Date: Mon, 13 Apr 2009 18:03:12 -0700 From: Norm Matloff To: Norm Matloff Subject: excellent Miano find--"best and brightest" myth unmasked! To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter Over the weekend, the New York Times ran a piece whose theme, roughly stated, was "Here is a brilliant H-1B hired by Google whom the firm (and the U.S.) will lose due to overly restrictive immigration laws." The piece seemed to be so extreme that a friend of mine, a Chinese-Vietnamese Australian who doesn't live in the U.S. but keenly follows American politics, wrote to me ask why the Times would run such an obviously biased article. I must say it's hard for me to escape the conclusion that the author set out to write a pro-industry article. On the other hand, I must strongly commend the Times for giving us five panelists from last's blog a chance to comment on the article. Ms. Terry Tang, who put the blog together, deserves special credit for all of this. The panelists' commentary on the article is enclosed below; the article is at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/business/12immig.html?ref=technology and last week's blog is at http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/do-we-need-foreign-technology-workers/ The most important of the five panelists' writeups is that of John Miano. I consider it to be ONE OF THE MOST SIGNIFICANT STATEMENTS ABOUT H-1B TO APPEAR IN QUITE A WHILE. Here's why: I've stated many times that although I support bringing in "the best and the brightest" from around the world, only a tiny percentage of H-1Bs are in the league. On occasion, I've even challenged the industry's claims that certain of its "poster children" are indeed of that caliber (http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/NotBestAndBrightest3.txt). But in this case, I wanted to keep my commentary on the broader H-1B issue, so I didn't pay much attention to the current poster child, Sanjay Mavinkurve. Fortunately, John Miano looked more closely at Mavinkurve than I did. John points out (emphasis added): # One particular item in the article leapt out at me. The article # describes the problem of slow downloads of maps to cellphones at # Google. No one at Google was able to solve the problem until Mr. # Mavinkurve came up with the idea of reducing the number of colors. # # This standard technique, known "color quantization," has been used # for years to reduce images size and speed up the drawing of images. # That solution would come immediately to anyone with experience # working with images. IT'S HARD TO BELIEVE THAT NO ONE AT GOOGLE, # OTHER THAN MR. MAVINKURVE, COULD COME UP WITH THIS TRIED AND TRUE # METHOD. THIS SUGGESTS THAT GOOGLE IS IGNORING THE VAST POOL OF # EXPERIENCED WORKERS WHO HAVE THE KNOWLEDGE GOOGLE NEEDS, WHILE IT # CLAIMS IT MUST HAVE H-1B WORKERS. Very interesting. Here the industry comes up with what at first looks like a perfect illustration of the good side of the H-1B program, the "foreign genius," and yet he turns out to be ignorant of a standard technique. Granted, one can't know everything, but the technique is actually an example of a general computer science principle. Any good undergraduate could come up with it. Really, it's not more than the fact, known even to non-techie readers of this e-newsletter, that you can make an image's storage space needs smaller by reducing the resolution. And yet Mavinkurve is presented as a genius, a hero at Google, for this "insight." Mind you, this doesn't disprove the claim that Mavinkurve has special talent in user interface design (which is more art or psychology than technology). I'm willing to believe that he does. I personally enjoy the Google user interface, and if they say he'll contribute to more of the same, that's great. And I can tell you for sure that Google has indeed hired some H-1Bs that really are "the best and the brightest." But I'm can equally say that there are many Google H-1Bs who are not brilliant. (Of course, this is not picking on Google; I'd make the same statement for any employer.) And most importantly, I strongly agree with John's point that Google probably could have hired an American as good as, or better than, Mavinkurve. Concerning the other panelists' remarks: Yes, Prof. Jasso is correct in saying that the immigration system places lots of emotional stresses on people, including on marriages. Many improvements should be made. But Jasso might also do some research on the impact on U.S. citizens and permanent residents whose marriages have been strained by the displacement of a engineer husband and/or wife from the job market by the employers' hiring of H-1Bs. One programmer who was replaced from his job with the Bank of America by H-1Bs even committed suicide in the bank parking lot. Mr. Heesen should read John Miano's blog from last week. Heesen apparently claims we're going to lose top foreign engineers who tire of waiting in the long green card line. John pointed readers to the State Dept.'s Visa Bulletin, which shows that there is essentially no wait for those in the EB-1 class, called Extraorinary Ability. We're NOT losing "the best and the brightest" due to long waits. Vivek Wadhwa's statement on entrepreneurship is answered by my own writeup below it, where I point out that immigrant engineers and native engineers have the same rates of founding startups. A similar statement holds for patents; if you follow his link to Prof. Hunt's paper, you will see that she makes an explicit disclaimer that she is not claiming that immigrant engineers are more patent-prone than native engineers. I must again thank the Times and especially Ms. Tang for running last week's blog and today's further panelist commentary. The Times had some good coverage of H-1B during 1998-2000, but for some reason has not addressed the topic in recent years. Norm http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/13/skilled-guest-workers-american-jobs/#more-4465 Room for Debate | A New York Times Blog __________________________________________________________________ April 13, 2009, 2:41 pm Skilled Guest Workers, American Jobs By The Editors In a continuing