To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter Tue Apr 2 21:35:02 PDT 2013 We're seeing a flurry of articles reporting that yesterday was the opening of "H-1B season," with large numbers of employers vying for a limited number of visas. I'll focus here on one such piece, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324883604578396680112980530.html and will highlight this article's "H-1B poster child," Amrita Mahale. The industry's PR people and allies don't have a good track record for "poster kids." Closer scrutiny typically shows that those examples are actually arguments why H-1B and other foreign tech worker programs should be reduced in scope, not expanded. I'll review a few past such cases, and then discuss Ms. Mahale. 1. We had one example just a few days ago, Cristin Martinez-Mortolo, http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/SendHub.txt She's doing an ordinary job, with an ordinary background. She sends out messages to customers of the type "You have 500 free minutes." Lots of U.S. citizens and permanent residents could do this work. 2. Vivek Wadha cited one, Girija Subramaniam, http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/TexasInstruments.txt Again, ordinary background, and most interestingly, ordinary work--a test engineer. You can't find any type of engineering work more ordinary than that, no special talents needed. Lots of underemployed American engineers would love to do that work. AND...Vivek, who really plays up the theme that the green card wait is too long, resulting in H-1Bs giving up and going home or elsewhere, used Ms. Subramaniam as an example, saying, "Frustrated, she has applied for fast-track Canadian permanent residency and expects to move north of the border by the end of the year." Well, guess what--she's still here, working at Nomad Digital in the DC area, according to her LinkedIn page. 3. YuYing Yu, http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/FedsGiveTakeAway.txt Master's degree in educational technology, working for a lighting firm. Details are sketchy, but it certainly looks like she too has a job that lots of Americans could do. 4. Prasad Kothari, http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/ObamaSpeech.txt Kothari himself was not highlighted, but his boss, Prachee Devadas, was praised in a speech by President Obama, as a model immigrant/entrepreneur. A little detective work on my part revealed that Mr. Kothari also has an ordinary background, and was doing ordinary data analysis work for Ms. Devadas, again the kind of work tons of Americans could do. I have no doubt that the above are doing a good job, but again, many Americans could do their jobs. NONE of these fits the "skills shortage, genius" model that the industry likes to present for the H-1B program. Now to Ms. Mahale. I've always said that we should welcome the world's genuine best and brightest, and arguably Mahale fits that deascription, as a gold medal winner in aero engineering at IIT, a campus in India's most prestigious system of engineering schools. HOWEVER... Hers is a job that a friend of mine, a naturalized U.S. citizen, is well qualified for. He has an MBA from one of the top 5 business schools in the nation, and has done customer acquisition work for several household-name firms. It's been a while since I've talked to him, but I'm fairly sure this is the kind of position he'd be highly interested in (the prospect of moving back to California would make the idea even more interesting to him). Second, let's talk about Mahale's alleged "plight," not sure that she'll get a visa. Her current status is a little murky, http://www.linkedin.com/pub/amrita-mahale/7/449/147 MS finished in 2009, then worked at Google until 2011, then at Pocket Gems, her current employer, ever since. She may be applying for a renewal, after the initial three-year visa period. But let's put that aside and focus on the main point: She's hoping to "win the lottery," by getting an H-1B visa in this brief "H-1B season" that began yesterday. I've looked through the LCA records for Pocket Gems, and it's not clear which of them, if any, is for Mahale. But it does appear that the firm may be paying its foreign workers well, as a number of the wages are well above the legally-required prevailing wage. Let's assume that to be the case, which then has two very important implications: 1. News reports indicate that H-1B may be very much oversubscribed this year. The USCIS has handled that in past via a random lottery. But various organizations have proposed that this be done through an auction rather than a lottery. By "auction," I mean that the employers offering the higher salaries get priority for the visas. This makes great sense, which is why USCIS has chosen NOT to go this route in the past. If they were to do so this year, Mahale, working for a firm that seems to pay well, should have no trouble getting a visa for her. 2. I once again return to the Grassley/Brown bill, which would set the prevailing wage at the median overall for an occupation, without breaking down into experience levels. (I must stress, as usual, that the lack of experience levels is crucial.) Again, I believe that under this bill, Mahale would easily qualify. Don't points 1 and 2 above make sense? The ostensible reason why employers hire H-1Bs is that they are special, extraordinary people in some way or ways. For those that this description genuinely applies to, the above two approaches should easily fill the bill. So, why not take such common sense approaches? One more thing on Mahale: Here's a tweet she posted while she was at Google: https://twitter.com/amritamahale/status/14001121832 ************************ Amrita Mahale Amrita Mahale @amritamahale If you have 1-3 years experience in consulting and would like to be a part of my strategy team at Google, drop me a line. http://goo.gl/htla ************************ Back to the age issue once again! Many people who are interested in the H-1B issue fail to pay proper attention to this. Employers say they are "desperate" to hire, but in actuality they only want new or recent college graduates--NCGs or RCGs, in Intel's acronym system. When they run out of American NCGs and RCGs, they turn to the foreign NCGs and RCGs--in order to avoid hiring the older (35+) Americans. As I've mentioned before, this is why the notion with great currency on Capitol Hill of "STEM visas," given to new foreign graduates, is so wrong. Norm Archived at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/PosterKids.txt