To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter Thu Jan 31 21:01:45 PST 2013 Two interesting articles came to my attention this evening, regarding the various recent proposals to expand the H-1B and/or EB-series green card programs. There are a number of important points raised, which I'll address here. Let's start with Pat Thibodeau's Computerworld piece, at http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9236396/What_will_an_H_1B_cap_hike_bring_to_U.S._ The article contrasts the Hatch bill, will focuses on H-1B, with other proposals that center on green cards. Thibodeau writes: *********************************************************************** The Senate proponents say the H-1B visas are needed to fill critical jobs and keep the U.S. competitive. The visas give companies the ability to hire who they want. Some lawmakers, though, want to lessen the emphasis on temporary workers and instead focus on encouraging foreign graduates of U.S. universities to remain in the country. These officials would offer permanent residency to foreign students that earn an advanced degree in science, technology, engineering and math, or the so-called STEM degrees. *********************************************************************** On the surface, this is a good account of the original philosophy behind the "staple a green card to their diplomas" slogan, first put forth by IEEE-USA, and championed by, for instance, the Dallas Fed and indeed President Obama. Mind you, I do not support this notion, as I believe it would be just as harmful as H-1B, for reasons I've explained before. But my point here is that I believe the above is NOT the industry's motivation in supporting special STEM green cards. Instead, as I said the other day and in the past, the real motivator for the industry is to get a backdoor increase in the H-1B cap. If a STEM green card program is enacted, you can bet that it won't be "staple a green card to their diplomas," meaning that green cards will NOT be immediately granted to the foreign graduates. There will still be a delay of several years, because as I've explained before, the de facto indentured servant nature of the current green card process is highy attractive to employers; they want to handcuff their workers, and the green card process makes foreign workers captive. Then why DO the employers support STEM green cards? The reason is that the STEM green card program would set up a new visa category, separate from H-1B--and thus would amount to an indirect increase in the H-1B cap. AND...keep in mind that no cap has been mentioned in any of the proposals for STEM green cards, either the recent proposals or the older ones. It's not in the Lofgren's IDEA bill introduced last year, for instance. So, those who believe the "Gang of 8" bill will be less onerous than the Hatch proposal (whose provisions are tantamount to lifting the H-1B cap entirely), should rethink this whole mess. No cap on STEM visas! And couple that with the fact that many analysts believe that a STEM green card program would create its own demand. You'll find a lot more programs like the one at Cal State East Bay, at which 90% of the enrollment at the computer science master's program is foreign. (I believe this is common at most of the CSU campuses, but CSUEB is the only one whose MSCS foreign percentage I know.) In other words, we're probably talking about truly large numbers of people. I just took a look at CSUEB's list of master's programs, for example, at http://www20.csueastbay.edu/prospective/majors-and-classes/fields-of-study/graduate-programs/index.html Easily half of those degrees would qualify as STEM. (The T part of STEM alone opens doors very wide.) Some of you will recall that some earlier proposals for STEM green cards were restricted to research universities, making it sound like perhaps 50 or 60 universities would be covered. But as I reported at the time, sources tell me that "research universities" would include at least 200 and maybe as many as 300 schools. CSUEB faculty definitely do some research, for instance, so that school would qualify. Not to mention what I call "list creep." Political pressure would mean the list of qualifying schools, and the list of qualifying fields, would expand over time. It will be interesting to see what's in the Gang of 8's proposal when they introduce a formal bill, but judging from the myriad proposals made in the past for STEM green cards, I believe the above analyses will apply. Thibodeau writes, ******************************************************************* Microsoft says the typical pay for a new programmer or software engineer ranges from $100,000 to $120,000. "A person with an H-1B visa is not be treated differently than any other new hire," a spokeswoman said. ******************************************************************* Microsoft has made this claim on several occasions, but it is simply not true. The PERM green card data show that only 21 percent of the workers Microsoft sponsored for green cards during 2006-2011 had salaries of at least $100,000. In fact, only 18 percent of Microsoft’s sponsored workers with software engineering titles were above the $100,000 mark. Thibodeau notes that even Lofgren herself pointed out that the legally required prevaling wage is typically much lower than the true market wage for a worker. Yet there has been nothing in any of the bills to fix this (except for the Durbin-Grassley bill, which never got anywhere.) The other article is in Infoworld, http://www.infoworld.com/t/it-jobs/tech-companies-claim-more-h-1b-visas-will-fill-it-labor-gap-211929 There is lots of interesting stuff here, not least of which is a link to an outstanding analysis by Stan Sorscher at http://www.aflcio.org/Blog/Economy/Conjuring-a-High-Tech-Labor-Shortage I highly recommend the Sorscher report, but I do have one bone to pick with it, concerning this passage: ******************************************************************* During the Tech Boom in 1999, we did see a real labor shortage. Employers offered signing bonuses, job applicants could negotiate, having multiple offers of employment and workplace perks were profiled in glowing newspaper accounts. Nothing remotely like that is happening now. ******************************************************************* I strongly disagree. We in fact had very similar conditions then as now. New computer science graduates--YOUNG ones, mind you--today enjoy an excellent job market, with mediocre students getting good jobs, many with multiple offers and so on. BUT...the job market is far less welcoming for the people 10 or 15 years out of school. It is also unwelcoming for new grads who were older, i.e. had worked in industry and then returned to school. The same was true for older (age 35) workers in 1999, as some readers of this e-newsletter know only too well. Indeed, Sorscher himself includes two excellent quotes regarding the age issue, one from 1996 and the other from 2012, illustrating my point: Things really are the same now as then. There is one difference, though--the industry lobbyists have gotten a lot slicker since 1999. Back in 1999, coverage of the H-1B issue by any major news outlet, print or electronic, presented both sides of the story. Not so today! There has been a flurry of articles in the press on H-1B/green card proposals in the last week, and among the ones in mainstream outlets, the vast majority present only the industry side. (Thibodeau, writing for a trade paper, has always written balanced, insightful pieces.) This is not deliberate censorship. Instead, it's the result of top-flight PR by the industry, whose goal has been to implant in the American conciousness the notion that the U.S. has a STEM labor shortage--and indeed, that Americans are incapable of doing STEM. Just look at the rhetoric, from both the industry lobbyists and the politicians--we need H-1Bs for innovation, we need H-1Bs for tech entrepreneurship and so on, the implication being that we can't do that ourselves. That glitch notwithstanding, read the Sorscher report, highly recommended. Norm