Some Quotes Regarding H-1B and Related Issues

Norm Matloff
University of California, Davis
See bio here

While the ills of H-1B work visa can be complex, various quotes often tell the story quite succinctly -- especially quotes of supporters of the program themselves. Below are a few such quotes, broken down by category.

Issue categories:

Widespread LEGAL abuse of foreign tech worker programs:

Abuse of H-1B and green cards -- including paying below-market wages and "handcuffing" workers to keep them from going to another employer -- is widespread in all segments of the industry, INCLUDING the big mainstream U.S. firms, NOT just in the Indian outsourcing firms. Almost all the abuse is 100% legal, due to loopholes.

Again, note that the big mainstream firms ARE involved in the abuse. See references to Oracle, Texas Instruments, Bayer, Marconi and Westinghouse, Fed Ex, Cisco etc. below.

• When an Oracle manager objected to a low salary his superior ordered him to offer a worker from India, the superior said it was "good money for an Indian," according to a lawsuit filed in 2014 by former Oracle manager Ian Spandow.
• "I know from my experience as a tech CEO that H-1Bs are cheaper than domestic hires. Technically, these workers are supposed to be paid a 'prevailing wage,' but this mechanism is riddled with loopholes" -- Vivek Wadhwa, prominent supporter of expanding foreign worker programs (his two firms were mainstream, not in the outsourcing business)
• "[Rep. Zoe] Lofgren said that the average wage for computer systems analysts in her district is $92,000, but the U.S. government prevailing wage rate for H-1B workers in the same job currently stands at $52,000, or $40,000 less. 'Small wonder there's a problem here,' said Lofgren. 'We can't have people coming in and undercutting the American educated workforce'" -- Computerworld, March 31, 2011
• "Employers know they have these workers over a barrel. They aren't going to demand a raise during those six years [of green card sponsorship], even if they deserve it, and they aren't going to move on to another company, because they know doing those things will jeopardize their chances of getting their green cards in time" -- Professor Sankar Mukhopadhyay, 2012 (note: the Indian outsourcing firms rarely sponsor their foreign workers for green cards, so this study refers to mainstream firms)
• "By far the most important advantage of [green card sponsorship] is the fact that the employee is tied to a particular position with one company and must remain with the company in most cases for more than four years" -- immigration lawyer David Swaim (whose online biography notes that he "created the immigration procedures at dozens of companies such as Texas Instruments"), 2012
• "Roger Coker, TI's director of staffing for the United States, says the company is using every trick in the book to fight labor cost creep...The company is also fighting in Washington to allow more foreign engineers and designers to take jobs in the United States on temporary H-1B visas..." -- US News and World Report, August 30, 1999
• "This is legal human rights violation in America...You [as an H-1B] are an indentured servant, a modern-day slave..."--Murali Devarakonda, a member of the Board of Directors of the Immigrant Support Network, an H-1B organization, Straight Talk (weekly television program produced by Santa Clara County Democratic Club), June 10, 2000
• "And our goal is clearly, not to find a qualified and interested U.S. worker...We are complying with the law fully, but ah, our objective is to get this person a green card...So certainly we are not going to try to find a place [at which to advertise the job] where the applicants are the most numerous. We're going to try to find a place where we can comply with the law, and hoping, and likely, not to find qualified and interested worker applicants" -- Larry Leibowitz, partner in prominent immigration law firm Cohen and Grigsby, with mainstream clients such as Bayer, Marconi and Westinghouse, Fed Ex; promotional video, 2007, discussing the green card process
• "Employers who favor aliens have an arsenal of legal means to reject all U.S. workers who apply" -- prominent immigration attorney Joel Stewart, "Legal Rejection of U.S. Workers," Immigration Daily, April 24, 2000, discussing the employer-sponsored green card process
• "Some employers said that they hired H-1B workers in part because these workers would often accept lower salaries than similarly qualified U.S. workers; however, these employers said they never paid H-1B workers less than the required wage -- GAO, 2003; note the italicized portion (emphasis added), illustrating that the abuse is due to loopholes, not violations of the law
• "...based on interviews with some H-1B employers, Salzman reported that H-1B workers in jobs requiring lower levels of IT skill received lower wages, less senior job titles, smaller signing bonuses, and smaller pay and compensation increases than would be typical for the work they actually did" -- congressionally commissioned NRC report, 2001 (p.175); the survey including a wide range of employers, including mainstream household-name firms (personal communication, H. Salzman)
• "It is the committee's judgment that the current size of the H-1B workforce relative to the overall Category 1 IT workforce is large enough to exert a nonnegligible moderating force that keeps wages from rising as fast as might be expected in a tight labor market" -- congressionally commissioned NRC report, 2001
• "There is no doubt that the [H-1B] program is a benefit to their employers, enabling them to get workers at a lower wage, and to that extent, it is a subsidy" -- Nobel economist Milton Friedman
• "Allowing more skilled workers into the country would bring down the salaries of top earners in the United States, easing tensions over the mounting wage gap, Greenspan said" -- Bloomberg News, March 14, 2007, quoting Fed Chair Alan Greenspan; the median wage for software engineers at the time was $83,130
• "The department has information indicating that in at least some cases [Cisco] improperly instructed clients who filed permanent labor certification applications to contact their attorney before hiring apparently qualified U.S. workers."--Department of Justice finding in an audit of computer network giant Cisco Systems, triggered when an American worker responded to a job ad, only to find that the contact was an immigration attorney's office.

