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Importing the best minds

Rocky Mountain News

Published August 10, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.

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U.S. prosperity is more dependent than ever on finding workers skilled in science, math, engineering and technological fields - even though the loudest immigration debate has focused on unskilled migrant labor.

But in an age where the United States is going to need sharp minds in these fields to stay ahead, government processing delays have led to green cards going to waste at the end of each fiscal year - green cards, that is, providing permanent residence for highly prized foreign professionals working in the U.S. Bipartisan legislation that recently passed the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law would recapture those lost visas, directing them toward workers who in most cases have been on a waiting list for years.

Opponents of the bill, such as Numbers USA, contend that allowing this skilled labor to remain in the country "not only ensures that countless native-born programmers, engineers, and professors stay unemployed or underemployed, it also drives down their wages if they are actually able to find a job."

Not so. It's absurd, in fact, to think American companies are actively ignoring better qualified native applicants.

Tapping America's Potential, a group of 16 businesses focused on the goal of doubling the number of science, math and engineering graduates by 2015, released a discouraging progress report last month: In the three years since the effort began, bachelor's degrees in the target subjects only increased by 24,000 to 225,000. This puts the group way off track to meet the goal of 400,000 such degrees by 2015.

And while "expanding homegrown talent is TAP's number one priority," the group recognizes the need to reform the H-1 skilled visa system to keep America competitive.

Another House bill would automatically qualify foreign-born master's and Ph.D. candidates with employment offers for a green card. Yet another would eliminate the per country limits on green cards for highly skilled workers, ensuring that U.S. companies could recruit the best talent period.

Immigration reform should be about common sense above emotion. Passing these bills to welcome skilled, highly educated employees into our economy should be a no-brainer.

Comments

  • August 10, 2008

    6:04 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    steven709 writes:

    "Opponents of the bill, such as Numbers USA, contend that allowing this skilled labor to remain in the country "not only ensures that countless native-born programmers, engineers, and professors stay unemployed or underemployed, it also drives down their wages if they are actually able to find a job."
    "Not so. It's absurd, in fact, to think American companies are actively ignoring better qualified native applicants."
    It is interesting in the past year I have seen two different news reports on legal firms holding seminars on how to disqualify/exclude American job applicants so that foreign workers could be hired. It makes you wonder why companies would want to do that – since your article contends it’s not because foreign workers will work for less. It wouldn’t surprise me if some of the members of TAP also actively seek means to disqualify American workers (you should have identified the companies making up TAP).

  • August 10, 2008

    9:06 a.m.

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    Shadow writes:

    All these proposal are bad for America. Instead of limiting or increaseing skilled laborers. How about bettering the education system in this country. Produce a better quality of worker here from our own.

    For every single job taken by a displaced worker or a visa holder is one less job for an AMERICAN.

    Its time that we invest again in America and Americans. Better education, encourageing a better work ethic, and living wages for Americans.

  • August 10, 2008

    9:18 a.m.

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    HolierThanThou writes:

    The Rocky editors who wrote this piece need to be replaced by H1 workers from India. Although their spoken English may be unintelligible to the untrained ear, they can write better opinion pieces. We'll see you at the unemployment office. Come to think of it, maybe the American editors already have been replaced and this piece WAS written by foreigners because only a foreigner could agree with it.

    I know someone who has worked with these so-called imported brains. He is an engineer who designed and built patented inventions for companies that saved them well over $100 million per year. He later became a software engineer because American management refused to invest in automation to save manufacturing jobs.

    Now, like many American software engineers, he's paid about 60% of what they paid him 10 years ago. The programmers from India that they hire have college degrees but the quality of those people and their degrees is bad. Maybe one in ten of them can match a typical American engineer in skill and productivity. He described one company where they replaced a core engineer who was an American with one, then two, then three, then four little Indians because management mistakenly assumed that the American engineer was doing an easy job. Failure resulted: the project fell behind schedule, got canceled, and more people were then laid off.

    The only reason to bring more H1 visas into America is to put Americans out of work and drive down pay. Let's look at the in-your-face results:

    1. Evictions by foreclosure are shattering all previous records.

    2. Working middle-class paychecks are being eliminated and reduced.

    3. The tax base is shrinking and driving the federal deficit deeper in the hole.

    4. Billionaires are two to ten times richer than they were 10 years ago.

    This is not opinion. It's fact. Based on these facts the only reasonable thing to do is stop importing poverty and send all H1 visa holders home.

