Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2010 23:58:15 -0700 From: Norm Matloff To: Norm Matloff , H-1B/L-1/offshoringe-newsletter@laura.cs.ucdavis.edu Subject: Science Careers profile Enclosed below is a profile Beryl Benderly recently wrote on me in Science Careers, a publication of the American Association for Advancement of Science, run by the publishers of the prestigious Science magazine. Ms. Benderly is the author of the superb piece on postdocs that I reviewed a few days ago, archived at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/PostdocGauntlet.txt Keep in mind, for use below, that large numbers of those postdocs are foreigners holding H-1B visas. Several journalists have written profiles of me in the past, including: http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/BusinessWeekProfile.txt http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/SalonMagProfile.txt http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/CWProfile.txt http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/UCDRecognition.txt Other than the unfair and possibly libelous BusinessWeek piece, most of the profiles have been positive--especially, I'm proud to say, the one by my own university's official magazine. I typically don't know what to say in reviewing my own profile. I find writing such a review to be rather surreal. Nevertheless, I must say the Benderly piece is the most thorough and most accurate account of "where I'm coming from" on the H-1B and related issues. This I highly appreciate. I won't comment much on her piece itself. Instead, I wish to expand on the theme Benderly chose for her opening. She begins with a reference to my May 25 post, http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/FedsGiveTakeAway.txt in which I noted the sad irony of the federal government on the one hand funding a "retraining" program for unemployed IT people, to do work beneath their qualifications, while on the other hand approving the hiring of an H-1B in southern California for work those unemployed IT people could easily do. This idea of different parts of the government working at cross purposes to each other is no doubt something that especially resonates with DC dwellers like Benderly, even more than the rest of us who only visit the place. But those are not the only such contradictions, no sir, no ma'am. How about this one? The National Science Foundation is funding that retraining program for unemployed IT workers, while at the same time pouring tons of money into grants to find ways to increase college enrollment in IT! NSF's CPATH program, for instance, is aimed at increasing computer science enrollment, again at the same time NSF is funding the training of unemployed IT professionals to become high school teachers. And even sadder, the recipient of the unemployed IT worker retraining funds, Georgia Tech, is also one of the recipients of a CPATH grant. Similarly, NSF's STEP program is aimed at increasing STEM enrollment. Yet at the same time, the NSF is complicit in the shameful, abusive postdoc system Benderly wrote about (NSF funds many of the postdocs) as symbolizing the near-hopelessness the postdocs have for a career in science. And this in spite of the fact, reported by Benderly, that we already have plenty of college students studying STEM. Reminds me of today's Wall Street Journal report that preliminary U.S. government investigations of the Toyota "stuck accelerator" accidents seem to show that some of the drivers unwittingly had their feet on the accelerator instead of the brake. Well, in the NSF's case, the government has its foot BOTH on the accelerator AND on the brake. Needless to say, it goes far beyond the NSF. Many other government agencies are funding efforts to increase STEM/IT enrollment, while simultaneously the feds are approving hundreds of thousands of H-1B visas (new and renewal, the latter not counted in the cap), not to mention the foreign-student OPT work permits, L-1s and so on, all of which make it very difficult for American STEM/IT students to attain lifelong careers in those fields. This feds giveth/feds taketh away theme was poignantly illustrated in a CNN interview of students at Georgia Tech last year, probing their anxiety over the poor job market they might be facing on graduation. See my review, http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/AgeIsTheMainH1BIssue.txt One of the students interviewed was Christine Liu, who spoke of her engineer dad, an immigrant from China (emphasis added): # Currently the job market with my dad, because he's an engineer, is # hard, really hard, to stay up because we have all these Georgia Tech # students who are up with the new information and stuff like that. # THEY'RE COMING IN AND TAKING THE OLDER PEOPLE'S JOBS, so my dad # doesn't have the opportunity to get a job. He's a really smart guy, # so he's considering going back to China and starting a job there. # That should never be an option!...It makes me angry. What Ms. Liu doesn't understand is that a lot of those young people taking her dad's job are H-1Bs. As I've explained so many times, H-1B is at its core a vehicle used by employers to shun older (age 35+) American workers. Ironically, H-1B is probably the visa Mr. Liu held when he first started work in the U.S. The feds gave to his father, and are now taking away, in this case beneficiary and victim being the same person. CNN of course chose Georgia Tech as its interview site because the campus is just a couple of miles from CNN headquarters. But actually, Georgia Tech is something of a hotbed of pro-H-1B activity. Google names like Peter Freeman and Jim Foley to see some examples. My favorite is the comment Freeman, then Dean of Computing Sciences at Georgia Tech, gave to a reporter, derisively dismissing my research as "spitting into the wind"; see http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/CSEnrollmentDrop4.txt About a year and half ago, I