In June 2006 an industry lobbying group, AeA (American Electronics Association), released a policy paper, Attracting the Best and the Brightest to the United States. This was part of the AeA's lobbying efforts to greatly expand the H-1B work visa program and to establish a new F-4 visa having similar impacts on U.S. citizen and permanent resident engineers. Following is a point-by-point rebuttal. On the H-1B requirements: AeA says, "Employers who apply for an H-1B visa must show evidence that they cannot find an American with the qualifications needed for the position..." This is false. H-1B does NOT require the employer to make any attempt to find an American worker to fill the position. See http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/H1BRequirements for details. On PhDs: The Aea says, "Half of doctoral computer science and math degrees and 60 percent of doctoral engineering degrees awarded in the United States go to foreign nationals." We don't need so many PhDs. Tons of them have been laid off. H-1B is causing an internal brain drain. The reason there are so many foreign students in U.S. PhD programs is that the National Science Foundation, a government agency planned it that way. Their explicit goal was to bring in foreign students in order to hold down PhD wages. The NSF recognized that the low PhD wages would be a disincentive for American students to pursue a PhD. On Google cofounder Sergey Brin, etc.: Brin came to the U.S. as a child with his family, not as an H-1B. So did Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang. Former Intel CEO (and NOT cofounder) Andy Grove immigrated with his family too. More importantly, Google has not been important to the industry's technological advance. There are lots of other search engines available, and all of them are about equally effective. Similar points can be made for the other firms cited. On "the best and the brightest": I definitely do support bringing in the best and the brightest, but only a tiny percentage are in that category. For instance, one can see this directly by considering H-1B salaries, say for 1999-2000. (INS, Characteristics of Specialty Occupation Workers (H-1B): October 1999 to February 2000. Note that these figures give actual salaries, not prevailing wage levels.) The 25th, 50th and 75th percentile salary levels for computer-related H-1Bs were $44,000, $50,000 and $57,000, respectively. Fitting a normal distribution to this, we find that 99 percent of computer-related H-1Bs made less than about $79,400. This is far below the \$100,000 or more that ``genius'' workers in the computer field make; even the 90th percentile, arguably not "genius" level, for salaries for software applications engineers in 2001 was $109,170 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2001 National Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates, http://www.bls.gov/oes/2001/oes151031.htm) Also, the study by David North, a former Assistant Secretary of Labor, showed that the foreign PhD students in the U.S. tend to be enrolled in the the academically weaker universities (David S. North, Soothing the Establishment: The Impact of Foreign-Born Scientists and Engineers on America, University Press of America, 1995, p.48) On the AeA's claims of a labor shortage: The AeA says, "In 2005, the unemployment rate for all engineering profes- sions was 2.3 percent. For electrical engineers it was 1.5 percent. High-tech companies are increasingly seeking skilled labor to feed a growing industry and cannot find it." Unemployment figures don't tell the story. Lots of engineers turn to other kinds of jobs when they can't find engineering work. The laid-off engineer who is now working as a school bus driver counts as an employed school bus driver, not an unemployed engineer. Also, many programmers are independent contractors, who are seeing that they have fewer contracts today than before, yet they still count as employed. If there were a shortage, salaries would be going up, which they are NOT. Starting salaries (adjusted for inflation) for new Bachelor's graduates have been flat since 1999 (see BusinessWeek Online, September 15, 2005, Good Time to Learn Accounting?, Michael Mandel, www.businessweek.com/ the_thread/economicsunbound/archives/2005/09/good_time_to_le.html) Salaries have been flat at the Master's level too (see Best? Brightest? A Green Card Giveaway for Foreign Grads Would Be Unwarranted, N. Matloff, May 2006, Center for Immigration Studies, www.cis.org/articles/2006/ back506.html) (No data is available at the PhD level.) On H-1B wages: AeA says, "A 2005 report by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) concluded that H-1B computer programmers were paid less than their U.S. counterparts. The CIS researchers relied on what companies reported as the `prevailing wage' for those positions, instead of the actual wage paid." That is FALSE. The CIS report (The Bottom of the Pay Scale: Wages for H-1B Computer Programmers, John Miano, Center for Immigration Studies, www.cis.org/articles/2006/back1305.html) used the Rate of Pay entry in the H-1B LCA form (http://workforcesecurity.doleta.gov/ foreign/pdf/eta9035v50.pdf), which is item C on page 1 of the form; by contrast, Prevailing Wage is item E, page 2. The LCA data is sound. Moreover, various studies that have used the direct wage data, e.g. census data, show the same thing--the H-1Bs tend to be paid less than Americans. Two congressionally commissioned employer surveys found many employers even ADMITTING to paying less than Americans; you can imagine how many employers who were underpaying their H-1Bs did NOT admit it. See N. Matloff, On the Need for Reform of the H-1B Nonimmigrant Work Visa in Computer-Related Occupations, University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, Fall 2003, Vol. 36, Issue 4, 815-914 for a full account of the studies. The AeA also states, "The vast majority of companies play by the rules, pay market wages, and do not wish to see the integrity of the program called into question by a minority of