trees. So he makes it past a screener and then the project manager yells at them for sending them a moron. The screener walks away thinking "I've got to match this up exactly."

Course the easiest way to get around that as a job applicant is to tailor your cover letter to suit their needs exactly.

[Jim Cane]

So, imposing tariffs on foreign-manufactured products will cause more U.S. students to study engineering and science?

Yes.

You ask easy questions.

[doosee]

Ingersoll-Rand never heard of Cincinnati Milacron's layoffs of engineers?

Ingersoll is such an American loving company that they moved their Corporate charter and home to some island in the Carribean. Would anyone expect this company to have any concern for American workers?

[Jim Cane]

Meet TexDawg--a man who has NO USE for employed Americans.

Just ignore ol' Running Dawg. Chicom talking points and all.

[ninenot]

Generally, with all systems requirements, I've immediately told my clients that some latitiude will be necessary--unless they want an MVS internals geek w/BAL so they can tweak native TSO, or someone to mess with source code.

But all the common RDB packages work the same, just different nomenclature, some tricks that the other guy doesn't have, etc.

Hell, you can figure THAT out just by playing with Word and WordPerfect. One's the Caddy--but the Chev is passable.

[ninenot]

I recall that the list of 14 'movers' included about 8 manufacturers of hand tools--Cooper, Ingersoll, and one that wanted to leave, but got 'caught' in the PR fiasco--and several others.

Reason? Flat hand tools are coming in from PRC at about 1/8 the cost of US made tools. The move these companies made was to escape US Income tax--a partial offset of the PRC's predatory pricing scheme.

[SauronOfMordor]

Go to an HR professional society meeting some day. THere are NO men left in the biz to speak of. EEO made it so.

At the company I just started work for (employed at last!), there are NO males in the 12-person HR dept or payroll dept

[YankeeReb]

It is hard to displace U.S. workers when you don't have any U.S. workers to choose from," Dickson said'...........

This is the same line of garbage you hear from corporate flunkies at every level of employment. I spent 15 years in I.T. and saw my share of Indian, Chinese, Russian etc people being exploited because they were on a visa and couldn't quit a job without being sent home.

These days I'm out of IT and in the construction field (lower pay but they can't ship your job overseas), and I see hoardes of illegals doing jobs under conditions that would generate an ocean of lawsuits if they had Americans doing them. Things that OSHA would close the job down for (no safety equipment, improper ventalation things like that). The point is, it doesn't matter whether we're talking about H1-b engineers, asbestos removal workers or lettuce pickers. The reason most of these jobs can't be filled by Americans is that the conditions of employment are intolerable. The only way employers will improve these conditions is if the supply of cheap , semi-indentured labor is cut off.

[Paul Ross]

"Ingersoll-Rand has searched for more than a year to fill a plastics engineer and an industrial robotics engineer position, finally settling on a Canadian resident in both cases, said Elizabeth Dickson, advisor of immigration services for the industrial equipment manufacturer."

This particular example reeks. Someone should take a close look at the facts here. Anyone subscribe to the Society of Plastics Engineers? For such a supposedly super-heated field, it sure looks like their journal is highly concerned over U.S. Plastics Engineers working on their resumes, and networking skills to find jobs. It also mentions a steady stream of U.S. graduates of Plastics Engineers coming out of the colleges. H'mmmmmmm.

[Paul Ross]

Actually, yes, because that dries up the incentives for the outsourcing and importing...hence creating de facto a greater demand for U.S. production forces to fill the demand being currently displaced by the fraudulently-justified H-1Bs and L-1s. It worked for 200 years. Time to go back to the basics. No more entangling alliances.

[bvw]

As usual with H1-B postings it is all facile lies. As Alan Dershowitz said about Clinton's lies under oath before a grand jury -- "It's okay to perjure yourself about sex." Well, in the corporate world -- "It's okay to lie about anything that seems to make you money, or save moeny, or whatever strokes your corporate penis."

Big multi-national corporations don't have penises, of course, they are just full of dicks -- dicks willing to lie, and who can't trust an honest person. Grasso! Hey, he's a King of the Liars! More power to him for getting the contract he did. But look at the big Dick wolves all running the NYSE and the multi-nats.

People are so happy when the stock market goes up! They feel those big Dicks and Toms and Micheals running the big one up where it gives them such pleasure! "Oh give me that 401k again"

The cheap sleazy crack ho's of the stock market are the everyday 401k and retirement fund "investors" -- JQ Public, Mr. and Mrs. They just don't quite realize yet how they have been abused.

[DuncanWaring]

Ingersoll-Rand has searched for more than a year to fill a plastics engineer and an industrial robotics engineer position...

They were probably looking for someone who'd work for $25,000 a year.

I was laid-off a week ago from a "major manufacturer of aerospace electronic equipment".

When I started at that company 19 years ago in one of their Flight Management groups, I knew a fair amount about airplanes, but nothing about "Flight Management". I subsequently developed a significant portion of the "vertical navigation" function from scratch, part of which I now hold a patent on.

I recently, pre-layoff, interviewed with another group trying to build a Flight Management computer.

I was told my "vertical navigation experience isn't current enough" and I "...didn't know enough about their particular hardware architecture".

Idiots.

Those reasons would have been enough to disqualify me from the original job, which I excelled at.

[zeaal]

Spouses last day is Sept 30 ... telecom.

[remember]

Backers of the H-1B program argued Tuesday that the visas aren't taking away U.S. jobs, because some technology companies still can't find qualified workers for some positions. Ingersoll-Rand has searched for more than a year to fill a plastics engineer and an industrial robotics engineer position, finally settling on a Canadian resident in both cases, said Elizabeth Dickson, advisor of immigration services for the industrial equipment manufacturer.

Typical non sequitur. Elizabeth Dickson, who is she?

In addition, she is focusing on a couple of very unique positions. Most people reading that likely don't personally know a plastics engineer or industrial robotics engineer who is looking for work. Back during the boom, however, I asked an H-1B Visa worker who I worked with what his area of expertise was. It was C++. Now, one might argue that there was an occassional shortage of C++ programmers during the Boom (though I don't know that for a fact). But I can tell you that, in Silicon Valley, there are thousands of good C++ and Java programmers who are currently looking for work. There is definitely no shortage now. Anyone who says otherwise is flat-out lying. The H-1B Visa program definitely needs to be tightened up to those positions for which there is a clearly demonstratable shortage.