Date: Thu, 8 Jan 2004 00:34:09 -0800 From: Norm Matloff To: Norm Matloff Subject: major change point for the U.S. To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter We are all waiting to see what the details of the Bush guest worker plan will be. But based on the broad outlines we've been told so far, it appears to me that this legislation, if passed, would produce a sea change in American society. Allow me to make a few predictions: 1. The jobs currently being done by "undocumented" workers will CONTINUE to be done by them. They are hired today because they are cheap labor. The notion implicitly put forth by the Bush administration that the employers in the agricultural, restaurant, construction etc. industries will want to hire Bush's guest workers, complete with medical benefits, Social Security taxes, Workman's Comp etc. is absolutely absurd. In other words, the bill would not even make a dent on the main problem it's supposed to address. 2. The visa program will not say "Only current or former illegal aliens need apply, and only low-skilled jobs may be filled under this program." Most of the people who use the program will be filling positions in the mainstream job market. As long as the foreign workers have good English--and there are tons of people around the world with fluent enough English--there is no reason they couldn't be hired as clerical workers, insurance claims adjusters, airline ticket agents, teachers, you name it. The hotel industry, for instance, makes it sound like it would use the program to hire maids, but there really isn't any job in the whole damn hotel that couldn't be filled with a guest worker. They'd love to come and work for wages at the entry level or below entry-level for those occupations. And even the programmer and engineer jobs would be vulnerable. Sure, the program structure could include a provision saying something like, "Not for jobs normally requiring a Bachelor's degree," but so what? The employers would suddenly decide that many programming and engineering jobs don't need a Bachelor's. If it weren't so sad, it would be comical to watch, say, Sun Microsystems, use this new program to hire sub-Bachelor's workers for the same jobs that Sun is now insisting require a Bachelor's degree (the requirement for H-1B). 3. Last year I myself proposed the idea of a jobs database, at which Americans would get first crack with guest workers being eligible for whatever can't be filled by Americans, in my H-1B reform proposal (see http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Summary.pdf). But my proposal is constructed as an integrated package in which all the parts depend on each other. Bush's guest worker program undoubtedly won't be like this. It will simply say that if the employer can't fill the job with an American, then he can hire a guest worker. Well, all the employer will have to do is set the wage low (even entry level would probably be sufficiently low, especially since the large influx of workers would have the effect of making the entry-level wage lower and lower), and bingo!, there will be a "shortage" of American applicants. And that isn't even mentioning all the other tricks employers use today in defining a position in such a manner that only a foreign worker would qualify. 4. Fortunately for the tech industry, most programmers and engineers are wimps who won't fight the outrages going on with H-1B, but if as I predicted above this program hits the general middle in a big way (note that no one has mentioned a cap for the program), I can picture the populace in a very ugly, riotous mood. Norm