To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter

Wed Mar 19 20:07:20 PDT 2014


A couple of DC insiders told me today that the tech industry lobbyists
seem to have launched a new PR blitz to expand the H-1B and
employer-sponsored green card programs.  (For brevity, I'll simply refer
to H-1B below, but bear in mind that the green card program is just as
harmful, as I've explained before.)  The industry may be short on
evidence supporting such expansion, but they are long on PR funding.
This post will have a "follow the money" theme, especially regarding the
claimed "academic" evidence showing H-1B is "good for America."

CompeteAmerica, an industry group that has lobbied for H-1B for the last
few years, held a phone-in press conference this morning, announcing
their latest PR gimmick, a "clock," modeled after the "national debt
clock."  This one ticks off the total number of U.S. jobs supposedly
lost due to what they regard as restrictive H-1B policies, that
supposedly hamper U.S. innovation and thus impede job creation.  Here is
some of the press coverage:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9247070/H_1B_visas_produce_net_IT_job_boost_trade_group_says     

http://smallbusiness.foxbusiness.com/legal-hr/2014/03/19/immigration-reform-group-launches-job-loss-clock/     

I'm waiting for the other side to come up with their own clocks, say one
that tracks the total amount of lobbying dollars spent by the tech
industry, and another that shows total tax revenue dollars lost to
cash-strapped federal and local governments due to the industry hiring
low-wage foreign workers. :-)  Even without the uberslick PR help that
the industry lobbyists can afford, there are endless "clock"
possibilities that organizations critical of H-1B can think up on their
own. :-)

I don't think a lot of people will be fooled by the clock stunt, but I'm
more concerned about the university professors CompeteAmerica cites, in
particular Matthew Slaughter of Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business.
CompeteAmerica cites his research on the benefits of H-1B.  

I doubt that even one journalist at the phone press conference today
realized just how heavily Professor Slaughter is funded by the corporate
world.  Look for example at the portion of his Web page that he titles,
"General-Interest Sponsored Research Publications,"

http://faculty.tuck.dartmouth.edu/matthew-slaughter/research-publications/general-interest-sponsored-research-publications

Of course, the key word is SPONSORED.  Corporations are PAYING for his
research--notably including his paper for CompeteAmerica, "Talent,
Immigration, and U.S. Economic Competitiveness," with coauthor UCSD
professor Gordon H. Hanson, Compete America Coalition research report,
Washington, D.C., May 2013,

http://irps.ucsd.edu/assets/001/504703.pdf

(Not surprisingly, Hanson too has been outspoken in favor of H-1B.)

In addition to the various papers listed there that were funded by the
industry, Slaughter's  Web page also features a long list of "Select
Keynote Speaking Engagements" to business and industry groups, most if
not all of which likely paid nice speaking fees to Slaughter.

NOTE CAREFULLY that having their work being sponsored extensively by the
corporate world does not necessarily preclude Professors Slaughter and
Hanson from having sincere beliefs in the glories of H-1B.  But
certainly they have major incentives not to delve too deeply into the
negative aspects of H-1B.  And obviously their corporate ties are an
extremely important thing for the press--and even more so, Congress--to
know.  These two professors are being presented to the world as
"impartial experts," which is not really the case.

Here is an example that relates to both the "follow the money" and
"clock" themes.  The CompeteAmerica clock is based on a claim that each
H-1B who is hired creates four other new jobs.  The "research" behind
such a claim is so flawed that even the highly pro-H-1B Wall Street
Journal dismissed it; see the details in my e-newsletter posting at the
time, http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/ WSJOnNFAPClaim.txt  Two
university economists ought to see right through such a claim.

But my point here involves another aspect of that same Wall Street
Journal article:  It quoted Duke University statistics professor David
Banks, who supported the "H-1Bs create jobs" claim.  When I first read
that, I wondered "How in the world did the WSJ choose to interview Banks
on this topic, out of the literally thousands of statisticians they
could have asked?"  He had not done any research on H-1B.  But I did
some checking, and it turned out that Banks has served as a consultant
to prominent immigration lawyer Bruce Hake.  As with Slaughter and
Hanson, the reader of the WSJ article would just assume that Banks was
an "impartial expert" sought by the WSJ journalist.

I've mentioned incidents in the press like this before, e.g. CNBC
quoting what they described as an "economist" at Stanford Law School who
was actually a well-known immigration attorney.  Sorry to say so, but
the press is not doing its job in this respect, not "following the
money."  That very phrase became famous during the old Watergate
scandal, which two journalists exposed.

I'll have a lot more to say about Slaughter and Hanson in few days, when
I will post a detailed analysis of their paper written for the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce, at

http://immigration.uschamber.com/uploads/sites/400/facts_and_fallacies_high_skilled.pdf

This document criticizes the works of Salzman, Costa, Hira, Kuehn,
Lowell and myself, and at least concerning my own cited paper, the only
charitable description I can give for Hanson and Slaughter's comments is
that they didn't actually read my paper.

Now, returning to this morning's CompeteAmerica press conference, one of
the more interesting points involves a question by Beryl Benderley of
Science Careers, a publication of the august journal, Science, reported
in a press release by the electrical engineering organization IEEE-USA,
at

http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/1800664    

Benderley had asked CompeteAmerica executive director Scott Corley why
the tech industry doesn't retrain Americans rather than hiring foreign
workers.  Corley's rather fractured reply boiled down to, "It's not that
easy," which IEEE-USA president Gary Blank took to mean ""Mr. Corley
made clear companies would rather use the H-1B visa to hire younger,
cheaper temporary workers."  

Blank's response was an unfair non sequitur.  On the other hand,
Benderley's question stemmed from an incorrect premise that Americans
with requisite skills don't exist to fill the tech openings being filled
by H-1Bs.  

And as I've said before, the very word "training" is not appropriate to
describe practicing engineers in the first place, especially in software
engineering, the dominant field of H-1Bs.  Contrary to the picture
painted by the industry lobbyists, most software engineers learn new
skills (programming languages, operating systems, etc.) all the time, ON
THEIR OWN, no formal "training" necessary; indeed, they consider this to
be one of the attractive features of the profession.

To get back to Benderley's question, I will quote the 1998 report of the
industry lobbying group ITAA, which was instrumental in getting Congress
to approve a near doubling of the H-1B cap that year:

      Training employees in IT would seem to be a win-win for both
      worker and employer. And often that is the case. However,
      extensive training creates other issues. ``You take a $45,000
      asset, spend some time and money training him, and suddenly he's
      turned into an $80,000 asset,'' says Mary Kay Cosmetics CIO Trey
      Bradley...  That can lead to another problem. New graduates
      trained in cutting edge technologies become highly marketable
      individuals and, therefore, are attractive to other employers.

So it's not that Bradley says it's "not that easy" (borrowing from
Corley) for an older programmer to learn a new skill, but rather that
that makes him a flight risk, armed with his new-found skills.  The
older programmer has suddenly become too expensive.  Hiring an H-1B
solves that cost problem, as does hiring a young new graduate.

Meanwhile S&P has just written a pro-H-1B report, apparently not public,
but probably without any surprising content.

Norm

Archived at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/CompeteAmerica.txt