was in Atlanta for a research conference, and while there I thought I'd drop by Georgia Tech. Beautiful campus, well funded. On a whim, I decided to seek out a dean whom I had talked to briefly on the phone some months earlier. No appointment, no prior warning, nothing; I just suddenly showed up at his office. But the guy couldn't have been nicer. He dropped everything, and spent a full hour with me, discussing lots of aspects of computer science education. I was so impressed with this man, who clearly had a heartfelt concern for students, and who by the way overcame considerable adversity himself as a youngster, ending up as a dean at a prestigious university. And yet... He mentioned that in computer science (a full school at Georgia Tech, consisting of several departments), the push was to have more and more classes taught by temps, lecturers and other types of nonregular instructors. He readily admitted that this was having a negative impact on the students, who came to Tech expecting to be taught by the Tech's full professors, many of them world-renowned experts in their fields. But, he said, what counts most is that staffing lots of courses with nonregular instructors "gives you more bang for you buck." Money is literally the bottom line in everything, and H-1B comes as a natural part of that equation. Once again, it boils down to cheap labor. See what I'm saying? Norm http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2010_07_09/caredit.a1000069 Science Careers from the journal Science Taken for Granted: The Immigration Guru By Beryl Lieff Benderly July 09, 2010 "It boils down to cheap, compliant labor." -- Norman Matloff In connection with President Barack Obama's push for reform of immigration laws, two recent articles deserve attention. The first describes Operation Reboot, a $2.5 million, federally funded program to train middle-aged, out-of-work computer professionals for jobs as high school computer teachers. The second recounts the hiring of Yuying Lu, a recent alumna of California State University, Long Beach, for a computer job with a California company on an H-1B visa, the temporary work permit ostensibly intended to relieve shortages of technical personnel. A Chinese national who arrived in the United States in 2007, Lu earned a master's degree in a subject called educational technology. "So, in essence one branch of the federal government is funding unemployed ITers to 'retrain' for something well beneath their qualifications, while another federal agency is approving work permits for foreign students [for jobs] that unemployed Americans could easily do," writes the man to whom I owe my knowledge of this piquant contrast, computer science professor Norman Matloff of the University of California, Davis. He continues, "Of course, the fact that the Georgia Tech [Georgia Institute of Technology] program is funded by the NSF [National Science Foundation], which has been a promoter of H-1B, makes it all the more ironic." Based on his analysis of the Long Beach curriculum, Matloff judges the "computer content" of Lu's degree to be "quite shallow. ... It ought to be obvious that the 'former' IT professionals in the Georgia Tech program, or their counterparts in the southern California area, could easily be doing that job that Lu was hired for." Matloff's criticism, let me hasten to note, is of national policies and not of Lu, who has only taken advantage of opportunities legally available to her. "The H-1B does not require employers to give hiring priority to Americans," Matloff continues. Although "the spirit of the program is to fill shortages, ... I don't think there is a shortage here." Norm Matloff (Courtesy of Norman Matloff) (Courtesy of Norman Matloff) Norm Matloff Nor, adds Matloff in a recent interview with Science Careers, does any discernible shortage of scientists exist on American university campuses, where some of the scientists working as postdocs were admitted to the United States on H-1Bs. Although they, therefore, do no affect all foreign postdocs, the provisions of the H-1B nonetheless permit abuses. As in industry, the employer holds the visas, and the workers are not free to seek other positions. Although many differences distinguish IT employees from postdoc researchers, Matloff sees an overriding similarity. "It's exactly the same issue," he says. "It boils down to cheap, compliant labor." Sharp eye, straight talk This combination of straight talk and expert knowledge is probably familiar to readers who see the e-mail newsletter on immigration and employment that Matloff sends out at irregular intervals, from which I quoted above. His newsletter essays often present detailed analyses of the statistical claims or methodological bases of statements, often published in (purportedly) scientific reports and articles. Also familiar to those readers will be his views on the H-1B, about which he has made himself something of a national expert, a determined gadfly, and an interview subject for media outlets including CNN, NPR, PBS, and others. His interest grew out of the experiences of his computer students. (To receive the newsletter, e-mail a request to matloff@cs.ucdavis.edu.) Critics of immigration policies often find themselves accused of hostility to immigrants, a charge that fits Matloff poorly. The self-described offspring of "one-and-a-half immigrants" -- his American-born mother grew up in an immigrant community -- he is married to a U.S. citizen who is originally from China. A largely self-taught speaker of Mandarin and Cantonese, Matloff is something of a polymath. With a Ph.D. in mathematics and as a former professor of statistics at the university where he now holds a full professorship in computer science, he is one of very few technology experts to have contributed a long, invited scholarly article to a law journal published by a leading law school. His "On the Need for Reform of the H-1B Nonimmigrant Work Visa in Computer-Related