Lack of a STEM labor shortage:

No study, other than ones sponsored by the industry, has ever shown a tech labor shortage. The congressionally-commissioned NRC study failed to find one, as did a later study by the Dept. of Commerce. Note carefully that unemployment rates are not very useful, due to workers being forced to leave the field when work becomes hard to find; the former engineer now working at Radio Shack counts in the data as employed. See also the quotes below on STEM grad study and careers.

• "It is extraordinarily unlikely for a severe shortage to happen in a way that doesn't result in very large wage increases" -- Kirk Doran, University of Notre Dame economist, commenting on the minuscule rate at which software developer wages are rising
• "Analysis of the flow of students up through the S&E pipeline, when it reaches the labor market, suggests the education system produces qualified graduates far in excess of demand...each year there are more than three times as many S&E four-year college graduates as S&E job openings" -- Into the Eye of the Storm: Assessing the Evidence on Science and Engineering Education, Quality, and Workforce Demand, Urban Institute, 2007
• Exchange between Darla Whitaker, Texas Instruments VP for Human Resources, and House Immigration Subcommittee, hearing on October 5, 2011, Whitaker admitting that there are plenty of Americans earning engineering degrees at the bachelor's level, quite contrary to the industry lobbyists' claim that "Johnny doesn't want to do engineering":

  Ms. Whitaker: Well, one of our biggest challenges isn't so much that kids don't go into engineering. But where we have our challenge, which we are talking about today is really in our Ph.D.s and our masters. We have bachelor's degree graduates in electrical engineering, a majority American. That is who we hire. As I said earlier, we don't sponsor green cards, or sponsor H1Bs for foreign students who have just received bachelor's, because we don't have to. It is getting them to go to that next level. It is the Ph.D. and the master's degree area that we have a challenge. More than 50 percent of these students are foreign nationals.

  Rep. Poe: So why don't they want to go to the next level?...

  Ms. Whitaker: I don't really know the exact reason why they don't ...I would assume it is because they want to get out and go get a job versus staying in and getting the next degree.

  Employer sponsorship of employees for part-time Master's degree study, formerly common in the tech industry, is now rare.
• "Our review and analysis of the best available evidence indicates that the supply of STEM-potential and STEM-educated students has remained strong and appears to be quite responsive to standard economic signals...The immigration debate is complicated and polarizing, but the implications of the data for enacting high-skill guestworker policy are clear: Immigration policies that facilitate large flows of guestworkers will supply labor at wages that are too low to induce significant increases in supply from the domestic workforce"--Guestworkers in the High-Skill U.S. Labor Market, EPI, 2013
• "Simply producing more engineers and scientists may not be the answer because the labor market for those workers will simply reflect lower wages or, perhaps, greater unemployment for those workers" -- Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, testimony to Congress

Adverse impacts on older (age 35+) U.S. workers:

One of the major attractions to employers of the H-1B work visa is that it enables them to avoid hiring older (age 35+) American workers, the latter being more exensive not only in salary but also in benefits. Employers say they are "desperate" to hire, but they mean hiring YOUNG people, especially new graduates. Most of the H-1Bs are young, so the companies hire them instead of older Americans.

