Due to an extensive public relations campaign orchestrated by an industry trade organization, the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), a rash of newspaper articles have been appearing since early 1997, claiming desperate labor shortages in the information-technology field. Frantic employers complain that they cannot fill many open positions for computer programmers.
footnote: Our focus on computer programmers here is explained in the section ``Reason for the Focus on Software.''
Yet readers of the articles proclaiming a shortage would be perplexed if they also knew that Microsoft only hires 2% of its applicants for software positions, and that this rate is typical in the industry. Software employers, large or small, across the nation, concede that they receive huge numbers of re'sume's but reject most of them without even an interview. One does not have to be a ``techie'' to see the contradiction here. A 2% hiring rate might be unremarkable in other fields, but not in one in which there is supposed to be a ``desperate'' labor shortage. If employers were that desperate, they would certainly not be hiring just a minuscule fraction of their job applicants.
The hidden agenda of the ITAA public relations campaign which began in 1997 turned out to be to leverage Congress to increase the yearly quota of H-1B work visas, under which employers were importing tens of thousands of programmers to the U.S. each year. The campaign succeeded, with President Clinton signing the increase into law in October 1998. Yet in 1999 the industry started calling for even further increases in the visa quota, which it attained in October 2000.
I am frequently asked questions relating to various industry lobbyist claims. Following is a list of such questions and my answers. The reader is urged, though, not to simply read such a coarse summary, but instead read this document in its entirety, as this is a highly complex subject which cannot be reduced to ``sound bites.'' The answer to each FAQ includes links/page numbers to the detailed analyses within the document proper. Citations for all statistics and quotes given in this Frequently Asked Questions section are available in the body of this paper.
Question: Are the H-1Bs paid the fair ``prevailing wage,'' as claimed by the industry? Page (mouse click here) pageref.
Question: The industry says that it will need H-1B visas temporarily, until more programmers can be trained. Is this true? Page (mouse click here) pageref.
Question: The industry claims that if it cannot bring H-1B workers to the U.S., it will be forced to move software operations to where the workers are overseas. Is this true? Page (mouse click here) pageref.
Question: Why are the H-1Bs de facto indentured servants? Page (mouse click here) pageref.
Question: How has the high-tech slowdown since 2001 affected H-1B usage? Page (mouse click here) pageref.
Question: Rather than H-1Bs being a source of cheap labor, the industry claims that legal fees make the H-1Bs actually more expensive than American workers. Is that true? Page (mouse click here) pageref.
Question: The industry lobbyists say the alleged high-tech labor shortage is due to the failure of our K-12 educational system to develop math skills for engineering careers. Is that true? Page (mouse click here) pageref.
Question: Are large numbers of university computer science majors foreign students? Page (mouse click here) pageref.
Question: What about at the PhD level? Are they largely foreign students? Page (mouse click here) pageref.
Question: The industry lobbyists claim that the H-1Bs tend to be ``the best and the brightest'' from around the world. Is this true? Page (mouse click here) pageref.
Question: What about the industry lobbyists' citing of the Asian-born entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley? Page (mouse click here) pageref.
Question: The employers claim to hire the H-1Bs because they have work experience in specific software skills. How is it that the H-1Bs possess skills the Americans don't? Page (mouse click here) pageref.
Question: The industry claims that each job held by an H-1B generates several new jobs for Americans. Is this true? Page (mouse click here) pageref.
Question: Lobbyists for the large U.S. firms concede that there is abuse of H-1Bs, but that this is mainly among the ``body shops'' owned or run by Indo-Americans. Is this true? Page (mouse click here) pageref.
Question: Since the industry says that the H-1Bs are so important to them, has it lobbied Congress to expedite the greencard process? Page (mouse click here) pageref.
Question: The industry says H-1Bs comprise only a small percentage of their workers. If that is true, why is there such a controversy? Page (mouse click here) pageref.
Question: How was the industry able to get Congress to pass the H-1B increase in 1998, given that a Harris Poll had shown that 82% of Americans opposed the increase? Page (mouse click here) pageref.
Question: Does this discussion really boil down to whether one should protect the natives? Page (mouse click here) pageref.
Question: The industry lobbyists say that only a tiny percentage of H-1B visas lead to complaints about underpayment of wages. Page (mouse click here) pageref.
Question: Why not just have an open-borders policy, at least for high-tech workers? What would be the harm of issuing instant green cards to anyone with experience as a programmer or engineer? Page (mouse click here) pageref.
Question: How can we evaluate all these conflicting claims about whether a high-tech labor shortage exists or does not exist? Page (mouse click here) pageref.
Question: In all this ``high-tech labor shortage'' talk, what kinds of workers are we discussing? Page (mouse click here) pageref.
Question: Is there a ``desperate'' shortage of programmers? Page (mouse click here) pageref.
Question: Don't low unemployment rates among programmers indicate a labor shortage? Page (mouse click here) pageref.
Question: True, the fact that industry employers hire only about 2% of their programming applicants in spite of an alleged programmer ``shortage'' does sound strange. But could the low hiring rates simply reflect a situation in which the same applicants are applying to many employers? If for example an applicant sends re'sume's to 12 firms, that might make the overall applicant pool look 12 times its actual size. Page (mouse click here) pageref.
Question: Why are the employers being so picky in their hiring? Page (mouse click here) pageref.
Question: Are U.S. universities producing enough computer science graduates to meet industry's needs? Page (mouse click here) pageref.
Question: Industry employers say they have to hire only programmers with specific software skills, because they have urgent needs to finish a product quickly. Is this true? Page (mouse click here) pageref.
Question: The industry lobbyists point to large sums of money they spend recruiting programmers. Doesn't that show that there is a shortage? Page (mouse click here) pageref.
Question: The industry lobbyists cite astronomical sums of money the industry claims to spend on training. What about this? Page (mouse click here) pageref.
Question: Industry employers say that the reason they reject all programming applicants who lack specific software skills, is that they receive such a huge volume of re'sume's. They don't have time to interview everyone, and thus need to use some filter to winnow down the the pile of re'sume's. Isn't that reasonable? Page (mouse click here) pageref.
Question: If employers really would be better off hiring on the basis of general programming talent rather than on specific skills, won't market competition solve that problem? Won't the employers with better hiring policies naturally rise to the top of the market? Page (mouse click here) pageref.
Question: How widespread is age discrimination in this field? Page (mouse click here) pageref.
Question: Some older programmers do quite well in the field. So if an older programmer is having trouble finding programming work, isn't it his/her own fault for not keeping up with changes in the technology? Page (mouse click here) pageref.
Question: Since the issue of specific programming skills is central, is the solution to increase government or private training programs? Page (mouse click here) pageref.
Question: But training does seem to be working. Press accounts in the year 2000 have reported that the training programs funded by the H-1B fees are resulting in actual hires. Page (mouse click here) pageref.
Question: The industry dismisses concerns about older programmers by claiming that those programmers' experience is in COBOL, a language popular in the 1960s and 1970s but radically different from the languages used today. Is this true? Page (mouse click here) pageref.
Question: How can we evaluate all these conflicting claims about whether a high-tech labor shortage exists or does not exist?
Perform this simple five-minute experiment:
Just call any firm which hires programmers - a large firm, a small one, new, old, any location - and talk to the HR Department. Ask them if it is true that they reject the vast majority of their programming applicants without even an interview. After they confirm this, ask them why they do this, and they will say that the vast majority of the applicants don't have some new software skill set the employer wants, even though the applicants have years of programming experience.
Here is what you will have learned from this experiment:
Question: Are the H-1Bs paid the fair ``prevailing wage,'' as claimed by the industry?
The industry lobbyists form a lone voice on this issue. There is a broad consensus that the H-1Bs are indeed exploited in terms of wages and working conditions. This was found in
One need not even use data sets to see the problem. Most H-1Bs are de facto indentured servants, unable to switch jobs. Thus they cannot leave for a higher-paying job elsewhere, nor can they negotiate higher wages with their present employers by threatening to leave. So, they have lesser opportunities than do normal workers who are free to move about in the market. Thus it is indisputable, from basic economic principles, that on average they are making less money than they would if they had their freedom.
See Section 9.2.5.
Question: In all this ``high-tech labor shortage'' talk, what kinds of workers are we discussing?
Though usually not mentioned by the lobbyists, the discussion is about computer programmers. (Note that this includes not only those with Programmer titles, but also those with titles like Software Engineer and System Analyst.) The reason the discussion is about only programmers that the H-1B work visa holders in the high-tech field work almost exclusively as programmers, not in all the other information technology (IT) jobs such as marketing, customer support, software testing and so on. And note that this is not about engineers either - among the H-1B workers, computer science graduates outnumber the electrical engineering graduates 15-to-1.
See Section 3.
Question: Is there a ``desperate'' shortage of programmers?
The only ones claiming a shortage are the industry and their allies. Consider:
And though figures like 7 or 8% are a few percentage points above inflation, they are still very mild. If employers were desperate to hire, as they claim, they would certainly be willing to pay a premium of more than 7%. Wages in almost all professions have been going up at least this much. Surveyors and dieticians saw their salaries increase far more than programmers in 1997, beating inflation by 20% and 17%, respectively.
When the industry claims a shortage of programmers, what they mean is a shortage of cheap programmers. A September 28, 2000 article in the Chicago Sun-Times said it succinctly:
``If you're willing to pay market rate, you can find people,'' said Pete Georgiadis, founder and CEO of eBlast Ventures, a company that funds and builds technology firms. ``The issue is if you're budget-constrained, you can't get the people you want.''The fact that the industry cries of ``shortage'' were nothing more than a political ploy was illustrated by the fact that heavy layoffs in the industry began around January 2001, just two months after the industry lobbyists were insisting to Congress that there was a ``desperate'' shortage (and nearly a year after the NASDAQ stock index started falling).