Occupations", published in the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, is considered required reading by skeptics of the tech industry's claims of worker shortages. His fans are drawn heavily from scientifically and technically trained people dissatisfied with existing job opportunities, especially IT professionals unable to find work in their desired field. What bothers Matloff is not immigration or national origin, but waste, unfairness, and mendacity -- all major elements, he believes, of today's technical and scientific labor markets. He denies the significance of shortages or educational standards or any of the other supposed problems cited by "extremely slick" H-1B proponents, and points out ways that visas save employers money. "Type I," he says, "is where an H-1B of the same qualifications as an American gets paid less than an American. ... That's not illegal [because] there are so many loopholes [in the law]. Type II is hiring the younger H-1B instead of the older American. That's really the same thing [because in general], younger people are cheaper in salary; they're cheaper in benefits. That's really what it boils down to." In academe, the cost-saving method is even more straightforward. Postdocs receive what universities term training wages rather than faculty-worthy salaries, and large numbers admitted on H-1Bs (and other visas) make possible the depressed pay scale. In his law review article, Matloff documents some of the effects of these techniques, including what he calls the "striking" attrition rate among computer science graduates, many fewer of whom, he writes, are working in their degree field 15 or 20 years after graduation than are people in other technical specialties. At a point when they are only in their early 40s, less than one-fifth of computer science graduates are still working in the field -- in contrast, for example, to almost 60% of civil engineering graduates still working as civil engineers. Such a situation, Matloff writes, quoting a National Research Council report, "is consistent with actions taken by employers motivated by the reduction of labor costs. For example, an employer that terminated more experienced (hence older), higher-salaried workers and hired less experienced (hence younger), lower paid workers would not necessarily be violating the statutes prohibiting age discrimination. ... It was a waste of education and experience." Solutions? For these and other reasons, many of them discussed previously in this space, the H-1B needs to be reformed. Matloff's law-journal article proposes several changes, including requiring employers wanting to hire H-1Bs to attest that they have not "laid off Americans in the same ... job category within the past 6 months ... and will not lay off Americans in the same ... job category within the next 6 months." Furthermore, "the wage paid ... must be at least equal to the median national wage for the given job category, according to the government ... data." The wage, in other words, must not be lower than what a person of similar skills and qualification would receive on the open job market. All potential H-1B hiring, furthermore, would have to be done through "a public, Web-based process" with a clear and declared preference required for Americans who have the minimum qualifications to become "reasonably productive in the use of that skill within a month, via on-the-job learning." Americans could not be rejected as "overqualified." Short of Congress enacting his suggestions in full, he favors passage of the Durbin-Grassley Bill, though with the proviso that only "certain parts are good," such as the expansion of rules against layoffs by employers who hire H-1Bs. The best part of Durbin-Grassley, Matloff says, would "clean up the definition of prevailing wage," eliminating loopholes that permit "the legal prevailing wage [to be] well short of the market rate." "Many supporters of reform ... have the wrong idea that the employers that are underpaying the H-1Bs must be breaking the law," he continues. This view plays "right into the hands of industry, because industry loves to hear these news stories that say, 'People must be breaking the law. You need better enforcement.' But they're not breaking the law" because of the many abuses permitted by loopholes. The universal bottom line The desire for cheap, compliant labor is hardly limited to American tech companies or universities, Matloff notes. Last month, a trip to China that included family visits and meetings with professional colleagues provided a number of chances to discuss employment issues. Thanks to Chinese government policies in recent years, Matloff says, "Suddenly, there are a lot of college graduates. This used to be your ticket to the elite. Now they're not getting jobs. There's a surplus of people." A relative who is an engineer with a "very nice job" and a "gorgeous condo" in a provincial city, Matloff says, commented on the current "terrible" job market for new college graduates. "My wife said that of course it must be good for engineers," Matloff reports, "and he was just puzzled that we would just say that." Lunch with a faculty member at a prestigious Chinese university produced another surprise. "I was saying to our host [that] I think the Chinese system is better because [in China graduate] students are paid by the university; they're not paid from grants" as in the United States. "Paying from grants is kind of a corrupting influence. And he said, no, he really prefers the American way. ... He's not paying his students," so he can't determine how long they stay. When the university declares their research finished, he complained, the students leave. "You see," Matloff concludes, "it goes back to compliant labor." If, as President Obama hopes, the nation does undertake a serious overhaul of immigration law, the H-1B is high on the list of problems that need attention. Beryl Lieff Benderly writes from Washington, D.C.