Date: Fri, 20 Mar 2009 00:18:31 -0700 From: Norm Matloff To: Norm Matloff Subject: "the best and the brightest" again To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter One of the industry lobbyists' favorite lines is that the H-1Bs are "the best and the brightest" from around the world. Although I do support the immigration of top talents, only a small percentage of H-1Bs are in that league. I've shown this in great detail; see http://www.cis.org/articles/2008/back508.html http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/MichJLawReform.pdf But the lobbyists keep pushing it, hence my current posting. Here I'll give you a look at some other aspects. Let's start with Dan Siciliano, a lecturer in Stanford University's law school. He made the following comments to the Wall Street Journal, June 30, 2006, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB115135331760891063 # Economists worry about another place owning the very next big thing" -- # the next groundbreaking technology, If the heart and mind of the next # great thing emerges somewhere else because the talent is there, then we # will be hurt...[an increase in the H-1B cap is needed] to avoid # irreversible damage to the economy. So, what is Siciliano's background for making such strong claims about the innovative quality of the H-1Bs? Has he done research on H-1Bs, innovation and so on? Well, no. Here are his "qualifications": Siciliano was previously an immigration lawyer with Bacon and Dear, one of the most prominent immigration law firms in the nation (www.sinoedu.com/stanford-cg05.htm); Sun Microsystems retained Roxanne Bacon when Sun engineer Guy Santiglia sued Sun after they laid him off while keeping H-1Bs. Siciliano also is CEO of LawLogix, a firm that develops software systems for immigration lawyers. To top it off, Siciliano is on the Board of Trustees of, and is a research fellow at, the American Immigration Law Foundation, the research arm of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. (Note by the way that the vice chair of that board is Kirsten Schlenger, with whom I participated in a TV debate on H-1B; the video is at http://www.democraticclub-scc.org/StraightTalk/H-1Bvisas.wmv) So Siciliano has a vested interest in H-1B, to put it mildly. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to mention these things when he talks to the press. In the above WSJ article, for instance, he was described as "a Stanford economist." When he was on CNBC on March 6, he was asked his views "as an educator," and though his affiliation with the Immigration Policy Center was mentioned, there was no mention of IPC's connection to AILA/AILF, so IPC seemed neutral to viewers. On that CNBC show, Siciliano referred to my CIS study, the one at the www.cis.org Web link above, and grossly (though not necessarily deliberately) misinterpreted my findings. Here is what happened: As one of several approaches I took to assessing the industry lobbyists' claim that the H-1Bs are "the best and the brightest," I compared actual salary to legal prevailing wage. If the H-1Bs were indeed outstanding talents, they would be paid well above the legal prevailing wage. Thus I calculated the ratio of actual wage to prevailing wage, calling it the Talent Measure (TM). As I suspected, the TM value was just a hair above 1.0 for the industry as a whole, and for almost all prominent tech firms. Microsoft was an exception, with TM equal to 1.19. Siciliano, who was debating CIS Fellow John Miano on the CNBC segment, tried to refute Miano's claim that H-1Bs are underpaid, saying "CIS' own study found that Microsoft pays 19% above prevailing wage." This of course ignored the fact that Microsoft's 1.19 figure was very unusual, and much more importantly, it ignored the disclaimer in my study concerning prevailing wage: # Typically the employer will cite government data as the source. The # legal definition of prevailing wage in both the law and regulations # contains major loopholes (see my previous Backgrounder mentioned above), # but the industry lobbyists insist that the foreign workers are not # underpaid. Since here the focus is on another industry claim, that the # foreign workers are of outstanding talent, for the purpose of the # present analysis, it will be assumed that the prevailing wage is the # real market wage. In other words, to address the industry claim that the H-1Bs are "the best and the brightest," my approach was to take at face value the industry's claim that legal prevailing wage is the real market wage, and then investigate what they are paying the H-1Bs relative to prevailing wage. If the answer is that they are paying no higher than legal prevailing wage, one must conclude that one of their two claims is wrong--either they are underpaying the H-1Bs or the H-1Bs are not outstanding talents. The TM figures should be used only to assess the "best/brightest" claims (and even then only if the TM values are low), not to determine whether these firms are paying their foreign workers market wages. Since I and others have found a 15-30% difference between the prevailing wage and real market wage, that 1.19 figure for Microsoft could in fact be as low as 0.90. It all depends on how much disparity there is between legal prevailing wage and real market wage in the state of Washington. Siciliano ignored all this, or didn't read the study he was citing in the first place. By the way, I normally don't highlight violations of immigration law, because most of the abuse is fully legal due to outrageous loopholes. The industry lobbyists actually like attention drawn to the few cases of violations that the Dept. of Labor finds, because that distracts attention from the core H-1B problem, which is the loopholes. Nevertheless, it should be mentioned that Siciliano's firm, LawLogix, was debarred for three years by the Dept. of Labor; see http://www.hammondlawfirm.com/monthly/business-immigration-monthly-july-2008.htm