Date: Fri, 9 Jul 2004 11:54:03 -0700 From: Norm Matloff To: Norm Matloff Subject: Sen. Lieberman on offshoring and H-1B To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter A number of people have mentioned a white paper on offshoring by Sen. Joseph Liberman, at http://www.lieberman.senate.gov/newsroom/whitepapers/Offshoring.pdf Clearly Lieberman is just one more person who is putting forth the unofficial Democratic Party line--Kerry, Clark, Dean, and most notably Hillary Clinton--which SOUNDS sympathetic to workers but IN REALITY consists only of a few minor changes which have minor impacts. It is no accident that Lieberman uses the word "tweak" for H-1B; he and the Democrats want to only "tweak" the entire system, to make it look like they've done something when they've actually done nothing. Kerry, for all his "Benedict Arnolds who offshore" bluster, has said he supports offshoring and his campaign officials have admitted that his "reforms" would have very little impact on the problem. As with the others, Lieberman says we should invest more money in education and research. He says that the offshoring is going to countries that are making such investments--as if that is the reason they offshore. The real reason U.S. firms offshore is that these firms seek cheap labor, not "investment in research." (The amount of research done in India and China is minuscule.) Lieberman cites Taiwan as a country making such "investments," yet basically NONE of the offshoring is going to Taiwan. Duh! The U.S. can "invest" until the cows come home and still not change a thing. As Lieberman himself points out in his white paper, unemployment among college graduates is growing at double the rate for high school graduates. So much for the value of investment in education! Lieberman also drags out the tired statistic that China is graduating more engineers than we are. First of all, that is misleading. The U.S. has the second-highest per-capita number of engineers in the world, after Israel (Michael Hiltzik, Israel's High Tech Shifts Into High Gear, Los Angeles Times, August 13, 2000), and most of China's engineers are not doing much engineering. But the interesting part is that Lieberman concludes that this means that China has more potential for innovation, a new spin on this statistic that I hadn't seen before. It's curious how Lieberman thinks that graduating more engineers in the U.S. will lead to more innovation--since U.S. firms won't give American jobs in which they can innovate. Large numbers of U.S. programmers and engineers are seeing their education going to waste, as they can't get tech jobs. Lieberman thinks we should produce even more programmers and engineers, so that even more of them can have their education go to waste? Lieberman also follows the tried-and-true path of saying that not enough U.S. students pursue graduate degrees. Of course, that again outrageously ignores the tens of thousands of American programmers and engineers who have graduate degrees and yet are unemployed or underemployed (i.e. working in non-tech jobs such as driving a school bus). See my posting on the industry lobbyists' graduate degree propaganda at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/GradDegrees.txt) Sadly, Lieberman also can't resist saying that Indian programmers are better, another favorite claim of the industry lobbyists. See my posting on this at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/CMMHype.txt As with other apologists for offshoring, a lot of Lieberman's proposals involved cushioning the blow of offshoring, e.g. requiring that employers give U.S. workers advance notice. This is nothing more than a short-term palliative, not a long-term solution, and thus should have been mentioned only as an afterthought, rather than a featured point as Lieberman did. Lieberman praises H-1B, claiming that it played a key role in U.S. technological leadership. He relegates abuses as being exceptions. He's totally off base here. Almost none of the hiring of tech H-1Bs in the 13-year history of the H-1B program has been justified; the overriding consideration in almost all hires of tech H-1Bs has been cheap labor (either Type I or Type II in my classification scheme). See my law journal article on this, at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/MichJLawReform.pdf For those readers who still might hold on to a belief that Lieberman cares about American programmers and engineers, here is what he wrote in a letter to the U.S. India Political Action Committee earlier this year: I also oppose any efforts to eliminate or diminish the H1-B visa program. Why do we want to limit or otherwise handicap a community that has made such significant and important contributions to this country? It is counter-intuitive and counter-productive. As a long-time Democrat myself, let me state it bluntly: The Democrats are not any more sympathetic to American programmers and engineers than are the Republicans. The only difference between the parties is that the Democrats pretend to be sympathetic while the Republicans are openly hostile. BOTH parties are hopelessly in league with their corporate campaign contributors. Norm