In the economic slowdown of 2001, employers became even pickier than before. Whereas before a job ad might require only Java, the same ad now was phrased something like ``Requires Java and XML, in real estate applications, residential real estate preferred.''
See Section 4.
Question: Don't low unemployment rates among programmers indicate a labor shortage?
Since people who cannot find programming work leave the field, unemployment statistics for programmers are meaningless.
For example, consider the recent age discrimination lawsuit filed against Siemens. An EEOC report on the suit found that in the firm's layoff action, the termination rate for those over 40 was 10 times higher than for those under 40. The plaintiffs in the case were now working in jobs such as truck driver. Clearly, they were ``employed,'' but they counted in government statistics as an employed truck drivers, not unemployed programmers.
See Section 5.7.1.
Question: True, the fact that industry employers hire only about 2% of their programming applicants in spite of an alleged programmer ``shortage'' does sound strange. But could the low hiring rates simply reflect a situation in which the same applicants are applying to many employers? If for example an applicant sends re'sume's to 12 firms, that might make the overall applicant pool look 12 times its actual size.
It is not just the hiring rates which are low; the interview rates are also low. Employers admit that they reject the vast majority of their programming applicants without even interviewing them. The key significance of of this is that it shows that the the employers are actually not ``desperate'' to hire, contrary to their claim. Instead of being desperate to hire, they are actually very picky.
Question: Why are the employers being so picky in their hiring?
As noted earlier, most employers admit that they reject the vast majority of their applicants. Why are they so picky?
The employers answer that most of their applicants, even though they are experienced professional programmers, do not have a very specific new software skill which the employer wants, say the Java programming language.
This skills issue is central, for both insincere and sincere employers:
So again, for both insincere and sincere employers, the skills issue is central. Employers say they do not have enough applicants for programming jobs, but in fact they have huge numbers of applicants; what they really mean is that they do not have many applicants who possess work experience in a given skill.
An Information Week Online article (March 30, 1998) summarized the situation with respect to both age and specific software skills:
``Younger people with hot skills have the most options open to them,'' says Tom Morgan, a VP in the Chicago office of Pencom Systems, a national IT recruiting firm.See Sections 5, 7 and 9.2.
Question: How widespread is age discrimination in this field?
Age discrimination is rampant in this field, starting even as young as 35. Though industry lobbyists like to dismiss this as being supported only by anecdotal evidence, the fact is that there is a plethora of hard data which show that older programmers and engineers do face major difficulties in finding programming and engineering jobs, such as:
The employers use the skills issue as a pretext for shunning the older programmers, saying, ``Sorry, we cannot hire you, since you do not have the new software skills.''
Question: The industry lobbyists point to large sums of money they spend recruiting programmers. Doesn't that show that there is a shortage?
No. Again, this only reflects the fact that employers want to hire certain narrow categories of people, such as those with specific new software skills and younger and/or foreign programmers with lower salaries.
Question: The industry lobbyists cite astronomical sums of money the industry claims to spend on training. What about this?
Most of those sums for training are spent on secretaries and technicians, with much less being spent on programmers and engineers.
In fact, it is common for a firm to be laying off older workers while simultaneously hiring younger ones with newer skills. As one HR director of Dow Jones put it in 1998
There's a real focus on skill sets needed right now. I recently attended a conference on retention where participants were simultaneously hiring and laying off-even in IT-all because of the need to get things involving new skill sets done fast. Training never came up as an alternative.
Computerworld reported in June 2000 that IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Ernst and Young and so on
[are laying off programmers off while] hiring people with the right skills - not teaching old dogs new tricks.
Question: Industry employers say they have to hire only programmers with specific software skills, because they have urgent needs to finish a product quickly. Is this true?
By the industry's own admission, they often leave jobs open for months (an average of 3.7 months in Silicon Valley) until they find a programmer possessing the exact skills match they want. It is thus disingenuous for them to say they need someone who can ``be productive immediately, tomorrow.''
During the three or four months they wait for the perfect match, they could instead hire a generic programmer and let him/her learn the specific skills on the job, which any competent programmer can do within weeks. Refusing to hire a C-language programmer to write Java code is like a Ford dealer refusing to hire mechanics who have only Chevy experience, and even such luminaries as Microsoft's Bill Gates have criticized industry practice in this regard.
The best way to finish a project on time is to hire smart programmers, not programmers who have some particular skill set. Studies show that there is a 10-to-1 range in productivity among programmers.
Employers are shooting themselves in the foot with their current hiring policies, actually increasing their labor costs rather than reducing them, and increasing time-to-market for their products, rather than reducing it.
Question: Industry employers say that the reason they reject all programming applicants who lack specific software skills, is that they receive such a huge volume of re'sume's. They don't have time to interview everyone, and thus need to use some filter to winnow down the the pile of re'sume's. Isn't that reasonable?
It's not reasonable to say on the one hand that they are ``desperate'' to hire, and on the other hand complain that they have so many applicants that they need ways to winnow down their pile of re'sume's. They have an embarrassment of riches, not a shortage.
Question: The employers claim to hire the H-1Bs because they have work experience in specific software skills. How is it that the H-1Bs possess skills the Americans don't?
Often the H-1Bs don't have the background they claim. An audit by a U.S. consulate in India found that fraud was quite common. Similarly, reports from American programmers who work with H-1Bs indicate that rather than having work experience in the given skill, many H-1Bs either have only had a quick course or are learning the skill on the job. Ironically, the latter is what I recommend that the employers have older American programmers do, but the difference is that the H-1Bs are much cheaper than the older Americans, so the employers do this with the H-1Bs but not with the older Americans.
See Section 9.8.
Question: Some older programmers do quite well in the field. So if an older programmer is having trouble finding programming work, isn't it his/her own fault for not keeping up with changes in the technology?
No. Employers are not willing to hire a veteran programmer who has taken a course in a new software skill. Employers insist on actual work experience in that skill.
If an older programmer is lucky enough that the present employer will allow him/her to work on a project which uses a new skill, then he/she can then stay alive in the field. Or, in some instances, if there is a very new programming language X which very few programmers know, a programmer who knows another language Y can try to find another employer who needs Y and is willing to let him/her learn X on the job. But there is only a narrow window of time in which this is possible.
See Section 5.9.
Question: The industry dismisses concerns about older programmers by claiming that those programmers' experience is in COBOL, a language popular in the 1960s and 1970s but radically different from the languages used today. Is this true?
Virtually none of the older programmers I talk to around the nation who have trouble finding programming work are COBOL people. Their experience is in the C programming language. Java and C++, two of the hottest languages today, are extensions of the C language.
The industry lobbyists then claim that the C language is not enough, asserting that Java and C++, with their ``object-oriented programming'' (OOP) philosophy, represent an ``abrupt change in the paradigms of programming.'' This is simply false. Those of us ``dinosaurs'' who have been programming since way back in the days of punched cards have heard claims of ``abrupt paradigm changes'' many times as programming languages have evolved over the years. The claims have always simply been hype. Programming is programming is programming, and it has always been a straightforward matter to quickly become productive in a new language.
Question: Since the issue of specific programming skills issue is central, is the solution to increase government or private training programs?
No, this is absolutely the wrong ``solution,'' for these reasons:
This is not a ``career path'' issue. Technicians do not later become programmers. The two jobs are unrelated, just a computer technician at a magazine would not become a writer, a lighting technician in a theater would not become an actor, etc.
See Section 8.
Question: But training does seem to be working. Press accounts in the year 2000 have reported that the training programs funded by the H-1B fees are resulting in actual hires.
Those programs are training people to fill jobs which are not taken by the H-1Bs anyway, not the programming jobs taken by H-1Bs. The training is for jobs as a technician, a completely different job which requires a level of general education at only the high school diploma level; the H-1B visa is for jobs requiring a college degree. (Again, note that technicians do not later become programmers.)
Thus the programs are not accomplishing the goal Congress had in establishing them - to reduce industry usage of H-1Bs, to make use of the older ex-programmers who were forced out of the industry, etc.
This point was illustrated in the September 18, 2000 issue of eWeek. It notes that $153.7 million has been raised by H-1B fees, but:
eWeek reporting supports the claim that retraining programs funded by H-1B fees are failing to lessen dependence on imported IT talent. Calls to companies on the list of corporate partners of one Labor-funded program, Bay Area Video Coalition, or BAVC, in San Francisco, didn't turn up a single organization that could claim to have reduced its use of H-1B visa holders because of the program...(Emphasis added.)Even big IT employers familiar with the H-1B fee-funded training programs say they haven't been used to reduce dependence on workers from outside the United States. Sun, for example, donates cash, equipment and curriculum develop ment to training programs funded by the H-1B fees, yet within Sun itself, the programs have brought about no impact on H-1B visa usage. Why isn't Sun hiring training program graduates into positions held by H-1B visa workers? Because the skill levels of the two groups are worlds apart, said a Sun spokesman. ``There's no data on actual skill levels, but the Sun people who are on H-1B visas are very highly skilled,'' said the spokesman, in Washington.
Like Sun, many IT employers see a vast discrepancy between the high skill levels of most H-1B visa holders and the entry-level skills of most graduates of H-1B fee-funded training programs
The article then quotes some industry lobbyists as saying the problem is government bureaucratic bungling. But that is an obfuscation of the basic fact that industry does not want to reduce H-1B usage in the first place; the attractions of indentured servitude, salary savings and so on are things the industry just does not want to give up. Even industry lobbyist Rick Swartz has stated this.