http://blogs.ilw.com/gregsiskind/2008/07/us-labor-depart.html Now let's turn to the recent Washington Post op-ed by Vivek Wadhwa, enclosed below. Unlike Siciliano, Wadhwa has actually done research on H-1B and related topics, and though I've found fault with some of his work, he has done some very good studies. Yet as I will show below, Wadhwa has chosen some odd poster children for his own claim that we are losing "the best and the brightest," ostensibly because they are weary of the long wait for green cards. The claim is unfounded in the first place. The employer-sponsored green card categories used by the tech industry consist of three levels, EB-1, EB-2 and EB-3, in order from most to least talented. The fact is that there have been long waits in recent years only for EB-3, which is for ordinary workers of no special talents. See http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/WadhwaIII.txt Wadhwa's examples here don't support his "best and brightest" assertion. His first, Sandeep Nijsure, attended mediocre universities in India and the U.S. (Mumbai University and the University of North Texas; see http://hpc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/17/4/431 for the Mumbai cite). Though I have no doubt that Nijsure is a good, solid engineer and I dislike judging someone by the schools they attended, his schools certainly are no indication that Nijsure plays in the "best and brightest" league. Another example Wadhwa offers us is Girija Subramaniam, a test engineer at Texas Instruments. Come on, Vivek--a test engineer???? This is no job for geniuses. So this example doesn't work either. His third example, Meijie Tang, may be different. She's mentioned a lot in an NYT article http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/magazine/01China.t.html and she seems to be an interesting person. After acing a bunch of China's standardized tests she gained some fame in that country before she came to the U.S. for study. I'm not a fan of those tests, but maybe she does qualify as "the best and the brightest" in some senses. On the other hand, it's not in the technology sense; Tang is an econ major, according to Wadhwa. So, the Best and Brightest count is two no's and one maybe. Is that the best Wadhwa could come up with? Again, I strongly support facilitating the immigration of outstanding talents, but I don't regard these as the type I have in mind. Before I go on, I'd like to point out that many U.S. native "best and brightest" are being displaced. Gene Nelson won a National Science Fair award when he was in high school, which arguably makes his case somewhat similar to Tang's. He later earned a PhD in biophysics, but once he got older (remember, even 35 is "old") the jobs started drying up for him--and taken by H-1Bs. I've mentioned before my former student, whose innovative engineering work at a major household-name firm got him a mention in the Wall Street Journal, arguably also of best-and-brightest quality. He was laid off by that same firm a few years ago, around age 36, even though they still hire H-1Bs. After working only sporadically in engineering for several years, he finally bit the bullet and switched to another profession. I've got several readers of this e-newsletter with degrees from MIT who have found it hard to get tech work too. Presumably MIT only admits the best and brightest, right? A man who earned his PhD in computer security in my department about 10 years ago is out of work. He was a top student academically, had prior industry experience before coming back to grad school, and is personable and articulate. He did fine the first few years after finishing his PhD, but now has been unemployed for almost a year. He's willing to take any tech job, and I'm sure he can do many jobs occupied by H-1Bs better than they can. And let's not forget Douglas Prasher, the almost-Nobel laureate who's working as a van driver for a Toyota dealer. He could do a lot of those research jobs in biotech that are filled by H-1Bs. So H-1B is crowding out many of our own best and brightest, and causing many of the best and brightest college students to avoid tech in the first place. (Some of you may have seen news articles the last couple of days showing that computer science enrollment is finally up somewhat this year. What they don't tell you is that in many cases this was accomplished by lowering the bar for admission.) As I have shown in the studies cited at the outset of this posting, the vast majority of H-1Bs are NOT in the best-and-brightest league. On the contrary, many are rote-memory trained and quite lacking in the insight needed to develop a good product. Here is an incident reported to me recently by a reader of this e-newsletter (posted with his permission): # In 2003, I was an employee (U.S. citizen) at a major retail firm's IT # shop. A team of Indians from Covansys was developing a Java-based # stores POS application. The application was running painfully slow - 6 # minutes to process a single transaction. The Indians' performance # recommendation was to buy a larger, faster server. Management called me # in to give performance tips. I looked at the code. The Java # application was creating a String object, then modifying it 100,000 # times. As any Java programmer and most Java students should know, # Strings are immutable. Each time a String is modified, a new object is # created. After modifying a String 100,000 times, this application had # 100,001 String objects consuming memory, which naturally crippled # performance. I asked the Indian guys why they didn't use StringBuffer # instead of String. StringBuffers are mutable and only create one # object, i.e., after modifying a StringBuffer 100,000 times, you still # have only have one object in memory, not 100,001. The fewer objects # clogging memory, the faster everything will run. That one quick change # improved