To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter Sun May 18 22:14:38 PDT 2014 At the invitation of Sen. Sessions' staff, I participated in a phone-in media briefing on the issues of H-1B, alleged STEM shortages, and so on. The other participants were Michael Teitelbaum, who has a long interest in STEM-related issues and whose book debunking the STEM shortage claims just came out; and Hal Salzman and Ron Hira, both of them professors of public policy who are long-time, frequently-cited researchers in the H-1B and/or shortage issues. Each of us presented for about 5 minutes. The article at http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/05/16/Scholars-Debunk-Claims-of-High-Tech-Workers-Shortage-Question-Industry-s-Free-Pass ("Scholars Debunk Claims of High-Tech Workers Shortage, Question Industry's 'Free Pass', by Tony Lee) gives a good summary. However, there are some ambiguities in the account, and also some of the things that Hal and Ron said were incorrectly attributed to me. So, here is a "translation": 1. In my comment "When you talk about solutions..." the context was solutions to the supposed STEM labor shortage. 2. Michael, ever the urbane, smooth, eloquent senior voice, probably didn't use quite the fractured language in the quote "nobody who is not..." At any rate, what he was saying was that other than industry-sponsored studies, no study of depth has ever found a general STEM or computer field-specific labor shortage. 3. The quote of me regarding "handcuffing" is accurate--and is one of the very core issues of H-1B--but I should point out, as I usually have, that the H-1Bs who are clearly handcuffed are those being sponsored for green cards. Other H-1Bs often are immobile for various reasons too, but with the green card issues it's structural. AND...keep in mind that it is the mainstream U.S. firms that sponsor for green cards, not the Indian offshoring firms. 4. The two paragraphs beginning with "He also mentioned..." and "Further, Matloff emphasized..." are misattributed to me. I believe most of the statements in those two 'graphs were made by Hal, and at least one by Ron. In other news: You may recall the AfterCollege press release last week that claimed that 80% of engineering students graduating this May/June had not gotten jobs lined up by April 15. I mentioned that I would look into this. Since that time, I've: talked to the AfterCollege person involved with their study; obtained their written report; talked to placement officers at two universities; and done an informal survey of this year's graduating seniors in Computer Science at my institution, UC Davis. I'll wait one more day to see if any more survey responses come in, and will report on it all here within the next few days. Advance summary: Although the numbers in the AfterCollege survey should not be taken literally and are probably overly grim, they do seem to reflect reality fairly well. The job market for new CS grads is apparently not very good. Norm Archived at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/SessionsBriefing.txt