Alarmist predictions of a talent shortage of high-tech workers are driving the race to the bottom

[marmar]

From The Nation:


Hi-Tech Hysteria
Elizabeth Schuster & Michelle Chandra


The only witness at a March 7 hearing on US competitiveness before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pension, Microsoft's Bill Gates outlined the consequences of a talent shortage in science and engineering. "America's immigration policies are driving away the world's best and brightest precisely when we need them most," he said. Gates was referring to the H-1B visa program, which allows 85,000 "nonimmigrant" workers in "specialty occupations" to come to the United States each year. Close to half of these visas in 2005 were granted to high-tech workers.

Microsoft is a member of Compete America, which heavily lobbies to increase the H-1B cap. Founded in 1996 as American Business for Legal Immigration in part by the then-president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, Compete America brings together disparate groups like universities, high-tech corporations and IT offshore outsourcers, all of whom have a common stake in expanding the H-1B program. Universities like the California system rely on foreign students to bolster their computer science and engineering PhD programs. Typically, more than 50 percent of such programs are filled by foreign students who arrive with the expectation of working in the United States on an H-1B after getting their degree. H-1B visa workers also make up the bulk of business for immigration lawyers, who stand to collect, at the very minimum, $1,000 per client.

Compete America's dubious predictions of a talent shortage in high-tech fields divert attention away from the real problems of the H-1B program. Talent shortages are typically signaled by increasing wages and low unemployment levels. However, starting salaries for college graduates with a bachelor's degree in computer science have remained flat since 2001. Perhaps more telling, 1 million high-tech jobs were lost during the dot-com bust, when the H-1B quota was at 195,000, its highest level ever. Vivek Wadhwa, an adjunct professor in the Master of Engineering Management program at Duke University, recently published a study that found no shortage of engineers in the past five years.

Whether or not the H-1B program brings in the "best and brightest," it clearly serves another purpose: supplying businesses with a steady source of cheap labor. John Miano of the Programmers Guild discovered 3,000 job listings last year alone that specified that only H-1B workers need apply, and studies have found that high-tech workers on H-1Bs earn up to 23 percent less than their American counterparts. Aided by vast loopholes and little oversight, companies can hire H-1Bs over American workers, pay them below market wages and still comply with the law; the Labor Department usually rubber-stamps H-1B visa applications. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070702/schuster_chandra

[Warren Stupidity]

1. It is the annual H-1B visa con game.

Been going on pretty much ever since I can remember. We've had dire shortages while high tech was as bombed out as the WTC after the dot com crash. We've always had dire shortages.

[Deja Q]

2. Gates only cares about cheap labor. He, having a position of power, is skewing reality.

And he, as a businessman, ought to know what used to be preached as religion: "money is an incentive", which is why America survived the transition into the service economy during the 1990s. The growth of IT.

Again, I don't mind globalization if it was taken to completion, but all we're seeing is the maintained status quo of a gross inequity. And regardless of the excuse or spin, only the American worker is the one being treated as the cause of the problem. And that's hardly the entire truth.

BTW: I was in a training course recently. For the so-called "best and brightest", the Indian in the classroom wasn't what many in the classroom would have considered the "smartest". So forgive me if I say "The H1B program brings in the 'best and brightest'" is a load of cow manure.

It's about cheap wages and from other stories I've read or heard about, lack of quality (and quality control) too.

[Flatulo]

3. Yeah, I know of a few brilliant engineers who have been laid-off

for many months now and can't find any work, even in Mass, which is a pretty big hi-tech hub.

All they can find is contract work for a few months at 1/2 the pay, no vacation, and no bennies. Welcome to the future.

Shortage my ass.