Question: If employers really would be better off hiring on the basis of general programming talent rather than on specific skills, won't market competition solve that problem? Won't the employers with better hiring policies naturally rise to the top of the market?
No. The classical economic models of ``perfect competition'' don't apply to this industry.
Question: The industry says that it will need H-1B visas temporarily, until more programmers can be trained. Is this true?
No, it's false and dishonest. The employers know that this labor ``shortage,'' in the manner they have defined it, will be permanent; they intend to rely heavily on H-1Bs permanently, as explained below.
The industry has been using this ``temporary need'' stall tactic for years, ever since the H-1B law was enacted in 1990. In the early- and mid-1990s, for example, the industry kept saying that H-1Bs wouldn't be needed after the laid-off defense programmers and engineers were retrained, but never carried out its promise. It hired those laid off in low-level jobs such as technician (which is all the retraining programs prepared them for), and hired H-1Bs for the programming and engineering work.
It is important to note that though the industry has claimed that the H-1B visa program is just a ``temporary'' solution to the claimed labor shortage, that claimed/perceived ``shortage'' will be permanent. The reason for this is that, since software technology will continue to change extremely rapidly, and since employers are not willing to hire a veteran programmer who learns a new software skill via coursework, it will always be the case that most programmers do not possess the latest software skills, and thus there always will be a ``shortage.''
Indeed, immediately after the H-1B bill passed Congress in the year 2000, Texas Instruments and other high-tech firms said that they would need H-1B for ``the next 20 years.''
Question: Are U.S. universities producing enough computer science graduates to meet industry's needs?
``Pushing the Education Button'' is a tried and true method for obfuscating any issue, this case being a prime example.
The leading industry lobbying group for increasing the H-1B quota, the ITAA, claimed in its original literature in 1997 that American students had neither the interest nor the background to study computer science. But in actually, the ITAA knew that computer science enrollment was skyrocketing, and it deliberately suppressed that fact in its report. New computer science enrollment doubled nationwide in the latter half of the 1990s.
Other industry lobbyists have continued to present highly misleading data since that time. They also continue to obfuscate the issue by talking about enrollment in engineering, even though as mentioned earlier the vast majority of high-tech H-1Bs have degrees in computer science, not engineering; the H-1Bs are overwhelmingly programmers, not engineers.
Contrary to the claims that American youth lack interest in computer careers, the fact is that university enrollment in computer science programs has risen and fallen in almost perfect correlation to the job market in this field.
Moreover, these supposedly-desperate employers are ignoring most of the new graduates. If you ask a large employer about their recruiting at a typical large university, they will admit that they extend offers for programming positions - again, this is what the H-1Bs are hired for, thus the category of interest here - to only a small handful of the new graduates at that school. Amdahl, for example, made only six offers to new graduates at UC Davis during the two recruiting seasons 1998 and 1999.
A small number of graduates are highly courted by employers, but most graduates cannot get programming positions, and are relegated to semitechnical jobs like customer support. To be sure, salaries are good even in those semitechnical positions, but most CS grads have worked very hard in their studies, preparing to do the ``real'' work, i.e. programming; instead, the employers are hiring the H-1Bs for programming positions. Moreover, once someone without job experience in programming gets a customer support position, it is quite difficult to move into d evelopment jobs; most will never become programmers.
The economic slowdown of 2001 hit new graduates very hard, according to reports in early Spring. All the problems cited above became more severe. The situation was dramatized by the revelation that Intel even had contacted some of those to whom it had made recent job offers, now turning around and offering to pay them NOT to accept those offers; a number of other firms did the same.
See Section 6.
Question: Are large numbers of university computer science majors foreign students?
No. Only 6% of Bachelor's degrees in computer science are awarded to foreign students.
See Section 6.
Question: What about at the PhD level? Are they largely foreign students?
This is a red herring to begin with, since fewer than 1% of the computer-related H-1Bs have a PhD. (And only 7.5% have a Master's.) But some other points are worth mentioning as well:
It is true that a substantial percentage of computer science PhD degrees in the U.S. are awarded to foreign students. But that is irrelevant because one does not need a graduate degree to do the work in this field. Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, does not even have a Bachelor's degree, and similar statements hold for Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, and Steve Jobs, founder of Apple and Pixar. A joint Stanford/RAND study found that we are overproducing PhDs in science and engineering.
The decision of American students not to pursue a PhD is indeed a rational response from a salary perspective: National Science Foundation data show that the salary premium for a PhD over a Bachelor's is one of the smallest of all science and engineering fields. There is simply no incentive to pursue the degree for domestic students, whereas foreign students can use their U.S. education (which is typically a graduate degree) as a better steppingstone to a greencard (it allows them to avoid the onerous ``body shop'' employers since they make industrial contacts through their professors, they get priority for greencards via using the EB-2 category instead of EB-3, etc.). The NSF was aware of this and actually planned for it.
Even a highly biased pro-industry National Research Council committee calculated that graduate study is a losing proposition financially for domestic students. They found that the holder of a Master's degree takes 10 years to make up for income lost while in graduate school, and a PhD takes a staggering 50 years to compensate.
Those who are plied by the industry's feigned interest in PhDs would be baffled by the following incident. On October 13, 1999, a team of Intel engineers recruiting for new graduates visiting my department at UC Davis. I mentioned that I had a couple of PhDs in electrical engineering I could refer to them, one a new graduate and the other a 1992 graduate. In reply one of the recruiters blurted out, ``No, Intel is not very interested in PhDs.'' The other added that she did not think a PhD would have enough to challenge him or her at Intel, except in the case of very highly specialized research areas. Keep in mind, Intel lobbyists in particular have told Congress they need H-1Bs because so few domestic students pursue a doctorate. This is shameless hypocrisy.
Why, then, do employers hire MS/PhD H-1Bs, even in relatively small numbers? One reason is the ``ethnic connection'': A manager who is, say, from India and came to the U.S. as a student will often hire others in his own image. Another reason is that foreign students are local: One can call their professors to check on their abilities, and it is easy to bring them in for an interview. So one gets the indentured servitude with some degree of quality control.
Question: The industry lobbyists claim that the H-1Bs tend to be ``the best and the brightest'' from around the world. Is this true?
Certainly not. We should definitely facilitate the immigration of the outstanding talents throughout the world, but only a small proportion of the H-1Bs fall into this category. 75% of the H-1Bs earn less than $65,000, far below the salaries of top talent in this field, which exceed $100,000.
A House Immigration Subcommittee hearing in 1999 revealed that, contrary to the industry's claim that the H-1Bs are usually of exceptionally high quality, many H-1Bs do not have the qualifications their sponsor claims for them.
See Section 9.6.
Question: The industry claims that each job held by an H-1B generates several new jobs for Americans. Is this true?
This is an obvious fallacy. The employers could fill those positions with Americans (U.S. citizens and permanent residents) instead of H-1Bs and still get the job-generating effect.
Question: What about the industry lobbyists' citing of the Asian-born entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley?
The Saxenian study that the industry lobbyists are citing here shows that the Asian-immigrant programmers and engineers in Silicon Valley actually have a lower per-capita rate of entrepreneurship than do natives.
Also these firms may not employ many programmers and engineers anyway. For instance, according to Saxenian, 36% of the Chinese-owned firms are in the business of ``Computer Wholesaling,'' meaning that they are simply assemblers of commodity PCs, with no engineering or programming work being done.
Moreover, even Saxenian (whose study was funded by a foundation related to the high-tech giant, Hewlett-Packard) notes that the immigrant entrepreneurs tend to hire from their own immigrant ethnic groups; those jobs are largely not open to natives.
Question: The industry lobbyists say that only a tiny percentage of H-1B visas lead to complaints about underpayment of wages.
The affected parties do not dare speak out: The H-1Bs rely on the job to stay in the U.S. and also fear blacklisting, and their U.S. citizen/permanent resident co-workers at the same company fear retribution by their employers as well.
Even those outside the company find that complaining to the DOL is futile. First, people outside the company do not have access to H-1B information, other than submitting a Freedom of Information Act request to the Dept. of Labor. Much more importantly, the DOL has itself complained that Congress tied its hands, giving the DOL only very limited ability to investigate and prosecute violations. One of the biggest obstacles is the fact that the law has so many loopholes in it; it is pointless to complain to DOL about these, as Congress is the party which made these laws.
Question: Lobbyists for the large U.S. firms concede that there is abuse of H-1Bs, but that this is mainly among the ``body shops'' owned or run by Indo-Americans. Is this true?
No.
First of all, this focus on Indo-Americans is unwarranted scapegoating.
Second, who are the clients of those Indo-American agents? They are the large mainstream American firms, the same ones that are trying to distance themselves from the ``body shops'' by statements like those above.
The large American firms are just as interested in cheap labor as anyone else. Sun Microsystems, for example, has bragged in a Los Angeles Times interview that it hired Russian programmers (to work there) ``at bargain prices.'' Intel and Hewlett-Packard use H-1Bs supplied by Northwest Software, which pays the foreign workers wages well below average. General Dynamics imported H-1Bs from England, with the appeal being, according to federal court documents, the ``indentured'' status of the foreign workers, promised by the agency to be ``prepared to work here in the United States for as much as a 40% reduction in current United States salary levels.''
See Section 9.4.
Question: Rather than H-1Bs being a source of cheap labor, the industry claims that legal fees make the H-1Bs actually more expensive than American workers. Is that true?
The legal paperwork needed to sponsor an H-1B costs only about $1,000.
It does cost more to sponsor a worker for a greencard, around $10,000, but often the employers have the foreign employees pay the legal fees for greencards themselves. And even when employers foot the bill, the cost is usually far less than they save in salary, accumulated over the several years it now takes to get the greencard.