• "Several researchers and labor advocates have stated that technology companies seek to replace older, American IT workers with cheaper, younger workers that are freshly supplied through the H-1B program in order to lower costs..." -- GAO, 2011
• Percentage of computer-related H-1Bs under age 35: 78% (GAO, 2011)
• "The half life of an engineer, hardware or software, is only a few years" -- former Intel CEO/Chairman Craig Barrett
• "Mukund Mohan, CEO of Microsoft's startup accelerator programme in India, says the shelf life of certain kinds of developers has shrunk to less than a year. 'My daughter developed an app for iPhone 4. Today, she is redeveloping the app to make it smarter for iPhone 5. Five years ago, developers were talking Symbian (the Nokia operating system). Today, it's not very relevant. You have to look at Android or iOS or may be even Windows 8 to stay relevant'" -- "What's the Shelf Life of a Techie? Just 15 Years," Economic Times (Indian press), November 17, 2012
• "[Microsoft] Senior Vice-President and Chief Technical Officer David Vaskevitch...acknowledges that the vast majority of Microsoft hires are young, but that is because older workers tend to go into more senior jobs and there are fewer of those positions to begin with" -- Vivek Wadhwa, Businessweek, January 15, 2008 (emphasis added)
• "...[an] engineer earning over $100,000 a year...was a great deal more expensive to keep than a newcomer only a few years out of college...[Intel began to talk of] bumping, the practice, suggested to Intel by management consultants who feared that the company was aging too fast, of easing older employees out of the company..." -- Inside Intel, by Tim Jackson; an Intel job posted in 2013 at http://http://www.linkedin.com/jobs?viewJob=&jobId=4750771&srchIndex=3 (taken down after I wrote about it), overtly restricts to new or recent college graduates
• "New Grads, Masters & PhDs Production Engineer, University," "Data Engineer, Data Warehouse (New Grad)" -- job titles posted by Facebook, 2013 at www.facebook.com/careers/university
• "Software Engineer, New Grad 2013 - North America...Candidates graduating from December 2012 to August 2013 are encouraged to apply" -- Google job posting, http://www.google.com/jobs/students/tech/fulltime/uscanada/software-engineer-new-grad-2013-north-america.html
• "We're recruiting not just in the U.S., but we`re recruiting abroad, as well at top universities. We`re going out of the state of California, which was something I haven`t seen startups do traditionally. We're going for younger engineers, so we're recruiting a lot out of the master`s program, a lot out of the Ph.D. program" -- Andrew Feldman, CEO, Seamicro, Nightly Business Report, PBS, September 6, 2011 (emphasis added)
• "If you want to build for the future you're going to have to hire college students aggressively right now. Because it's very expensive to hire only senior talent, it's very hard and it's very time consuming. So, that's where we've shifted our focus. We had over 50 interns here last summer, many of whom have accepted full-time offers" -- Steve Cadigan, Vice President of People Operations at LinkedIn, quoted in San Jose Mercury News, June 28, 2011 (emphasis added)
• "Young people are just smarter" -- Facebook founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg; he later apologized for the remark
• "The industry claims that only the young new grads have the latest skills. If so, who taught them those skills? It's old guys like me." -- Prof. Norm Matloff, UC Davis
• "...even if the [older] $120,000 programmer gets the right skills, companies would rather hire the younger workers. That's really what's behind this" -- Vivek Wadhwa, former tech CEO and now prominent supporter of expanding foreign worker programs
• Some prominent tech inventors and their ages:
  • Java programming language inventor James Gosling, 40
  • Android operating system inventor Andy Rubin, 45
  • laser inventor Charles Townes, 38
  • SVM (popular artificial intelligence technique) inventor Vladimir Vapnik, 65

Adverse impacts on STEM graduate study/careers:

The large influx of foreign students holds down STEM graduate and post doc stipends, and PhD salaries. As even a Cisco executive admits below, earning a PhD is "a financial loser," causing a net loss in lifetime earnings.

• "A growing influx of foreign Ph.D.s into U.S. labor markets will hold down the level of Ph.D. salaries...[The Americans] will select alternative career paths...by choosing to acquire a 'professional' degree in business or law, or by switching into management as rapidly as possible after gaining employment in private industry...[as] the effective premium for acquiring a Ph.D. may actually be negative" -- National Science Foundation internal memo, 1989; the projection turned out to be quite accurate
• "...a Ph.D. in computer science is probably a financial loser in both the short and long terms, says [Cisco Systems Vice President for Research] Douglas Comer" -- Science Careers, April 11, 2008
• "[Foreign grad students] will do everything they can to stay here" -- Stephen Seideman, Dean of the College of Computing Science, New Jersey Institute of Technology, quoted in Computerworld, February 28, 2005
• "The [NRC] committee heard concerns that foreign graduate students and postdoctorates are seen by some American institutions as low-wage laboratory workers, rather than as young scientists undergoing intensive research training. Indeed, a number of American universities actively recruit foreign students for such purposes" -- Addressing the Nation's Changing Needs for Biomedical and Behavioral Scientists, NRC report, 2000 (emphasis added)
• Approximately 54 percent of postdoctoral researchers are foreign, most of them on H-1B visas -- statistic in The Science and Engineering Workforce in the United States. NBER, 2009
• "Long recognized as a form of disguised unemployment, postdocs were now the first post-degree positions for 41% of new Ph.D. engineers, more than doubling from 18.9% a decade before" -- National Science Foundation, 2011
• "...high-tech engineers and managers have experienced lower wage growth than their counterparts nationally...Why hasn't the growth of high-tech wages kept up?...Foreign students are an important part of the story...Approximately one-half of engineering Ph.D.s and one-third of engineering MSs were granted to foreign-born students in the mid-1990s" -- UCB researchers(Brown, Campbell, and Pinsonneault, 1998 (emphasis added)
• "The lack of permanent jobs leaves many PhD scientists doing routine laboratory work in low-wage positions known as 'post-docs,' or postdoctoral fellowships. Post-docs used to last a year or two, but now it's not unusual to find scientists toiling away for six, seven, even 10 years" -- Washington Post, July 7, 2012
• "Recently, after 7 years of grad school at Vanderbilt, Earls and Westmoreland, her husband, both took postdoc positions at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee...'I ... think that my family expects that now we're making tons and tons of money because we have Ph.D.s. We don't know how to tell them that, no, we're [each] making less than a schoolteacher,' Earls says" -- Science Careers, April 11, 2008
• "GAO noted that... the availability of foreign H-1B post-docs may discourage US students from earning biomedical degrees because of typically lengthy post-docs at relatively low wages" -- Conference Report, Dynamics of the STEM Labor Market, Georgetown University, 2011
• "In physics, biochemistry, and chemistry much of the expansion [from the mid-1980s to mid-90s] in doctorate receipt to foreign students occurs at unranked programs or those ranked outside the top 50; the growth in foreign students in engineering is distributed more evenly among programs. Among students from China, Taiwan, and South Korea growth has been particularly concentrated outside the most highly ranked institutions" -- The Science and Engineering Workforce in the United States. NBER, 2009
• "If you're a high math student in America, from a purely economic point of view, it's crazy to go into STEM" -- Anthony Carnevale, Georgetown University

