Date: Sat, 19 Mar 2011 14:19:53 -0700 From: Norm Matloff To: Norm Matloff Subject: talk at ISIM To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter Yesterday I gave a talk at Georgetown University's Institute for the Study of International Migration, hosted by B. Lindsay Lowell, a prominent researcher on immigration. It was held at the university's law school, marking the second time in a year that I've given talks at law schools, one of my favorite speaking venues, though I don't think there were many law students at either talk. At any rate, I wish to thank Lindsay for the opportunity to have a very stimulating exchange of ideas. The PDF file for my presentation is viewable on the Web, at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/georgetown.pdf Lindsay will also be posting a video on the ISIM Web page, http://isim.georgetown.edu/ which should be very valuable as it will show the questions and answers, always a key part of any talk, as well as my extemperaneous comments. I'll wait for that video to make detailed comments, but I did want to mention now the question asked by a woman from the Migration Policy Institute, an organization that promotes expansive immigration policies. I had emphasized that the underpayment of H-1Bs is due to loopholes in the law, rather than fraud. She asked if fixing the loopholes would be enough for me, as opposed to reducing the H-1B and green card quotas. Jack Martin of FAIR also asked whether I felt that the latter should be reduced. (See also Martin's blog report below.) I'm not sure I did a good job of answering either questioner. My basic point was that if the loopholes were to be truly plugged, the quota issue would become secondary. Plugging the loopholes would solve the cheap labor problem, and without cheap labor, the employers would have very little interest in H-1B and green cards, thus rendering the quota issue essentially moot. Enclosed below are three pieces covering my talk. The first is by Beryl Benderly of Science Careers Magazine, which is affiliated with Science Magazine. The second is by CIS' David North, a former Assistant to the U.S. Secretary of Labor and longtime immigration researcher. The third is Jack Martin's blog. Norm http://blogs.sciencemag.org/sciencecareers/2011/03/an-internal-bra.html Science Careers Blog March 18, 2011 "An Internal Brain Drain" The United States is suffering from a serious scientific and technological workforce problem that harms innovation, according to Norman Matloff of the University of California-Davis computer science department. But it is not the supposed shortage of American scientists and engineers widely bemoaned by politicians and industry representatives. Rather, because of "an internal brain drain" of able Americans out of scientific and technical fields, "we are wasting our talent," he told he told an audience of legal and immigration experts, IT workers, and scientists at a March 18 policy briefing held at the Georgetown University Law School. This loss of talent largely results from the nation's policy of admitting large number of scientists, IT workers, and computer engineers, he said. Entitled "Are they they best and brightest? Analysis of employer-sponsored tech immigrants," the talk was arranged by the Institute for the Study of International Migration of Georgetown's school of foreign service. Matloff's answer to that question is a resounding No. Despite widely publicized claims that foreign tech workers and scientists represent exceptional ability and are thus vital to American innovation, Matloff called that argument merely "a good sound byte for lobbyists" supporting industry proposals for higher visa caps. The data, on the other hand, indicate that those admitted are no more able, productive, or innovative than America's homegrown talent, he said. In fact, Matloff went on, the nation is "wasting the innovation" that Americans could create because they are being driven from technical and scientific fields by the influx of foreigners. "There are a lot of good people who are displaced," he said. In the tech field, this does not occur because of talent, education, productivity or ability but with age, and ultimately with pay, he stated. Employers prefer to bring in young foreign workers who are cheaper in preference to employing experienced Americans who are more expensive. In a number of tech companies, a majority of workers are foreign-born while many Americans being displaced "are of good quality." Over 20 years ago, he noted, experts predicted that encouraging immigration would discourage citizens from entering these fields. "It's an issue of money....It's all due to an oversupply of people" created by immigration policies, he said. The issues applies to both the IT industry and scientific research, he added. One result is that young American "would have to be crazy to go into lab science today," he said. "No study except for industry studies has ever shown a shortage" of scientific or technical workers, he said. One indication of non-shortage is that "salaries are flat," whereas in a shortage situation they should rise. Proponents of more visas and green cards for foreign engineers and scientists, however, regularly cite the supposedly higher rates of entrepreneurship and patent applications by foreigners. The data show that immigrants patent at rates similar to or lower than that of Americans. Immigrants do, however, have more research publications and higher rates of entrepreneurship. Further analysis reveals, however, that this does not necessarily indicate greater innovation. "Many people in academe game the system and are very good at becoming machines to make many publications," he said. And "founding a company is not the same thing as innovation," he continued, citing a study showing that a third of the tech companies founded by Chinese immigrants are simply wholesaling or assembling PCs. Many Indian immigrant firms, meanwhile, are involved in outsourcing. Matloff emphasizes that he does not oppose immigration. He himself is the son of an immigrant and is married to a Chinese immigrant, he notes. He is fluent in Chinese and travels to China, both on professional matters and to visit family members. He has been instrumental in his department's hiring immigrant faculty members, he adds. What he opposes, he says, is permitting the labor market to be flooded with foreign workers, which he sees as contrary to the national interest. Policies such as a blanket provision of a green card to all foreign science and tech graduates as "unwarranted." "There is no labor shortage in tech" and no "best & brightest" trend found among foreign students or workers here. By Beryl Benderly on March 18, 2011 3:47 PM http://www.cis.org/north/matloff-isim-talk