Note also that an employer who rents an H-1B from an agency avoids the fee a recruiter would charge in a regular hire, which is considerably more than $10,000.
See Section 9.3.3.
Question: Why are the H-1Bs de facto indentured servants?
Most H-1Bs hope to get U.S. permanent residency status, i.e. green cards. But during their sponsorship by employers for greencards, they are in essence indentured servants: The green-card process takes several years, so H-1Bs dare not change employers. Changing employers would mean starting the green-card clock all over again.
The legislation passed in late 2000 tempers the indentured servitude problem somewhat, but is far from a solution. Immigration attorneys estimate that H-1Bs will still typically have a period of indentured servitude of 3 or 4 years.
Starting in early 2001 (or late 2000), the industry experienced a sharp slowdown. There were now many more H-1Bs than jobs which employers wished to fill with H-1Bs. Accordingly, many employers no longer offered green card sponsorship when they hired H-1Bs. Though this would at first appear to at least give the H-1Bs more freedom of movement, they now had a new problem - deportation. If they were laid off or fired from one job, they would have to find another within 10 days, or face deportation. (Some immigration attorneys challenged this, but the INS chose not to respond.) So, it was de facto indentured servitude all over again.
Question: Since the industry says that the H-1Bs are so important to them, has it lobbied Congress to expedite the greencard process?
Very few employers have done this. On the contrary, the ITAA's Harris Miller, in an interview with the press, said to the H-1Bs in essence, ``If you don't like it, go home'':
They don't have to use the H-1B program They can stay in their own country or they can go to another country. They are trying to turn this into an entitlement program.This is an amazing statement for Miller to make. He has repeatedly claimed that the H-1Bs are vital to the U.S. economy, so why would he invite them to leave the U.S.? His emotional outburst illustrates the fact that ISN's lobbying exposes the real reason why Miller's clients want H-1Bs, indentured servitude.
Even Rick Swartz, a pro-immigration lobbying kingpin who has represented both industry firms such as Microsoft and also the ISN, an organization of H-1B workers, recognizes this, as seen in Electronic Business, March 2001:
What's more, there are no politically powerful folks pushing for a reform of the system. There is no consensus among high-tech companies to push for it, says Swartz. Some companies ``get it,'' he says, while he believes that other companies may want to keep the program as is in order to keep their foreign employees ``under their thumb.'' Although the Immigrants Support Network's leadership has talked to some high-tech companies and found that some support its goals in theory, no company has come forth with financial support for the group, says Swartz.Question: The industry claims that if it cannot bring H-1B workers to the U.S., it will be forced to move software operations to where the workers are overseas. Is this true?
This is a bogus threat, an obvious contradiction: Why does the industry want to bring Indian programmers to the U.S. as H-1Bs in the first place? Why not just employ those programmers in India? The answer is that it is not feasible to do so.
The fact is that, although a small amount of work is done abroad (largely old mainframe software), this will not escalate to become the major mode of operation of the industry. The misunderstandings caused by long-distance communication, the problems of highly-disparate time zones and so on result in major headaches, unmet deadlines and a general loss of productivity.
Just look at Silicon Valley. This is the most ``wired'' place in the world, yet those massive Silicon Valley freeway traffic jams arise because very few programmers telecommute. They know that face-to-face interaction is crucial to the success of a software project.
See Section 9.5.
Question: The industry says H-1Bs comprise only a small percentage of their workers. If that is true, why is there such a controversy?
The Department of Commerce, in their report Digital Economy 2000 (June 5, 2000), found that H-1Bs now account for 28% of all information technology industry hires requiring at least a Bachelor's degree.
Moreover, many of the large employers claiming that only a small proportion of ``their'' work forces consists of H-1Bs are hiding behind the fact that they ``rent'' many H-1B workers from agencies.
Question: How was the industry able to get Congress to pass the H-1B increase in 1998, given that a Harris Poll had shown that 82% of Americans opposed the increase?
The high-tech industry wields enormous, unstoppable clout on Capitol Hill and in the White House, and even in academia.
In Spring 2000, a major supporter of pending legislation which would increase the H-1B quota, Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), had the gall to say, ``This is not a popular bill with the public. It's popular with the CEOs...This is a very important issue for the high-tech executives who give the money.'' Rep. Davis is chair of the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee.
Then when the Senate passed the H-1B bill on October 3, 2000, even more outrageous talk came from Capitol Hill, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle:
``Once it's clear (the visa bill) is going to get through, everybody signs up so nobody can be in the position of being accused of being against high tech,'' said Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah, after the vote. ``There were, in fact, a whole lot of folks against it, but because they are tapping the high-tech community for campaign contributions, they don't want to admit that in public.''(The AFL-CIO did not campaign against the bill. In fact, it actually considered supporting the H-1B increase.)
One place where the industry lobbyists cannot simply flash their money is the court system. As of this writing, there have been two court cases in which the author's writings have produced a favorable outcome:
Several other related lawsuits are pending.
Extensive details are given in Sections 2.3, 2.2 and 11.
Question: Does this discussion really boil down to whether one should protect the natives?
We should definitely encourage ``the best and the brightest'' programmers and engineers around the globe to come to the U.S. But as discussed above, the vast majority of H-1Bs are not in that category.
And it is not a ``natives vs. immigrants'' issue. Many immigrant American programmers are negatively impacted as well. Thus when we refer to ``Americans,'' we mean U.S. citizens (native or naturalized) and legal permanent residents (greencard holders). The employers' access to the H-1B labor pool makes it easy to shun American programmers, both native and immigrant; immigrant computer programmers encounter the same age discrimination when they reach age 35 or 40 that natives do. As pointed out by Shankar Lakhavani, an official with the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), ``There are many immigrants like me who are American citizens, and they would like a crack at these jobs [which are going to H-1Bs].''
Question: How has the high-tech slowdown since 2001 affected H-1B usage?
Since jobs were now scarce, the H-1Bs were even more beholden to their employers than before.
The industry lobbyists, embarrassed by the fact that massive layoffs occurred almost immediately after the lobbyists got Congress to approve an increase in the H-1B quota, tried to spin the news their way. They predicted that the new larger quota would not be used, and ``therefore'' employers must be hiring Americans instead of H-1Bs. But the facts show this analysis to be incorrect.
In 2001, the number of new H-1B visas issued was up, while job openings were down. Clearly, American employers in 2001 were even more keenly interested in H-1Bs than in the past. This is apparently due to the fact that the economic tightening caused employers to have increased interest in hiring cheaper labor.
One firm, ADEA, even issued a press release in May 2001 in which it blatantly announced it would actively recruit such workers, in order to take advantage of their desperate status. Thus, although the numbers of H-1Bs hired may have been down, the percentage of new openings being filled by H-1Bs may have actually increased.
Also in 2001, in the midst of a recession, Dun and Bradstreet admitted to (legally) laying off American workers and replacing them with H-1Bs. The firm also forced the American workers to train their H-1B replacments, a common action in such situations.
The number of new H-1B visas issued did fall in 2002, but that was simply a result of the precipitous drop in job openings that year, even relative to 2002. But again this did not mean employers were acting any more responsibly than before. Indeed, a rough analysis indicated that the percentage of new IT jobs filled by H-1Bs was increasing, not decreasing.
In 2002, a suit was filed against Sun Microsystems, a Silicon Valley giant which has lobbied Congress heavily for higher H-1B caps. The complaint alleges that Sun also laid off Americans and replaced them by H-1Bs. Dept. of Labor recrods show that the number of H-1B visas applied for by Sun has been on the increase during the industry's slowdown: 751 visas in 1999, 1870 in 2000 and 5179 in 2001.
Question: The industry lobbyists say the alleged high-tech labor shortage is due to the failure of our K-12 educational system to develop math skills for engineering careers. Is that true?
The main answer to this question is that the vast majority of high-tech H-1Bs are programmers, not engineers, and programming does not use math.
footnote: An obvious exception is software for mathematical applications, and theoretical computer science as an academic discipline is sometimes of a mathematical character.So, the question is a red herring to begin with.
Even if the industry lobbyists insist on focusing on the small minority of H-1Bs who are engineers, for whom math is important, this ``math skills'' claim is highly misleading. This is quickly seen by noting, for example, that average math test scores of some individual U.S. states such as Iowa and Utah are quite similar to those of the East Asian nations with whom the U.S. is often compared unfavorably. What is so special about Iowa and Utah? The answer is that their scores are not hampered by having a large socioeconomic underclass, as the U.S. as a whole is. There are a number of other serious problems with the study.
Quite contrary to industry's claim that math education is superior in other countries, especially in East Asia, in an article in the September 1999 issue of the American Society for Engineering Education's magazine Prism, an engineering professor in China warns his nation that the engineers being produced by Chinese universities are not good enough for China to compete in the global high-tech market. Professor Chen says the educational system in China produces students who cannot think independently or creatively, and cannot solve practical problems. He writes that the system ``results in the phenomenon of high scores and low ability.'' Many other academics have written about this problem, and the governments of China, Japan and South Korea all are making attempts to remedy it.
The U.S. has more than double the number engineers per capita of the nations which the industry lobbyists say have superior school math scores: South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Switzerland, and so on.
See Section 6.3.2.
Question: Why not just have an open-borders policy, at least for high-tech workers? What would be the harm of issuing instant green cards to anyone with experience as a programmer or engineer?
Even the very pro-industry National Resarch Council committee found that the swelling of the high-tech labor supply by the H-1Bs was suppressing wage growth in the field.