infractors." The fact is that though the vast majority of firms DO play by the rules, they do NOT page market wages. That's because the rules are filled with gaping loopholes, so that the legal definition of prevailing wage is far below market wage. This was illustrated succinctly by a statement in a report by Congress' General Accounting Office in 2003, which stated "Some employers said that they hired H-1B workers in part because these workers would often accept lower salaries than similarly qualified U.S. workers; however, these employers said they never paid H-1B workers less than the required wage." In other words, the employers were underpaying the H-1Bs in full compliance with the law, exploiting the fact that the law is so loophole-ridden. It is important to note that, contrary to the AeA's implication that big firms don't underpay the H-1Bs, the fact is that underpayment occurs across the board, in big firms and small. It's the same as the situation with the tax code: Loopholes in the tax code are used aggressively by both big firms and small, and loopholes in the H-1B code are used across the board too. For an analysis of Intel's H-1B wages, see my CIS article, cited above. The AeA also says, "NFAP also found that CIS vastly underestimated H-1B wages because it failed to control for age and work experience, as H-1B professionals tend to be younger than their American counterparts." Actually, the youth of the H-1Bs is precisely what the employers want! A little-known fact about the H-1B program is that one of its major attractions to employers is that it allows them to save money by hiring younger H-1Bs instead of older Americans. When the industry says that it can't find the engineers it needs, it means it can't find YOUNG, CHEAP ones. TCS, one of the major H-1B users, stated that 93% of its programmers have less than 5 years of experience. A good illustration of this can be seen in a Wall Street Journal article (Sharon Begley, Slim Pickings: Behind `Shortage' of Engineers: Employers Grow More Choosy, Wall Street Journal, November 16, 2005, p.A1). Employers were telling the reporter that they "struggle to fill openings," yet they conceded that they rejects many candidates because they are "deemed overqualified." The AeA further states, "Further research conducted by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University found that foreign-born and American-born professionals earned virtually identical salaries in math and science fields." This study is irrelevant, because it looked at ALL foreign-born, NOT just H-1Bs. This is crucial, because only the H-1Bs are subject to abuse due to de facto indentured servitude (see below). Other foreign-born, i.e. naturalized U.S. citizens and permament residents, have full mobility in the labor market and thus are not vulnerable. So, any problems with H-1Bs would be washed out in the Northeastern study, since H-1Bs comprised only a tiny proportion of the people in the study. On the de facto indentured servitude of the H-1Bs: The AeA says, "Visa holders do not have to stay with the employer that sponsored them. They are free to seek employment elsewhere, provided their H-1B status has not expired." The AeA's statement here is misleading, because the (de facto) indentured servitude comes mostly from green card sponsorship, not the H-1B visa itself. Most H-1Bs hope to be sponsored by their employers for permanent residence, i.e. green cards. (See for example the comment by Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration lawyer and adjunct professor at Cornell Law School, in Alexander Nguyen, High Tech Migrant Labor, The American Prospect, December 20, 1999. This is a multi-year proces, during which the H-1B worker being sponsored for the green card is essentially immobile. Switching employers during this time would necessitate starting the green card process all over again, an unthinkable prospect for most. This situation renders the affected H-1Bs de facto indentured servants, thus highly exploitable. The AeA in fact makes this point about immobility itself in their document, without realizing it. In their inset box titled, "The Real Life Story of Siva Singaram" on the same page as their "Myth 3" in which they deny the immobility, they show the plight of Mr. Singaram, who is immobile. Murali Devarakonda, a member of the Board of Directors of the Immigrant Support Network, an H-1B organization which became quite influential in Congress in 2000, said, "This is legal human rights violation in America...You [as an H-1B] are an indentured servant, a modern-day slave..." (Straight Talk [weekly television program produced by Santa Clara County Democratic Club], June 10, 2000.) A slight improvement was made in 2000, but as Singaram's case shows, the situation is still basically the same. For example, see: Senate Immigration Bill Draws Mixed Reaction, India West, Viji Sundaram, Jun 04, 2006, http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/ view_article.html?article_id=286e7a6f54b520ff883c9eabc58b3634 Skilled Immigrants Turn to K Street: High-Tech Workers Awaiting Green Cards Hire Lobbyists, Hit the Hill; S. Mitra Kalita Washington Post, April 26, 2006; p.D01, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ content/article/2006/04/25/AR2006042501963.html Indeed, that immobility has been extolled by the immigration attorneys as a major benefit for hiring H-1Bs. For example, the Dayton Daily News reported that "[Attorney Sherry] Neal said foreign nationals may appear to be more loyal workers because they aren't as mobile as other in-demand tech workers" (July 11, 1999). Similarly, an article in a magazine for HR executives said that a virtue of hiring H-1Bs is that if the H-1B were to leave the employer, "...he or she has to start the immigration process all over again. As a result, most H-1B visa holders demonstrate remarkable loyalty" (John Wentworth, "Stop-gap Measures for the IT Staffing Crunch," Workforce Magazine, May 1999). To many employers, that "loyalty" is even more important than the salary savings.