Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2006 23:25:21 -0700 From: Norm Matloff To: Norm Matloff Subject: new article on age and H-1B To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter A few months ago the California Labor and Employment Law Review, a publication of the State Bar of California Labor and Employment Law Section, invited me to write an article about H-1B. I chose to focus on the age issue, and my article's title is "The Adverse Impact of Work Visa Programs on Older U.S. Engineers and Programmers." The age issue is key to understanding the H-1B program. The article appears in the current issue (August) of the magazine. You can read the entire issue (including articles on organizing tech workers and the offshoring issue). at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/CLER.pdf The article is a mixture of old and new material, with the old material coming largely from my 2003 article in the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform. One thing I've tried very hard to get across over the years is that the age issue is absolutely central to the popularity of the H-1B program. As I say in this article, This is the point which is largely missed about H-1B, even by critics of the program: the most significant factor underlying the industry's perennial pressuring of Congress to increase the H-1B cap is actually a desire to hire young workers. Type I savings are already of importance, with estimated magnitude ranging from 15-20 percent to 33 percent, but the Type II savings--i.e., the age-related savings--are even greater, in the 30-50 percent range we saw earlier. I hope the significance of this is not lost on those readers of this e-newsletter who support an "instant green card" approach to reforming H-1B, as embodied for example in the new F-4 visa type proposed in the SKIL bill. As I explained in my recent CIS article, at http://www.cis.org/articles/2006/back506.html the fact that F-4 by statute would apply only to new graduates shows that it would have a major adverse impact on older U.S. programmers and engineers. Intel et al want this so that they won't have to hire the American 45-year-olds, or for that matter, the 35-year-olds. Most F-4s would also be de facto indentured servants, as I explained in my CIS piece, but even without that aspect, F-4 would inflict a severe blow on American programmers and engineers. Remember, when you think of H-1B, think first of age discrimination. Norm