Furthermore, the larger the labor pool, the worse conditions would be for older workers in the field, already a serious problem; the more workers there are, especially younger ones, the easier it is for employers to avoid the older workers.
These problems exist currently with H-1Bs, and would still exist with an ``instant green card'' policy.
We should definitely facilitate the immigration of the world's ``best and brightest,'' but the vast majority of H-1Bs are not in that category at all. And having open borders simply to bring in cheaper labor would be a wrong-headed policy, which among other things would greatly discourage our young people from entering this field.
Here we will discuss the motivations on the part of industry and academia to claim a programmer labor shortage, and the reasons why Congress accepts such arguments while rejecting the pleas of organizations representing programmers and engineers.
In early 1997, the ITAA industry lobbying group began its massive national public relations campaign to develop an image of a software labor shortage in the public consciousness. Many critics speculated at the time that access to cheap labor, in the form of foreign nationals, was the ``hidden agenda'' behind the ITAA's campaign. Though ITAA's Harris Miller originally denied this (Electronic Engineering Times, December 8, 1997), another ITAA official blurted out around the same time that its ``number one priority'' in 1998 would be to push Congress to increase the yearly quota of H-1B work visas (San Jose Mercury News, November 21, 1997), which turned out to be the case; ITAA led the successful campaigns to raise the H-1B cap in 1998 and 2000.
Amazingly, the prominent computer-industry business magazine, the Red Herring, admitted in its July 1998 editorial that the charges I make in this report are correct, and even more amazingly, actually endorsed the idea of hiring H-1Bs as a means to accessing cheap labor. The Red Herring put it this way:
The congressional General Accounting Office found ``serious analytical and methodological weaknesses'' in the [ITAA/Dept. of Commerce] reports. The American Engineering Association criticized common IT hiring practices that eliminate more than 95 percent of applicants. A University of California at Davis professor decried ``rampant'' age discrimination by the industry and suggested that technology companies prefer to hire young, cheap, foreign programmers who are willing to work 80-hour weeks.Equally important as cheap labor as an attraction to industry is the de facto ``indentured servitude'' of the H-1B workers whose employers are sponsoring them for greencards. As explained in Section 9.4, such workers are essentially immobile for a period of five years or more. This means a programmer cannot suddenly leave the employer in the lurch on an important project by leaving for another company, an extremely important consideration to employers. It also enables the employers to give them smaller raises, work them more hours and so on.Though factually correct, these criticisms are, we feel, ingenuous. Companies have a fiduciary responsibility to keep labor costs low. If U.S. technology companies cannot find highly trained, highly motivated American employees at a competitive cost, then a shortage does exist. And if companies say they want to hire more skilled foreign workers because those workers are cheaper, we should believe them - and increase the number of visas issued.
This point in particular demonstrates the insincerity of the industry' s claim to legitimately need the H-1Bs. The industry did not support legislation in 1998 and 2000 which would have greatly reduced the time it takes for an H-1B to get a greencard, thus ameliorating the indentured-servitude problem. Clearly, the industry finds indentured servitude quite appealing.
Even Rick Swartz, a pro-immigration lobbying kingpin who has represented both industry firms such as Microsoft and also the ISN, an organization of H-1B workers (see Sec. 2.3.4), recognizes this, as seen in Electronic Business, March 2001:
What's more, there are no politically powerful folks pushing for a reform of the system. There is no consensus among high-tech companies to push for it, says Swartz. Some companies ``get it,'' he says, while he believes that other companies may want to keep the program as is in order to keep their foreign employees ``under their thumb.'' Although the Immigrants Support Network's leadership has talked to some high-tech companies and found that some support its goals in theory, no company has come forth with financial support for the group, says Swartz.The H-1Bs are well aware of this, and many express quite bitter feelings about it in Internet discussions. A good description of this appeared in Tech Week, January 10, 2000:They should, he says. After all, these reforms are in the best interests of U.S. companies, too, which should want to keep these workers after they've invested the time, energy and money in training them
Rajeev calls himself a high-tech indentured servant.An organization of H-1Bs mainly from India, the Immigrant Support Network, www.isn.org, has arisen to lobby Congress to remedy the H-1Bs de facto indentured status. (See Sections 2.4 and 9.4.)An H-1B visa holder from India, he arrived here nearly five years ago to design chips for a semiconductor firm. Rajeev (not his real name) expected to get a greencard within a few years and pursue his dream of doing challenging tech work in Silicon Valley. Instead, immigration rules and bureaucratic delays have kept him at the same firm, which is now failing. All the talented engineers have fled to greener pastures, he says, while he and other H-1B visa holders are stuck, mopping up the mess and praying to get their greencards in the mail.
``It's total exploitation,'' he says. ``It's just Indians and Chinese who are doing all the work-because they have to''...
Mistreatment of H-1B workers is not surprising to guest workers in Silicon Valley. Recently, a group of five Indian H-1B technology professionals met with TechWeek to discuss problems with the system. All asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal from their firms, and several felt betrayed by bosses who shunted them into grunt-work duties. Much of the guest workers' frustration with the high-tech industry, however, stemmed from their perception that firms were purposefully ignoring the immigration dilemma. To them, it seems Silicon Valley firms favor a revolving door system of H-1B workers who are easy to exploit.
``The tech industry could help us by lobbying the INS,'' Rajeev says. ``But they choose not to, because they're getting H-1Bs.''
Ironically, the worst victims of current hiring policies are the employers themselves. This is detailed in a later section, titled ``Employers Are Shooting Themselves in the Foot with Their Hiring Policies.''
Universities and colleges have extremely strong incentives to support the claims by industry lobbyists of a desperate software labor shortage and the ``need'' for a higher H-1B quota:
Many also have started special computer-related training courses aimed at the nonstudent public, which, by charging higher fees than those of their mainstream courses, become ``profit centers.''
In short, if there were no H-1B program, the foreign students would not come to the U.S. for graduate study; universities would find their graduate programs depopulated and they would lose their grant monies.
One of the most prominent academic supporters of the H-1B program has been Professor Ed Lazowska of Department of Computer Science at the University of Washington. A glance at his department's Web page (as of March 16, 2000) shows just how financially beholden they are to industry:
The home page includes a place to click on ``Information for Industry,'' and after clicking there, one of the items in the next page is ``Corporate Support.'' And there you have it: $1.5 milion from Ford Motor Co. in research funds; ``several million dollars'' in equipment from Intel; $500,000 from Boeing for an endowed faculty chair; another $500,000 chair from Microsoft; another one from Boeing; some miscellaneous items; and finally, $3 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for two endowed chairs (soon to be filled).
Lazowska himself personally benefits financially from a cozy relationship with industry too. According to his personal Web page (http://lazowska.cs.washington.edu/, September 17, 2002), he is ``member of the Technical Advisory Boards for Microsoft Research, Voyager Capital, Ignition, Frazier Technology Ventures, Madrona Venture Group, and Impinj, and of the Boards of Directors of Data I/O Corporation and Lguide.com.''
The contortions through which university officials will go to support the industry party line was illustrated in an interview of Professor Randy Katz, then chair of the Computer Science Dept. at UC Berkeley, another school which enjoys huge industrial donations. Katz actually tried to justify age discrimination in the software industry on the PBS Newshour with Jim Lehrer (April 3, 1998):
SPENCER MICHELS: For example, Katz says that the new programming language called Java, which allows programs to run on any computer, may be easy for his students to learn but difficult for older workers.Word on the computer science academic grapevine following that broadcast was that Katz's colleagues considered his remarks to be ``stupid,'' and it was also pointed out that if older computer scientists can't learn new things, then professors like Katz are incapable of teaching those new things, and should be forced out. I was told by journalists that Katz subsequently refused to return their calls.PROFESSOR RANDY KATZ: The analogy that I like to use is I always wanted to learn Swedish. And it's harder for me as a forty-two-year-old to learn Swedish today than if I learned it when I was six years old, or if I tried to learn it when I was eighteen. And the same thing is true about these modern ways of programming computers.
Those who might have thought of academia as a center of integrity must keep in mind that universities are exceedingly political entities, with money playing a central role in all activities. Industry lobbyists know that they can count on academia to produce seemingly ``unbiased'' studies which in fact are designed from the outset to produce results supportive of industry's position. In an impressive moment of candor, prominent immigration attorney Austin Fragomen, who has lobbied Congress in favor of liberal H-1B visa policies, wrote in Workforce Magazine, March 1996. He said that when the Senate was considering scaling back the H-1B program in that year,
...The business community mobilized, forming American Business for Legal Immigration (ABLI), a Washington, D.C.-based lobbying group that represents a number of associations and employers, and commissions academic studies to support its position.(Emphasis added.)
The academic/industrial connections of Alan Merten, the chair of a supposedly impartial government committee appointed to review criticisms of the H-1B program, made for huge sources of bias. See Sections 4.4 and 2.3.6.
In Spring 2000, a major supporter of pending legislation which would increase the H-1B quota, Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), had the gall to say, ``This is not a popular bill with the public. It's popular with the CEOs...This is a very important issue for the high-tech executives who give the money.'' (National Journal, May 5, 2000 and New York Daily News, May 3, 2000.) Rep. Davis is chair of the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee.
In the last few years, both major political parties have been making tremendous efforts to curry favor with the high-tech industry. ( The New Republic, June 8, 1998; Newsbytes, April 27, 1999; Washington Post, June 13, 1999.) The Dallas Morning News described it most succinctly, in a June 29, 1999 article:
``The presidential candidates are tripping all over themselves to be seen as having the computer industry seal of approval,'' said Larry Makinson of the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington group that monitors campaign spending.(It should be noted that what is most important here is not the donations to individual politicians, but rather the ``soft money'' which goes to the political parties. There is a limit on donations to individuals but no limit on donations to parties.)``Both Democrats and Republicans are coming away from Silicon Valley with bagfuls of money,'' he said. ``It's probably the single most-sought-after industry there is. It's the turn-of-the-millennium equivalent of Hollywood.''