series on immigration, Room for Debate last week featured a discussion on how immigration policy affects high-skilled workers and the industries that rely on them. This forum preceded an article by Matt Richtel, a Times business and technology reporter, that appeared on Sunday, titled, "Tech Recruiting Clashes With Immigration Rules." We asked the experts from our discussion to weigh in again after reading Mr. Richtel's article, which focused on a Google worker, Sanjay Mavinkurve, who is the United States on a H-1B guest worker visa. Here's what they had to say. * Mark Heesen, National Venture Capital Association * Ron Hira, public policy professor, Rochester Institute of Technology * Guillermina Jasso, sociology professor, N.Y.U. * Norman Matloff, computer science professor, U.C. Davis * Vivek Wadhwa, Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University * John Miano, lawyer and computer programmer __________________________________________________________________ Winning the Next Technology Battle Mark Heese Mark Heesen is president of the National Venture Capital Association. The article highlights why immigration has helped the United States become the information-technology power that it's been. Many venture capitalists will tell you that particularly over the past five years there are more concerns that America is beginning to lose the general technology battle not just to China and India, but also to Europe. The new battle is in life sciences and clean technology -- but many experts in those fields are moving aroad. The new technology battle is not over information technology; that is the past battle. The new battle is in life sciences and clean technology, with many experts in those fields now residing abroad after being educated in the U.S. Many have left the U.S. voluntarily as economies around the world have become more developed, anti-immigration polices of the U.S. have become more pronounced and the technology infrastructure in other countries has become more advanced. The burdens of trying to stay in the U.S. are just too much to deal with when technologists can live anywhere in the world. It is critical to recognize that as stories on immigration continue to focus on information technology, other countries see the future differently. They are looking to the next huge wave of technological breakthroughs being developed in their countries as their citizens return home with their U.S. educations ready to use their engineering and medical training to create domestic life science and clean technology companies. The argument that foreign-born U.S.-educated engineers are unable to "think outside the box" is quickly being displaced as the globalization of the technology community moves forward. The U.S. has much to lose in the technology revolution. Shortsighted thinking that restricts immigration in economically depressed times will only hasten our already tenuous position in the next new technologies which will build upon the information technology revolution we have already witnessed. __________________________________________________________________ Unanswered Questions Ron Hira Ron Hira is assistant professor of public policy at Rochester Institute of Technology and co-author of "Outsourcing America." There is broad support for policies to welcome the best and brightest to come to the U.S. and settle permanently. But it should be done in a way that is fair to both foreign and American workers. The article says little about the critical decisions that should shape permanent immigration policy for skilled workers. What criteria should determine who is, and is not, admitted? Should it be based on degree level, occupational fields in demand, or whether someone earns a degree from a U.S. university? What process should people undergo before being granted permanent residence? Should they be "probationary Americans" beholden to a particular employer? What process should people undergo before being granted permanent residence? Should they be "probationary Americans" on a guest worker visa beholden to a particular employer? Or should they be able to sponsor themselves? Finally, how many permanent visas should be allocated to skilled immigrants? Should an increase of the current quota of 140,000 come at the expense of family-based permanent immigration? Rather than address these issues, which the featured Google worker faces, the article delves into H-1B policy, but ignores fundamental problems corrupting the H-1B program. As we know, employers regularly exploit loopholes in that program to pay below-market wages, drive Americans out of their jobs, force some to train foreign replacements and take advantage of the vulnerable position of foreign workers. Closing those loopholes can be done without losing the best and brightest. The workers who are hurt by these tactics -- which are, in fact, legal -- don't have high-priced lobbyists representing them in Washington yet their story is just as important. __________________________________________________________________ Visa-Driven Stresses Guillermina Jasso Guillermina Jasso is professor of sociology at New York University, research fellow at IZA Bonn and a principal investigator on the New Immigrant Survey. It seems inconsistent with American principles to impose inequality on hundreds of thousands of marriages, as we do when spouses of temporary-visa workers are prohibited from working. Such marital inequality has wide-ranging consequences, affecting the well-being not only of the couples, but also of their children. The article also shows that the process of applying for a permanent visa is long and arduous. Data from the New Immigrant Survey cohort of 2003 indicate that 21 percent of the highly skilled workers experienced depression because of the visa process compared with 17 percent of the whole group. If stress affects the productivity of temporary workers, then, given the fluidity of permanent and temporary workers, it might be worth considering a streamlined process -- or an experiment -- in which permanent visas are granted to a subset of temporary-visa