Prof. Matloff Busts 'Best and Brightest' Ballyhoo for H-1B Workers By David North, March 18, 2011 Professor Norm Matloff (from the University of California at Davis) quietly demolished the industry-cultivated notion that because H-1B workers are the "best and the brightest" more of them should be admitted to work in America's high-tech industries. He did so this morning a few blocks from Capitol Hill, at the Georgetown University Law School building at a meeting sponsored by the GU Institute for the Study of International Migration. Matloff began by quoting Microsoft's Bill Gates, and other tech industry leaders, who have repeatedly characterized the foreign workers in this program as the "best and the brightest" as they have sought to expand the program and/or make it easier for foreign tech workers to obtain green cards. The term has even been picked up by the president and is often heard in immigration debates in the Congress. He then went on to characterize the H-1B program as one that brings workers to prosperous companies at a 15-20 percent discount from market wages, and allows industry to repeatedly hire young foreign workers (below age 35) and to push aside older, equally-skilled, but more expensive, American workers. He also argued that flat wages in the industry recently are a strong sign that there is no shortage of tech workers, another industry claim. As to the "best and brightest" argument, Matloff, a statistician, presented a series of regression analyses to make his point, saying that once one had, through this technique, sorted out extraneous factors, the H-1B workers turned out to be pretty much like the rest of us, some brilliant, many average. One of the extraneous factors in the wage comparisons is the heavy concentration of H-1Bs in high cost of living areas, which inflates wages for workers in these areas. Perhaps the best indicia of high skill levels are wages paid by corporations, he said, but any comparative analysis of wages paid to H-1B workers and their U.S. co-workers (citizens and green card holders) ran into another analytical problem: that is the fact that H-1B workers, because of loopholes in the law and employer practices, are paid 15-20 percent less than their colleagues. To get around that, Matloff used the wage rates offered to people seeking green cards via the labor certification route, and compared those wages (in computer sciences and electrical engineering) to the wages of their U.S. colleagues - and found little difference. The latter comparison is an apples-to-apples one, because wages set for green cards are paid in a competitive market, while that is not true for H-1Bs, who are tied to the companies that brought them to the U.S. Matloff also showed regression analyses that indicated that there was not much difference between H-1B and other workers in terms of patents filed per capita and scholarly articles signed per capita, two other indirect indices of productivity. He questioned studies that found that the foreign workers were more innovative than American ones because they opened more companies; "opening a shop that assembles PCs is not innovation", he said, and that was something that many H-1Bs and ex-H1Bs have done. He also argued against the provision in the proposed "Staple Bills" that would automatically grant a green card to a foreign student getting a PhD in one of the high-tech fields (described colloquially as stapling a green card to their diplomas). "PhDs are overkill in the computer business, but master's degrees are valuable." He said that an analysis of the industry awards made by a big industry group, the Association for Computing Machinery, since the early 1980s showed that both Americans and people from India received awards in keeping with their populations in the industry, while Chinese did less well than their overall numbers would suggest. As to the relative lack of innovation of Chinese in the computer industry, compared to the other large H-1B group, Indians, Matloff (who is married to a speaker of Cantonese) said that it was not poor command of the English language that kept Chinese from more success, but rather the legacy of the rote learning that occupies so much of Chinese education. B. Lindsay Lowell, of the Georgetown migration program, presided at the session, which was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Bookmark/Search this post with: The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit research organization founded in 1985. It is the nation's only think tank devoted exclusively to research and policy analysis of the economic, social, demographic, fiscal, and other impacts of immigration on the United States. http://www.steinreport.com/archives/norm_matloff_why_we_need_to_fix_the_skilled_immigration_system.html March 18, 2011 Norm Matloff: Why We Need to Fix the Skilled Immigration System by Jack Martin Norman Matloff, a computer science professor at UC-Davis, made a presentation at the Georgetown U. Law Center on "Are Immigrant Engineers and Programmers Really Outstanding?" His thesis is that the claim by high-tech spokespersons (Bill Gates included) that the H-1B program is essential to hiring the "best and brightest" is nothing more than a smokescreen to allow the industry to maintain and/or increase the hiring of foreign workers to exploit at lower wages than would be paid to comparably educated Americans. Part of his presentation involved regression analyses of a series of surrogate measures of outstanding talent, the results of which sustained the conclusion that in general the foreign graduates from US universities who get H-1B visas are no more talented that US graduates. He suggested that the H-1B program could be redesigned to actually identify the best and brightest foreign graduates and thereby lower any discrimination against US workers. During his talk, an executive of a high-tech firm (who is of Indian heritage) commented that she had found that her US high-tech employees were on average much more productive than her H-1B high-tech employees. Later on, I asked Matloff whether - setting the quality of visa holders aside - he thinks that the sheer quantity of H-1B admissions discourages US students from going into science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields. He readily agreed that the current 100,000 or more H-1B admission level (adding in visas exempted from the 65,000 cap) is too high. I followed up and asked how he would set a level that avoided the unfair impact on US STEM graduates and he replied he did not have any formula for setting that limit, although he said that setting a minimum wage standard for new H-1B hires at the median wage for all new similar hires would go a long way towards relieving the unfair competition.