After the Senate vote on October 3, 2000 to increase the H-1B quota, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on October 4,
``Once it's clear (the visa bill) is going to get through, everybody signs up so nobody can be in the position of being accused of being against high tech,'' said Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah, after the vote. ``There were, in fact, a whole lot of folks against it, but because they are tapping the high-tech community for campaign contributions, they don't want to admit that in public.''
Whatever the industry wants, it gets. After President Clinton initially sided with the American Trial Lawyers Association (a close ally) on the issue of stockholder lawsuits against high-tech firms, Clinton switched his stance after heavy pressure from the industry. AFter Clinton signed the H-1B increase into law, and he immediately went on a fundraising tour of Silicon Valley. In 1999, the industry wanted to limit their legal liability on the Year 2000 bug problem, and Congress/Clinton approved this too.
The industry lobbyists made major efforts during Clinton's presidency to get a ``direct line'' to him. For example, during the 1996 expose' of ``coffees'' held in the White House for donors to meet Clinton, one of the attendees on June 19, 1996 was reported to be Dr. Howard Rubin, a Hunter College computer science professor who is paid by the industry and who has been a prominent ally of the ITAA industry lobbying group.
footnote: See the Center for Responsive Politics, http://www.opensecrets.org, section titled ``White House Coffees and Sleepovers.'' The full entry reads, ``RUBIN, HOWARD POUND RIDGE, NY DOCTOR, / Rubin Systems 6/19/1996. Attended a coffee hosted by Vice President Gore.''
Eventually, in 1997, Clinton wrote a memo to his Department of Commerce (DOC), asking them to cooperate with the ITAA. The Department of Education was also brought in, as the ITAA's theme was that education was the long-term solution to the claimed labor ``shortage,'' but that in the meantime an increase would be needed in the H-1B visa quota.
footnote: This argument, used in 1997 and 1998, is a common industry tactic, which they used in 1995 as well. At that time the theme was, ``As soon as we get the laid-off defense engineers and programmers retrained, we won't need H-1Bs.'' This, of course, never materialized.On the other hand, the Department of Labor was largely shunted out to the margins, as the industry lobbyists viewed DOL as the ``enemy,'' for having criticized the H-1B program in the past. The DOC issued its own report in September 1997, a virtual carbon copy of the ITAA report, with no input having been sought from opposing voices. (Later, after pressure from the American Engineering Association and a congressional staffer, DOC did establish ties with those who disagreed with the ``shortage'' claims, and produced a more balanced report in June 1999, The Digital Workforce: Building Infotech Skills at the Speed of Innovation, by Carol Ann Meares and John Sargent, Jr.)
The ITAA, out to attain the government's imprimatur for their ``shortage'' claim, got DOC approval to lend the Commerce name to a January 1998 Convocation held in the San Francisco Bay Area. In reality, though, the ITAA ran the show. (San Francisco Chronicle, January 22, 1998.) Keynote speakers were Secretary of Commerce William Daley and Secretary of Education Richard Riley. The Executive Branch's lack of integrity in this matter was illustrated when Riley pointed to a recent Wall Street Journal article (January 8, 1998) which had claimed that H-1Bs do not adversely affect job opportunities for American programmers. Riley avoided mentioning that that same article had also stated that American firms recruit abroad because ``recruiting foreign talent is cheaper than hiring Americans,'' quoting an American recruiter of foreign programmers as saying that he pays them $20,000 to $25,000 less than Americans with the same skills.
As noted earlier, immediately after Clinton signed into law the large H-1B quota increase in 1998, he went on a major fundraising tour of Silicon Valley and some other high-tech regions.
And even though some officials in the Department of Labor have been critical of the H-1B program (and thus the DOL was excluded in the collaboration between the ITAA and the Departments of Commerce and Education), the DOL has limited itself to addressing only egregious individual violations of H-1B law, rather than modifying regulations in a way that would have broad impact. In particular, the DOL could, entirely within its legal mandate, rewrite its prevailing-wage regulations so that a job's specific software skills requirements (e.g. the Java programming language) must be factored in to calculation of prevailing wage. (See Section 9.2.5.) Yet they have refused to do so.
The Baltimore Sun reported on February 21, 2000:
The industry groups and the companies employing H-1B workers have a powerful ally in the American Immigration Lawyers Association. AILA members have thrown their financial muscle and support behind the congressmen who play a key role in determining the fate of the program.Sen. Spencer Abraham, chairman of the Senate Immigration Committee, has been a speaker at AILA's national conferences and held a series of fund-raisers in tandem with AILA events.
When AILA met last summer in Seattle, the Michigan Republican held a $500-a-plate breakfast at the hotel where most of the conventioneers were staying. He held a similar fund-raiser during an earlier AILA conference.
Sen. Abraham, in holding hearings on the H-1B program on October 21, 1999, did not invite any critics of the program to present testimony. All five witnesses (two industry CEOs, two representatives from industry trade groups, and one think-tank analyst) testified in favor of raising the H-1B cap.
(Sen. Abraham lost his bid for re-election in 2000, partly due to TV ads bought by immigration-reform groups, criticizing his support of liberal immigration policies.)
The amazing political clout wielded by the industry made even an advocate of the H-1B program, immigration attorney Arthur Zabenko, express wonderment. In the September 28, 2000 issue of Immigration Daily, an electronic newsletter which he edits, Zabenko wrote
Despite the recent GAO report titled H-1B Foreign Workers: Better Controls Needed to Help Employers and Protect Workers, which pointed out our weaknesses in the program, there has been no discussion about major changes to the H-1B education and salary requirements.
The ITAA's focus on immigration, so vehemently denied throughout 1997 by ITAA president Harris Miller, is illustrated by the fact that Miller is a former immigration lobbyist. Moreover, prior to Miller's lobbying career, he was a congressional staffer who specialized in immigration legislation, and thus who had the perfect Capitol Hill connections on which to base his subsequent immigration-lobbying business.
Interestingly, Miller tries to conceal his immigration-lobbyist background. In an October 16, 2000 interview with the Washington Times, he said:
When I was hired five years ago some of the members of the ITAA said to the election committee ``What are you doing? You need to hire someone who is a techie or a trade association executive. Why would you hire a lobbyist?''The fact is that the ITAA needed an immigration specialist like Miller. In 1995, when Miller was hired by the ITAA, both the Senate and the House had introduced measures which would have scaled back the H-1B program. The ITAA apparently reacted to this by hiring Miller, a consummate Washington insider on immigration issues.
What we have, then, is a classic example of people writing laws and then taking lucrative jobs in the private sector which benefit from those laws. As The New Republic, October 19, 1987 reported, Miller is unapologetic about this:
``I believe in interest groups and the right of interest groups to be represented, and if I can represent them on the Hill, well, I will do it,'' says Harris Miller, a former aide to Kentucky Democrat Romano Mazzoli's House Judiciary subcommittee on immigration who now has his own lobbying firm. Miller's first big client was the National Council of Agricultural Employers, a group of large growers who use migrant and illegal alien workers.Interestingly, Miller used many of the same arguments for farm workers then as he is doing now in the case of H-1B visas for the high-tech workers.
These lobbyists know very well how to play the political game. They know, for example, that politicians like to use academic ``studies'' for cover. We have seen earlier immigration attorney/lobbyist Fragomen open admission that industry commissions academic studies with the understanding that the outcome of the studies will be in industry's favor. Miller, who used to work for Fragomen, has used the same tactic.
Miller's case illustrates the fact that H-1B policy is similar to immigration policy in general, which is set by a small group of Washington insiders who are unknown to the general public but who pop up repeatedly in different key roles over the years. These people who often profit from their insider status, through jobs, contracts and so on.
A February 20, 2000 article in the Baltimore Sun, for example, reported that former congressman Bruce Morrison had run an investment-visa business which exploited a bill he had authored while serving as chair of the House Immigration Subcommittee in 1990. Paul Donnelly, Morrison's former press secretary from Congress, established a similar business in Maryland.
footnote: The ``small group of insiders'' nature of immigration legislation is illustrated by the case of a partner of Morrison's in the investment-visa business, Maria Hsia. Hsia, a self-described ``immigration consultant,'' was later convicted for her alleged role in the ``Buddhist temple scandal'' involving illegal campaign donations to Vice President Gore in 1996. Hsia worked closely with John Huang, who was the center focal point of the influence-peddling scandal involving Gore and President Clinton in 1996. Huang was the one who got Clinton to do a sudden flip-flop on then-pending legislation to eliminate the so-called Fourth Preference immigration category. (Boston Globe, January 16, 1997.) Clinton had earlier reached an agreement with Congress to eliminate the category (following a recommendation by the Congressional Commission on Immigration Reform), then suddenly, within a one-week period, flip-flopped in response to Huang's urging. Huang had successfully retained the Fourth Preference provision during the drafting of the 1990 bill, a fact which a lobbying group noted (ironically dovetailing with our ``small group'' theme here) ``Most people outside of a handful do not know that [Huang] was intimately involved in the Immigration Act in 1990.''
Morrison's bill also established the H-1B visa program (which modified its predecessor program, called H-1), and also mandated the establishment of the bipartisan Congressional Commission on Immigration Reform. In 1993, Morrison himself was appointed to the commission, and Donnelly was hired as a commission staffer in 1994, in part due to his connections with Morrison.