the POS application's performance by 60-fold, saving the cost # of buying a faster, bigger server. While it's quite desirable to bring in the best and the brightest, if H-1B were limited to that, as it was (at least on paper) for the old H-1 statute, a yearly cap of 10 or 20 thousand would be plenty. Norm http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/06/AR2009030601926.html They're Taking Their Brains and Going Home By Vivek Wadhwa Sunday, March 8, 2009; Page B02 Seven years ago, Sandeep Nijsure left his home in Mumbai to study computer science at the University of North Texas. Master's degree in hand, he went to work for Microsoft. He valued his education and enjoyed the job, but he worried about his aging parents. He missed watching cricket, celebrating Hindu festivals and following the twists of Indian politics. His wife was homesick, too, and her visa didn't allow her to work. Not long ago, Sandeep would have faced a tough choice: either go home and give up opportunities for wealth and U.S. citizenship, or stay and bide his time until his application for a green card goes through. But last year, Sandeep returned to India and landed a software development position with Amazon.com in Hyderabad. He and his wife live a few blocks from their families in a spacious, air-conditioned house. No longer at the mercy of the American employer sponsoring his visa, Sandeep can more easily determine the course of his career. "We are very happy with our move," he told me in an e-mail. The United States has always been the country to which the world's best and brightest -- people like Sandeep -- have flocked in pursuit of education and to seek their fortunes. Over the past four decades, India and China suffered a major "brain drain" as tens of thousands of talented people made their way here, dreaming the American dream. But burgeoning new economies abroad and flagging prospects in the United States have changed everything. And as opportunities pull immigrants home, the lumbering U.S. immigration bureaucracy helps push them away. When I started teaching at Duke University in 2005, almost all the international students graduating from our Master of Engineering Management program said that they planned to stay in the United States for at least a few years. In the class of 2009, most of our 80 international students are buying one-way tickets home. It's the same at Harvard. Senior economics major Meijie Tang, from China, isn't even bothering to look for a job in the United States. After hearing from other students that it's "impossible" to get an H-1B visa -- the kind given to highly-skilled workers in fields such as engineering and science -- she teamed up with a classmate to start a technology company in Shanghai. Investors in China offered to put up millions even before 23-year-old Meijie and her 21-year-old colleague completed their business plan. When smart young foreigners leave these shores, they take with them the seeds of tomorrow's innovation. Almost 25 percent of all international patent applications filed from the United States in 2006 named foreign nationals as inventors. Immigrants founded a quarter of all U.S. engineering and technology companies started between 1995 and 2005, including half of those in Silicon Valley. In 2005 alone, immigrants' businesses generated $52 billion in sales and employed 450,000 workers. Yet rather than welcome these entrepreneurs, the U.S. government is confining many of them to a painful purgatory. As of Sept. 30, 2006, more than a million people were waiting for the 120,000 permanent-resident visas granted each year to skilled workers and their family members. No nation may claim more than 7 percent, so years may pass before immigrants from populous countries such as India and China are even considered. Like many Indians, Girija Subramaniam is fed up. After earning a master's in electrical engineering from the University of Virginia in 1998, she joined Texas Instruments as a test engineer. She wanted to stay in the United States, applied for permanent residency in 2002 and has been trapped in immigration limbo ever since. If she so much as accepts a promotion or, heaven forbid, starts her own company, she will lose her place in line. Frustrated, she has applied for fast-track Canadian permanent residency and expects to move north of the border by the end of the year. For the Kaufmann Foundation, I recently surveyed 1,200 Indians and Chinese who worked or studied in the United States and then returned home. Most were in their 30s, and 80 percent held master's degrees or doctorates in management, technology or science -- precisely the kind of people who could make the greatest contribution to the U.S. economy. A sizable number said that they had advanced significantly in their careers since leaving the United States. They were more optimistic about opportunities for entrepreneurship, and more than half planned to start their own businesses, if they had not done so already. Only a quarter said that they were likely to return to the United States. Why does all this matter? Because just as the United States has relied on foreigners to underwrite its deficit, it has also depended on smart immigrants to staff its laboratories, engineering design studios and tech firms. An analysis of the 2000 Census showed that although immigrants accounted for only 12 percent of the U.S. workforce, they made up 47 percent of all scientists and engineers with doctorates. What's more, 67 percent of all those who entered the fields of science and engineering between 1995 and 2006 were immigrants. What will happen to America's competitive edge when these people go home? Immigrants who leave the United States will launch companies, file patents and fill the intellectual coffers of other countries. Their talents will benefit nations such as India, China and Canada, not the United States. America's loss will be the world's gain.