Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2006 21:45:58 -0700 From: Norm Matloff To: Norm Matloff Subject: article featuring Sona Shah To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter Through the years, it seems that the New Jersey newspapers have given the most thoughtful coverage of the H-1B issue. The enclosed article is in general very good, but it's disappointing that the reporter didn't ask the industry lobbyist Lande to back up his statement, to be discussed below. Also, I will make some comments on the article's lead paragraph. Lande is quoted as saying this: "There are an estimated 10 million people in the domestic IT work force," said Jeff Lande, senior vice president of the Information Technology Association of America. "So maybe 30,000 of those come from H-1B. It's a drop in the bucket." Both of these numbers are way off the mark. Lande is including all kinds of people at "IT" in his 10 million figure--technicians, call center people, sales and marketing, and so on. None of these normally requires a Bachelor's degree, which is a central requirement of the H-1B visa. H-1Bs in IT are software developers, not call center workers. The IT jobs that H-1Bs do (with titles like Programmer, Software Engineer, System Analyst etc.) number about 2 million--a far cry from 10 million. The 30,000 figure is also way off. The current yearly cap on H-1B visas granted is 65,000, and it is true that something like 30,000 of those in in IT. BUT THE VISA IS GOOD FOR 6 YEARS, WITH YEARLY EXTENSIONS ALLOWABLE AFTER 6 YEARS. So the yearly cap on NEW visas doesn't tell you how many H-1Bs are in the U.S. Moreover, as the article points out, the cap was 195,000 per year for the three-year period preceding Oct. 2003, and a lot of those people are still here. And we haven't even talked about the exemptions to the cap yet. Unfortunately, USCIS does not keep track of the total number of H-1Bs in the country at any given time, but it is clear that there are several hundred thousand in IT. Then there is the L-1 visa, also very heavily used in IT. Moreover, among those 2 million jobs in IT, many are held by people who got in before the industry started its H-1B binge. Among new jobs, a substantial proportion are H-1Bs. This says it all: A Federal Reserve Bank study found that "Foreign workers accounted for half of all the new jobs created in system analysis, programming, and other computer-related occupations (Miriam Wasserman, EllisIsland.com?, Regional Review, Quarter 4 2000/Quarter 1 2001). Less striking, but still very importantly, the semiconductor industry itself told the Dept. of Commerce in 2004 that 21% of its recent engineering hires were H-1Bs. Now, let's look at the article's lead: Sona Shah didn't need flow charts or fancy diagrams to make her point during a U.S. Senate subcommittee briefing earlier this year. She just needed her cell phone. First, she dialed the number listed in a "Help Wanted" ad for a computer programmer. Then she let everyone listen to the ensuing conversation. "I said, 'Hi. I'm an American citizen. I'm looking for a job,'" Shah recalled. "They said, 'No, that job's been set aside for an H-1B employee.'" The staffers at the legislative briefing were stunned. "There were audible gasps," Shah said. Of all the articles on H-1B over the years, this one is the best, hands down. I'm sure it startled many readers. But as the article mentions later on, the congressional staffers can gasp until the cows come home, but their bosses will do NOTHING about it. Indeed, their bosses will continue to write form letters to their constituents, telling them that the H-1B program requires employers to give hiring priority to Americans, when in fact there is no such requirement. As noted in the article, the Pascrell bill would in fact impose such a requirement, but the bill has no chance of passing because Congress wants to keep receiving the industry's campaign funding. Members of Congress have publicly admitted that this is the case; see http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/StealthBill.txt Norm http://www.nj.com/printer/printer.ssf?/base/business-1/1158638951246080.xml&coll=5 H-1B is her No. 1 battle Sona Shah has leaped head-first into fight over controversial work-visa regulations Tuesday, September 19, 2006 BY PHILIP READ Times Staff Sona Shah didn't need flow charts or fancy diagrams to make her point during a U.S. Senate subcommittee briefing earlier this year. She just needed her cell phone. First, she dialed the number listed in a "Help Wanted" ad for a computer programmer. Then she let everyone listen to the ensuing conversation. "I said, 'Hi. I'm an American citizen. I'm looking for a job,'" Shah recalled. "They said, 'No, that job's been set aside for an H-1B employee.'" The staffers at the legislative briefing were stunned. "There were audible gasps," Shah said. Those are the kind of tactics the 34-year-old Montclair woman has used in her crusade to reform the H-1B visa classification, which she says U.S. employers have used to turn Indian