The kingpin of the ``immigration legislation insiders'' is lobbyist Rick Swartz. The New Republic tells the story (December 23, 1996; see also Wired magazine, August 1996) about what happened when the Commission on Immigration Reform recommended a thorough overhaul to address major problems with U.S. immigration policy, including the H-1B visa program:
[Immigration] lobbyists, alerted by the friendly reception that the commission's recommendations received, began organizing. Central to this effort was Rick Swartz, who runs a public relations business out of his Washington home. Swartz introduces himself as a former civil rights lawyer and liberal, but he is funded primarily by the political right. His main patrons are Wall Street financier Richard Gilder and his Political Club for Growth, a conservative funding group that helped launch Newt Gingrich's gopac and subsidizes a variety of efforts, from the Cato Institute to Empower America.One of those ``emissaries'' was Donnelly. (Personal communication with Donnelly, June 29, 2000.) The commission's proposal was that the labor certification process for employer-sponsored greencards be replaced by a fee. This would save the employer time and effort by eliminating the multi-year legal process needed to secure a greencard for the foreign worker. The proposal would also be of tremendous help to the foreign workers, who would get ``instant greencards,'' and thus not have to wait in limbo on H-1B visas during the lengthy processing time for green cards. The fact that Microsoft refused illustrates just how much industry likes the de facto ``indentured-servant'' nature of the H-1B visa.Swartz got seed money to work on immigration from Gilder and was hired to advise two computer companies, Microsoft and Intel, which feared that Congress, heeding the commission and the Department of Labor, would seek to regulate the hiring of skilled immigrants and temporary workers. (Emissaries from the Jordan Commission [on Immigration Reform] had tried to explain to Microsoft that its proposals to replace labor certification with a fee would save it time without costing more money, but the company was dead set against any change.)
The pervasive corruption involved in H-1B legislation in the year 2000 was capped by an amazing sequence of events in the House of Representatives.
In the morning of October 3, 2000, the Senate passed its version of the H-1B bill. At that time, two versions existed in the House, by Rep. Lamar Smith and Rep. David Dreier, both Republicans. Industry liked the Dreier bill (which was largely similar to the Senate version) and was adamantly opposed to the Smith bill, as the latter would have imposed various worker protections. The Smith bill, though, had the upper hand in the parliamentary sense, as it already passed through the proper committees.
That afternoon, it was announced in the House that no vote would be taken on the H-1B issue that day, so the congresspeople went home. Yet a vote actually was taken that evening, with only 40 congresspeople present out of a membership of 435. In addition, the vote was on the Senate bill, adopted whole, instead of either the Smith or Dreier versions, thus slickly solving the problem of what to do with the Smith bill.
Here is how the incident was reported by the Cox News Service, dateline October 3, 2000:
WASHINGTON - The speed - and stealth - with which the House voted Tuesday to increase visas for skilled foreign workers left one lawmaker shaking his head. ``Incredible,'' said Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, a major supporter of increased visas...Note that Doggett, a Democrat, also advocated increasing the H-1B quota.Doggett, who had co-sponsored a bill to increase the so-called H-1B visas for foreign workers, gave this account of the evening:
``At about 3:30, it was announced that there would be no further votes'' on important issues in the House, he said. Because many lawmakers wanted to get home early to watch the presidential debates, nearly everyone left, he said.
``But at about 5:30, an e-mail was sent over here'' announcing that an H-1B debate would begin shortly. ``I didn't see the email until about 6,'' he said.
Doggett said he scurried to the House floor, while other major supporters of the legislation also rushed back to Capitol Hill. Using various procedural moves, the GOP leaders ended the debate quickly and called for a voice vote, even though the House was nearly empty.
footnote: Reportedly Doggett even accepted campaign donations from H-1Bs. See Section 2.4.As noted earlier, the industry had a stranglehold over both major political parties. But some of the Democrats did want to add some mitigating amendments to the bill, and didn't get a chance to do so. And of course Smith's worker protections never saw the light of day.
A National Research Council study was mandated by Congress in 1998, as part of legislation which increased the H-1B quota. The charge, as codified in the law, was to investigate (a) whether age discrimination is common in IT, and (b) the impact of the H-1Bs on the labor market. But the blatantly biased membership makeup of the NRC committee resulted in the study being little more than a case of ``the fox guarding the hen house.''
Though the project committee did include some pro-labor members, it was dominated by industry representatives and allies of industry from academia. The committee included members from Intel and Microsoft, the latter representative being Ira Rubinstein, Microsoft's chief lobbyist for H-1B visas. Moreover, the pro-labor members were not only outnumbered but also outgunned; the industry representatives had access to huge resources (data, extensively researched counterarguments, etc.) while the pro-labor members had nothing, and in fact did not even have much time to devote to the committee. (The latter point was noted to me by Prof. Sara Kuhn, a committee member.)
Another committee member, Helen Wood, is a government bureaucrat by profession, but according to the committee's Web page, her position on the committee was to serve as a representative of the IEEE Computer Society. This is highly significant, since corporate and academic interests in IEEE-CS, together with the IEEE parent organization, were the ones who pressured IEEE-USA into greatly reducing its lobbying activities against the H-1B increase. (See Section 2.5.1.) IEEE-USA had no representative on the committee.
Another member, Peter Saflund, is director of a technical education training center, a prime candidate for receiving training funds raised by the H-1B fees.
The committee's chair, Alan Merten, is president of George Mason University. As shown in Section 2.2, academics have huge incentives to toe the industry line on the H-1B issue, and in addition, Merten sits on the boards of several high-tech firms, such as BTG Inc., Comshare and the Indus Group. (Washington Technology, August 29, 1996.) At least one of those, BTG, hires H-1Bs at below-market rates; a Freedom of Information Act request revealed that BTG had hired a Computer Engineer at a salary of only $30,000 (http://www.ShameH1B.ZaZona.com), Project Engineers at $37,000, and Programmer Analysts at $43,000, all far below the median salaries for these professions.
Merten decided before his NRC study began, without waiting for results, that the industry claims of a shortage were at least partly true, an irresponsible prejudgment for someone serving as chair of this committee. (San Jose Mercury News, September 20, 1999.) Actually, he had already made such a prejudgment more than a year earlier, as will be seen below, during the formation of his alliance with the industry.
The following excerpt from a March 2000 article in Atlantic Monthly illustrates Merten's source of bias as well:
In 1998 James S. Gilmore, the governor of Virginia, promised to increase stated funds for GMU [George Mason University] by as much as $25 million a year provided that the university better serve the region's high-tech businesses. GMU's president, Alan G. Merten, a computer scientist and a former dean of the business school at Cornell, hardly needed urging. ``We must accept that we have a new mandate, and a new reason for existence,'' he announced at the World Congress on Information Technology, a gathering of industry executives hosted by GMU in the summer of 1998.At the IT congress, Governor Gilmore announced that he was appointing four computer industry executives to GMU's 16-member governing board. (Washington Post, June 22, 1998.)
Merten had already started toeing the industry line in his keynote speech at the IT congress at GMU (http://www.gmu.edu/highlights/1998worl.html), even claiming a job growth rate wildly exceeding even the industry's claims: ``Here in the national capital area, thousands of `Information-Technology-related' positions remain unfilled because there are simply not enough qualified candidates. There may be enough candidates but we (you and I) have not done enough to make them QUALIFIED candidates...Last year, the United States had about five million computer scientists, engineers, programmers, and analysts - the positions that by-and-large define the high-tech workforce and drive the information economy. The problem is, most experts predict that the need for these people will DOUBLE in the next two to three years.''
footnote: Merten's recognition that there are lots of applicants for these jobs seems to indicate that the ITAA had already tipped him off to the fact that critics of the H-1B program had exposed the fact that employers do in fact get lots of applicants, contrary to the claims they had been making.(Emphasis in the original.)
GMU and the ITAA held a joint breakfast on May 19, 1999 (apparently a regular series of jointly-sponsored events between the two; for example there was another such event held on November 3 of that year). The featured speaker was Rep. Tom Davis, chair of the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, who later in Spring 2000, had the gall to say about the pending bill to increase the H-1B quota, ``This is not a popular bill with the public. It's popular with the CEOs...This is a very important issue for the high-tech executives who give the money.''
Clearly, in producing the NRC report, committee chair Merten was not going to ``bite the hand that feeds him.''
When the NRC committee originally set hearings in Silicon Valley in September 1999, the committee invited testimony from a number of Silicon Valley employers, and their allies in academia, but did not invite even one speaker who is critical of H-1B policy. After I contacted them to complain, they did set up one panel session to hear the non-employer side of the issue, but they had been prepared to spend three days in Silicon Valley without having such a panel.
It should also be noted that the NRC is funded by industry. The NRC unit responsible for this study, the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, lists as its current sponsors Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Microsoft, Texas Instruments, and Time-Warner Cable. With the exception of Time-Warner, all of these firms have been in the forefront of lobbying for increases in the H-1B program.
Not surprisingly, the committee's report, released in October 200, was extremely biased. This is discussed in Section 4.4.
As explained in Section 9.4, most H-1Bs are de facto indentured servants. Moreover, toward the end of the 1990s, many faced the real possibility that they would reach their six-year H-1B visa limit before their greencard approvals came through, forcing them to leave the U.S. empty-handed.
For this reason, they formed the Immigrants Support Network (www.isn.org) in 1998, with the goal of influencing Congress to pass legislation to alleviate their plight. ISN is comprised mainly of Indians, but includes H-1Bs from other nations as well.
After failing to achieve their goals in the 1998 H-1B legislation, ISN met with Rick Swartz, a highly-influential immigration-legislation lobbyist, on October 21, 1999,
footnote: This and much of the other information following was obtained from ISN's Web page.and decided to retain his services. (See Section 2.3.4.)