applicants. __________________________________________________________________ A Law Riddled With Loopholes Norman Matloff Norman Matloff is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis. An implicit message in the article is that the immigrants have some special knack for founding tech firms. Yet the data show otherwise. The work of two researchers, Vivek Wadhwa and AnnaLee Saxenian, quoted in the article found that 52.4 percent of Silicon Valley startups from 1995 to 2005 had a least one immigrant founder. Yet the census data show that 62 percent of Silicon Valley programmers and engineers were foreign-born as of 2000. That says entrepreneurship rates are about the same for immigrants and natives, with the immigrants even lagging slightly behind. The article's list of "foreign-born elite" is quite misleading. Yahoo!'s Jerry Yang and Google's Sergey Brin came to the U.S. as children under the family immigration law, and Andy Grove of Intel came to the U.S. as a refugee. They are irrelevant to the H-1B debate. Moreover, no firm, foreign- or domestic-founded, has been pivotal to the technological advance of the industry. We could do Web searches without Yahoo! or Google, on machines running non-Intel chips. The vast majority of H-1Bs visa holders are not of "best and brightest" caliber, and most H-1B holders don't come out of Ivy League schools, as did Sanjay Mavinkurve. Existing law already offers those of extraordinary ability fast green cards, called EB-1,with work benefits for their spouses. Minor technical adjustments may be warranted for EB-1 and similar visas, but in any event, Mr. Mavinkurve's case offers no argument for increasing the cap on H-1B visas. The article fails to focus on the central issue of the H-1B controversy, the use of the visa for cheap labor. Though the lobbyists claim that the financial industry needs such temporary guest workers to help the industry recover, institutions like the Bank of America have an abominable track record of replacing Americans with foreign workers. Even Vivek Wadhwa has stated, "I know from my experience as a tech CEO that H-1Bs are cheaper than domestic hires." These workers are supposed to be paid a prevailing wage, but the law is riddled with loopholes that allow employers to get around this requirement. __________________________________________________________________ More Foreigners, More Patents Vivek Wadhwa Vivek Wadhwa is an executive in residence for the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University and a senior research associate in the labor and work-life program at Harvard Law School. While protectionists are lobbying to close America's doors, the best and brightest are fleeing our shores. Other countries like Canada and Singapore are welcoming them with open arms. These countries have learned from our success - that skilled immigrants create jobs and provide competitive advantage, and they enrich our culture and improve our standard of living. Some argue that we have enough American-born programmers to fill all the open jobs in the tech industries, but my view is that you can never have enough workers like Sanjay Mavinkurve. Many of these skilled workers are starting companies that create jobs for native-born Americans and immigrants alike. While they enter the country as lower-level programmers, our research has shown, immigrants often start tech companies 13 years after arriving in the U.S. The fact is, skilled foreigners are more likely to start technology businesses than the general populace. For example, India-born immigrants constitute about .7 percent of the U.S. population yet they founded 6.7 percent of our tech companies from 1995-2005, including 15.5 percent of those in Silicon Valley. And as research by Jennifer Hunt of McGill University has shown, for every one-percent increase in immigrants with university degrees, the total percent of patents filed per capita goes up by 6 percent in the U.S. We should be making it easier for foreign workers to make America their home. __________________________________________________________________ Glossing Over the Downside John Miano John Miano is a lawyer and computer programmer. This article gives the impression that no innovation comes from native-born Americans and that we are now entirely dependent upon immigrants. Actually, Intel was founded by two native-born Americans, Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore, (not Andrew Grove, as reported). The argument here is not whether we should keep highly skilled people out of America but rather how do we identify such highly skilled people and how do we avoid adverse impact on U.S. workers. The vast majority of Americans will agree that a worker who has been told to train his replacement has a legitimate gripe with the immigration law. The big problem in the article, the negative impact of the H-1B program get glossed over. What about the U.S. workers who replaced with lower-paid foreign workers at Pfizer, Chrysler, Nielson, Bank of America and other companies? What about the 21 percent violation rate that the Department of Homeland Security found in the H-1B program? When a U.S. worker gets fired and replaced by a foreign worker and is told to train his replacement to collect a severance package; the vast majority of Americans will agree that such a worker has a legitimate gripe with the immigration law. But the article doesn't deal with those objections. One particular item in the article leapt out at me. The article describes the problem of slow downloads of maps to cellphones at Google. No one at Google was able to solve the problem until Mr. Mavinkurve came up with the idea of reducing the number of colors. This standard technique, known "color quantization," has been used for years to reduce images size and speed up the drawing of images. That solution would come immediately to anyone with experience working with images. It's hard to believe that no one at Google, other than Mr. Mavinkurve, could come up with this tried and true method. This suggests that Google is ignoring the vast pool of experienced workers who have the knowledge Google needs, while it claims it must have H-1B workers.