From Norm Matloff's newsletter on this Nature article:
One of these new points is striking: In absolute numbers, the U.S. has more top-scoring kids in math and science than any other country studied--by far. The authors point out that it is mainly these kids who become the innovators later as adults, and we've got an excellent supply of them. This is completely counter to what one constantly sees in the popular press.
Rob Sanchez has a good article on how the government is scamming Americans out of jobs by bringing in cheap labor without congress.
The OPT program is the worst of breed of backroom deals.
The cheap labor lobby and immigration lawyers are usually very, very careful to not actually say that "its about cheap labor." Every once-in-a-while, they slip up. Here is a quote from a video at a recent conference that reveals all:
And our goal is clearly not to find a qualified and interested U.S. worker. And you know in a sense that sounds funny, but it's what we're # trying to do here. We are complying with the law fully, but ah, our objective is to get this person a green card, and get through the labor certification process. 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.
Thanks to Rob Sanchez for finding this and Norm Matloff for notifying us.
THE United States has benefited immensely from its role as a magnet for the best and brightest workers from around the world, especially in innovative fields like high technology. Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, sounded precisely that theme in Senate testimony last month when asked about the visa program for skilled workers, the H-1B. Mr. Gates said that these workers are “uniquely talented” and highly paid — “taking jobs that pay over $100,000 a year” — and that America should “welcome as many of those people as we can get.”
But that is not how the H-1B visa program as a whole is working these days, according to an analysis by Ronil Hira, an assistant professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology. The median salary for new H-1B holders in the information technology industry is actually about $50,000, based on the most recent data filed by companies with the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services agency. That wage level, Mr. Hira says, is the same as starting salaries for graduating computer science majors with bachelor’s degrees.
Yet salaries, according to Mr. Hira, are only part of the story. He says that while Microsoft may be paying its H-1B visa holders well and recruiting people with hard-to-find talents, other companies have a different agenda. The H-1B visa program, Mr. Hira asserts, has become a vehicle for accelerating the pace of offshore outsourcing of computing work, sending more jobs abroad. Holders of H-1B visas, he says, do the on-site work of understanding a client’s needs and specifications — and then most of the software coding is done back in India.
“Information technology offshore outsourcing has just swamped the H-1B program in recent years,” he said. The list of the top 10 companies requesting H-1B visas in fiscal 2006, the most recent government data available, was dominated by Indian-based technology outsourcing companies like Infosys Technologies, Wipro Technologies and Tata Consultancy Services, and a few other companies that offer outsourced services and have sizable operations in India like Cognizant Technology Solutions, Accenture and Deloitte & Touche, according to a paper last month by Mr. Hira, which was published by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group....
Read the entire article here (registration required).
From The Orange County Register
It took just hours Monday for federal officials to log in about 150,000 applications for visas for high-skilled workers to come to the United States, more than double the 65,000 permits that became available on April 2.
Citizenship and Immigration Services has closed the application period and will use a lottery system to determine which employers will get to bring in the workers they want. Companies that don't get the visas they want now won't be able to apply again until April 2008.
Lobbyists like to claim that this is a sure sign of huge increases in the limits on visas. But lets get a few facts straight first.
Companies were told that all applications submitted prior to April 2 were going to be discarded and that a lottery system would be used if demand outstripped supply. This is nothing more than a pressure tactic to whip companies into a hysteria so that they can allocate huge blocks of visas "just in case." If this were gasoline, we'd call this hoarding. But because its foreign labor, everyone gets a free pass.
Instead what this shows is that the industry cannot get enough of cheap labor (as compared to a resident or citizen worker). Doing the simple math shows that 150,000 visas per business day means that our vaunted industry's appetite is closer to 36 million visas per year. Bill Gates has argued recently before Congress for unlimited visas.
Just think hard about what that would do to society as we know it.
Norm Matloff is one of the foremost critics of the H1B program. Check out his
background below, and check out his material by going to the sidebar on this blog under “Friends of American Workers” and take the Norm Matloff link. The following was excerpted from Dr. Matloff's website.
Dr. Norman Matloff is a professor of computer science at the University of California at Davis, and was formerly a professor of mathematics and statistics at that university. He is a former database software developer in Silicon Valley, and has been a statistical consultant for firms such as the Kaiser Permanente Health Plan. He has published numerous research papers in computer science and in theoretical and applied statistics, in fields such as parallel processing, data security, data mining, computer networks, and statistical regression analysis. He is the author of one textbook in computer science and another in statistics.
Dr. Matloff also writes about social issues such as immigration, affirmative action, and age discrimination. He has served as an expert witness in litigation regarding age and racial discrimination in the software industry. He has presented invited testimony to the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives on a number of occasions, and his advice has been solicited by the U.S. Department of Commerce, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the U.S. State Department, as well as the State of California Little Hoover Commission. His writings on immigration have been used as course materials at Stanford and Cornell Universities.
Prof. Matloff is particularly interested in the U.S. of foreign labor in the U.S. computer industry. His article in the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform on the H-1B work visa, written at the invitation of the journal, is the most comprehensive (99 pages, 300+ footnotes) academic work available on the H-1B issue. Another invited article concerned the relation of H-1B to age discrimination in the computer industry appeared in the California Labor and Employment Law Review, a publication of the California State Bar Association; click here to download the article.