Swartz's fee was $10,000 per month, and he estimated that the entire project would run approximately $100,000. Later, Carrie Kirby, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, told me that Swartz had started on a pro bono basis but began paid work for ISN in May 2000.
Swartz's representation of both ISN and his corporate clients such as Microsoft and Intel presented a conflict of interest, which is apparently why he chose a middle ground: He lobbied Congress for certain reforms in H-1B law and the employment-based greencard process which would bring about a mild reduction in the duration of the H-1Bs' indentured servitude, but which would still provide industry with a long enough duration to make hiring H-1Bs attractive. Swartz delivered on this promise; see Section 9.4.4.
ISN noted on its Web page the constraints it faced in terms of lobbying, both from its tax-exempt status and political issues:
Clearly as 501-C-4 organization ISN can not contribute to campaign funds. According to Mr. Shwartz [sic] it is not a desirable strategy to win our goals according to. Especially in the wake of spying scandals and the infamous campaign contributions to President Clinton controversy.Only U.S. citizens and permanent residents may legally make campaign contributions. Thus it would be illegal for H-1Bs to make such contributions. Yet at least some H-1Bs did so anyway, according to a report in the Austin-American Statesman, November 19, 2000:
The immigration concessions resulted from a season of organized clamor and lobbying - including a $10,000 contribution to Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Austin, from local H-1B workers. The tech industry was filling campaign coffers.As of October 2000, the ISN claimed 18,000 members nationwide. This number actually represented the number of people on ISN's e-mail list. The number of active members is likely to be much smaller. According to an October 6 e-mail message to the e-mail list from ISN Board Member Murali Krishna Devarakonda, only 762 members had actually contributed money for ISN's expensive lobbying efforts.
And even without contributing money, ISN can command meetings with politicians on the strength of ISN's status as an ``ethnic lobbying group.'' According to a message broadcast by ISN on May 7, 2001, the ISN was to meet with Maryland senator Barbara Mikulski on May 9, via the Indian American Legislative Council, which meets with the senator once a month. ISN said it would lobby the senator to increase the yearly green card quota for employer-sponsored immigration, so as to alleviate a long backlog of H-1Bs waiting for green cards.
In 1998, the engineering professional organization IEEE-USA (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers-USA) had lobbied Congress against the H-1B quota increase which was proposed that year. As an organization of over 200,000 members nationwide, it was a force to be reckoned with.
However, IEEE-USA knew that its action would not be appreciated by the corporate and academic interests which dominate the parent organization IEEE, who had strong vested interests in the H-1B program. So, IEEE-USA pulled its punches, refraining from using the only truly effective tool at their disposal: It refused to send out a mass mailing calling on its members to engage in a letter/fax assault on Congress.
In 2000 IEEE-USA came under enormous further pressure from the IEEE parent organization to moderate its position. IEEE-USA then hired Paul Donnelly as a consultant, whose job was ``to help wean the organization from its outright opposition to immigration.'' (The New Republic, June 19, 2000.) Donnelly is the former staffer with the Congressional Commission on Immigration Reform described in Section 2.3.4.
Around the same time, IEEE-USA greatly toned down its Web site. It removed its ``Misfortune 500'' file, a compendium of 500 engineers, mainly older, who were having trouble finding engineering work in spite of the alleged high-tech boom. It also removed from the site its report on a 1998 Harris Poll which had shown that 82% of Americans opposed the H-1B increase.
Donnelly convinced IEEE-USA to support his proposal - similar to one formulated by Congressional Commission on Immigration Reform as mentioned above - under which industry could bring in foreign engineers and programmers on an expedited basis, giving them ``instant green cards'' and bypassing the H-1B stage. This new stance on IEEE-USA's part was counter to its previous view that industry should hire/retrain American programmers and engineers, but apparently the organization felt that its new position would relieve the pressure brought to bear on it by the parent organization.
However, Donnelly was up against his rival, Rick Swartz (again, see Section 2.3.4), and up against Swartz's allies representing the computer industry, who apparently wanted to retain the ``indentured servant'' nature of the H-1B workers. Those lobbyists dismissed Donnelly as ``anti-immigrant,'' in spite of his work as a consultant to immigrants and as a longtime advocate for relieving the greencard backlog for the spouses and children of immigrants. (Wired News, May 15, 2000.)
Meanwhile, Swartz had acquired a new client, the Immigrant Support Network, an organization of H-1Bs who were hoping to get Congress to alleviate the ``indentured servitude'' problem. (See Section 2.4.)
Donnelly still tried to get Microsoft to support the ``instant greencard'' proposal. However, Microsoft's counsel and lobbyist, Ira Rubinstein, simply stalled, saying that he may support the proposal in the future but now wished to concentrate on H-1Bs. Later Rubinstein tried other stall tactics as well. (Personal communication with Paul Donnelly, June 17, 2000.)
Personally I do not support the Donnelly proposal, because although it would fix the problem of H-1B ``indentured servitude,'' a worthy goal, it would not address the problems of age discrimination and so on which are being fueled by the influx of foreign programmers. Nevertheless, the industry's continuing rejection of the Donnelly proposal, which would bring in the workers they say are needed and would reduce paperwork and trouble for the employers, shows that they do indeed wish to retain the indentured-servant nature of the H-1B program. And the personal attacks on Donnelly are uncalled for.
The AFL-CIO raised various concerns about the bill to increase the H-1B quota in 1998, but in the end chose not to oppose the increase. (Interpress, September 25, 1998.) When the next H-1B increase was proposed in 2000, the AFL-CIO again did not oppose the increase. In fact, the AFL-CIO were actually considering supporting the increase. (See the article by labor activist David Bacon in LA Weekly, January 16, 2001.
footnote: A very small component of the AFL-CIO, the Department of Professional Employees, did oppose the bill but was overruled by the AFL-CIO parent organization.)
The American Engineering Association (www.aea.org, not to be confused with the American Electronics Association, an industry lobbying group) has been a strident critic of the H-1B program for many years. Its influence is hampered by its relatively small size.
The same is true for the American Programmers Guild (http://www.colosseumbuilders.com/american.htm), which was formed in 1998 in response to the H-1B increase proposed in Congress that year. As of November 2000, it had about 1,000 members nationwide.
The Washington Alliance of Technology Workers (http://washtech.org) is a Seattle-based organization which consists of a much broader membership than just programmers and engineers. It has opposed the H-1B increases, but focuses on other issues.
Immigration-reform organizations, such as the FAIR and NumbersUSA, have also lobbied against the H-1B program. However, as with the AFL-CIO, these organizations also have other legislation to deal with, and have not always been able to devote full resources to the H-1B issue. Indeed, sometimes there has been conflict between issues. For example, in 2000 some Democrats in Congress tried to tie the H-1B quota increase to a partial amnesty for certain categories of illegal aliens. While this might have had the effect of derailing the drive to increase the H-1B quota, it might on the other hand result in both an H-1B increase and amnesty, the worst of both worlds from the point of view of these organizations.
In an attempt to obfuscate the issues, industry lobbyists who pushed Congress to increase the H-1B work visa quota in 1998 talked about shortages of ``information technology'' (IT) workers, running the entire gamut of all jobs having any connection to computers, including nontechnical jobs such as marketing. Yet the vast majority of H-1Bs hired for computer-related work are programmers, meaning software developers having titles such as Programmer, Software Engineer, System Analyst, Computer Engineer and so on.
This focus on software is especially important to keep in mind in the H-1B setting. The overwhelming majority of H-1Bs are in the computer science area, not electrical engineering. Department of Labor data show that the computer science H-1Bs outnumber the electrical engineering ones by nearly a 15-to-1 ratio. (Dallas Morning News, April 19, 1998. Also see a similar figures in Characteristics of Specialty Occupation Workers (H-1B), U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, February 2000; the number of H-1Bs in ``occupations in systems analysis and programming'' is 10.9 times the number in ``electrical/electronics engineering occupations.'') Though the boundaries between the two fields as viewed as undergraduate majors is not crisp - in fact, many, probably most, electrical engineering graduates eventually end up doing software - the key point is that the vast majority of high-tech H-1Bs are working on software, not hardware. For this reason, our report here focuses mainly on software, though we do also mention hardware/electrical engineering examples at some points.
Similarly we use the word industry to mean all employers of software developers, not just those in the high-tech field. This means that we include not only software publishers, such as Microsoft, but also employers such as banks, insurance companies and so on who develop software only for their own internal use.
It is very important to note that titles such as Programmer and Software Engineer are interchangeable. The choice of title depends on the employer, not on the type of work done. Many programmers may also have titles such as System Analyst, Computer Engineer and so on.
In his 1999 guide to programming careers,
footnote: The Complete Idiot's Guide to a Career in Computer Programming, Jesse Liberty, Que, 1999.consultant and author Jesse Liberty warns readers not to read anything into a job title in the software development field: ``Some companies distinguish between programmers, analysists, architects...Others call all these people software engineers.'' Actually, the Programmer title is rather archaic in today's job market.
John Miano of the American Programmers Guild noted (e-mail, May 21, 1999):
For all practical purposes the titles Programmer, Programmer/Analyst, System Analyst, Software Engineer, Software Specialist, Systems Architect etc. are functionally equivalent. The difference in titles is representative of the type of industry rather than the job function.For example, a bank would most like call an employee a "Programmer/Analyst" where the person doing the same job in a software development company would be called a "Software Engineer."
The amount of vertical division in programmer functions has virtually disappeared over the years. In the olden days of batch processing you had the Analysts who looked at problem