immigrants into underpaid indentured servants -- and to deny American citizens jobs. "You have to stand up for the rights of both sets of workers as long as there's this degradation," said Shah, who was born in India but raised in the United States. "We love India. We want to see India prosper, but we don't want it to see it happen at the expense of the American middle class." Supporters of the visa program say it is people like Shah who stand in the way of progress, denying American universities, high-tech companies and others the best brains needed to keep the U.S. economy humming. H-1B is reserved for temporary workers who come into the country to fill specialty occupations at the request of a U.S. employer, with about half of the 65,000 visas issued annually going to people in the computer industry. "There are an estimated 10 million people in the domestic IT work force," said Jeff Lande, senior vice president of the Information Technology Association of America. "So maybe 30,000 of those come from H-1B. It's a drop in the bucket." Shah is not alone in her criticism, however, and has joined what has become a key battle in the nation's immigration wars over the past decade. U.S. Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. (D-8th Dist.), who has authored legislation titled "Defend the American Dream" to reform the H-1B program, sides with Shah. Pascrell's bill would require companies hiring H-1B workers to give Americans a first shot at those jobs. It would establish mandatory wage-auditing to make sure guest workers were being fairly compensated. And it would increase the fee a company pays for an H-1B visa to $4,500, from $1,500, and decrease the length of the stay the visa allows from six years to three. It would also allow workers to sue their employers for everything from sexual harassment to unsafe working conditions. The debate over highly skilled foreign workers exploded in the 1990s, with big business successfully lobbying Congress to increase the number of visas granted each year to a high of 195,000. The increases fueled the rapid growth of information technology, but the numbers crept back down after the high-tech bubble burst in 2000. The computer industry has argued it desperately needs to import workers to keep pace with other countries challenging its dominance of high-tech industries. But critics say the flood of foreign workers drives down salaries, turns foreign workers into indentured servants and puts Americans out of work. Pascrell said many of his congressional colleagues have ignored his calls for reform, and he has a hunch why. "Follow the money," Pascrell said. "They're going to wheel and deal. And who's going to get hurt? The American worker." Shah says she was one of them -- a well-educated American citizen whose job was outsourced to a foreign worker here on a visa. She said she had been hired as a "token American" data programmer at Wilco Systems, a subsidiary of Roseland-based Automatic Data Processing, or ADP. Wilco sold financial software and provided pay-as-you-go programmers to install it. Early in 1996, she said she witnessed an influx of foreign workers, largely from India, her native country. Shah left Wilco in 1998 and became the chief litigant in a lawsuit against the company on behalf of American and foreign workers alike. "A vice president at Wilco once said, 'If Immigration were to see what we've got here, they'd shut us down,'" Shah, now 34, said in congressional testimony in 2004. "He was wrong. Immigration didn't care. To this day, there has been no investigation." Wilco Systems' defense attorney in the lawsuit, filed in New York Supreme Court eight years ago, declined to respond to Shah's allegations. "At this time, the company does not wish to make any comment," said Jonathan Meyers, an attorney with Grotta, Glassman & Hoffman in Roseland. Shah, meanwhile, has taken her case to Capitol Hill, where she has become a one-woman show. She carries a hefty legal folder, its accordion-like sides fully extended to fit a stack of documents, and a collection of business cards she's collected from legislative staffers as she makes the rounds, telling her story to anyone who will listen. Shah's employment record has been spotty, at best, since she left Wilco. Despite her credentials --she has a mechanical engineering degree from Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken -- she has lost her job to corporate outsourcing more than once, she said. "It's done to line the profits of the corporate boards of these companies," Shah said. Lande, of the Information Technology Association, said her case sounds unfortunate but, in all likelihood, is unrelated to immigrant workers. "Any time a displaced worker loses a job, that is a serious occurrence," he said. "But you have to look at all the factors. Did the person keep their skill sets current? Is the company pursuing new market strategies? When you drill down, immigrants are factors in very few cases." Philip Read covers West Essex. He may be reached at pread@starledger.com or (973) 392-1851.