Industry abuse of power/money lobbying for H-1B:

Lobbying by the industry and its allies (e.g. universities) epitomizes the loss of our democracy.

• "[We in tech] control massive distribution channels, both as companies and individuals...We have individuals with a lot of money. If deployed properly this can have huge influence in the current campaign finance environment" -- Joe Green, leader of Mark Zuckerberg's new immigration lobbying group
• "This [H-1B expansion legislation] is not a popular bill with the public. It's popular with the CEOs...This is a very important issue for the high-tech executives who give the money"--Rep. Tom Davis, Chair of the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, 2000
• "There were, in fact, a whole lot of folks against [the H-1B expansion bill], but because they are tapping the high-tech community for campaign contributions, they don't want to admit that in public" -- Sen. Robert Bennett, 2000
• "It is amazing, in this racially enlightened century, that we still see members of the U.S. Congress demonizing an ethnic group...Indian and Indian-American...IT businesses are being scapegoated for abuse of the visa program -- using it for cheap, immobile labor -- that actually pervades the entire industry" -- Norman Matloff, "Stop Blaming Indian Companies for Visa Abuse," Bloomberg View, August 26, 2013 (the industry lobbyists have been claiming that the Indian firms abuse the H-1B program but that the mainstream U.S. firms don't)

On industry claims the H-1Bs are "the best and the brightest":

The industry lobbyists claims H-1Bs are hired because they are of outstanding talent. But the data show that most are ordinary people, doing ordinary work.

• "For [computer science] workers of comparable age, educational attainment and so on, the former foreign students on average had fewer patent applications, attended lower-ranked U.S. universities and were less likely to be working in research and development positions"--N. Matloff, UC Davis, describing his 2013 EPI study in a Bloomberg op-ed
• "After I control for field of study and education, both main work visa groups and student/trainee visa holders have statistically significantly lower patenting probabilities than natives"--J. Hunt, Rutgers University, in a 2009 working paper (in the final published version, with a more restricted data set, she found no significant difference)
• "In physics, biochemistry, and chemistry much of the expansion [from the mid-1980s to mid-90s] in doctorate receipt to foreign students occurs at unranked programs or those ranked outside the top 50; the growth in foreign students in engineering is distributed more evenly among programs. Among students from China, Taiwan, and South Korea growth has been particularly concentrated outside the most highly ranked institutions"--Bound, Turner, and Walsh, University of Michigan, 2009
• "Last year when I visited [prominent physicist] Qian Xuesen, he told me that one of the important reasons that China has not fully developed is that not one university has been able to follow a model that can produce creative and innovative talents; none has its own unique innovations; and thus has not produced distinguished individuals"--Wen Jiabao, Premier of China (cited in Yong Zhao, Catching Up or Leading the Way: American Education in the Age of Globalization, 2009
• "...[Chinese universities use a] passive learning environment...Students...mechanically memorize lectures and readings...Naturally, this teaching method results in the phenomenon of high scores and low ability"--Professor Chen Lixin, 1999
• "Respondents [to an employer survey] also stated that [compared to foreign engineers] U.S. engineers were more creative, excelled in problem solving, risk taking, networking and had strong analytical skills"--Vivek Wadhwa, executive-in-residence, 2006