    The time has come for the American people to demand that their government represent THEIR ECONOMIC INTERESTS not those of a few greedy billionaires. We can no longer afford to tolerate the treasonous GREAT AMERICAN JOB GIVE-AWAY.

  • August 10, 2008

    10:01 a.m.

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    HolierThanThou writes:

    "We're trying to move everything we can offshore." - HP Services chief Ann Livermore ... HP figures a good high-end programmer in India costs about $20,000 a year, about a quarter the U.S. cost. And things could get even cheaper. "We see China gaining on India about three or four years from now."

  • August 10, 2008

    10:07 a.m.

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    HolierThanThou writes:

    Here's how Americans are being pushed into permanent unemployment and poverty. These programs are used to eventually outsource the jobs to foreign countries as stated by the traitor, Ann Livermore, above.

    America's highest-skilled workers are being displaced from their professions by employment-based visas:

    * H-1b: Congress has authorized employers to sponsor and hire foreign workers regardless of whether qualified Americans are available to fill the positions. Employers can legally force Americans to train their foreign H-1b replacements as a condition of receiving a severance package.
    * L-1: Congress has authorized employers to bring foreign workers into the U.S. for one year while continuing to pay them their foreign wage level.
    * PERM: Congress has authorized employers to sponsor foreign workers for green cards by simply running a few classified ads and then to find any reason possible to disqualify all American applicants.

  • August 10, 2008

    10:40 a.m.

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    HolierThanThou writes:

    For those of you who have had your job stolen and given to an H1 you can find information about joining class-action lawsuits against your former employers at:

    http://www.hireamericansfirst.org/us_...

  • August 10, 2008

    1:41 p.m.

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    HolierThanThou writes:

    This isn't about lower or higher IQs. It isn't even about skill and training.

    Imported H-1b slaves are usually much less skilled than the American citizens that they displace. The college degrees that they get in India aren't worth the paper they're printed on.

    Members of Congress who vote to expand these imported slave programs are traitors to those they purport to represent. They're not representing anyone except their corporate bribe masters. They're frauds who aid and abet the theft of American jobs. Burglars and purse-snatchers are saints when put up against the likes of such hypocrites. They deserve extreme punishments the likes of which are only reserved for the worst of traitors.

    This isn't about importing the "best minds". That's the corporate PR lie. It's about putting American citizens out of work and into a permanent state of destitution.

  • August 10, 2008

    6:11 p.m.

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    max writes:

    Maybe there was a time when the best and brightest were coming to this country. However, that is not the case any more. The H-1Bs that are now entering this country have average skills at best. The U.S. is going to lose it's technological lead BECAUSE of H-1Bs. We import cheap labor (H-1Bs) with average skills and at home drive the truly best and brightest engineering candidates to other careers. What we will be left with is a bunch of engineers with average abilities. Corporate greed and ignorant columnists are debasing the indigenous engineering infrastructure of this country.

  • August 10, 2008

    8:04 p.m.

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    Sweetpickle writes:

    This is a bad idea for so many reasons. One reason for the decline in engineering and science graduation rates is because foreign workers have lowered the value of us natives.
    If anyone remembers the song "The futures so bright I gotta wear shades", it's just not true anymore.
    At one time our government chose contractors who would not put our national security in the hands of foreign nationals. I guess that day is gone too. What an open invitation that will be.
    If you think a workforce of mixed language and training is a good idea just look at your computer, particularly if it has Microsoft. Is it a good reliable product?
    Give us a break.

  • August 10, 2008

    10:26 p.m.

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    American_Engineer writes:

    "Not so. It's absurd, in fact, to think American companies are actively ignoring better qualified native applicants."

    No it's not. We're already graduating more American STEM students than there are available jobs. At the same time we're importing 85,000+ H-1B visa holders each year.

    This is about cheap labor, not skills. H-1B allows businesses to flood the labor market, gives them access to captive workers (the employer controls the visa status), and facilitates outsourcing.

    If you truly think this program is necessary to find skilled workers (while many qualified IT workers are already out of a job), then at least make H-1B less of a cheap labor vehicle. Start with dispensing visas by auction and severing employer control over the visa status. No need for more visas, either above the table or "reclaimed".

  • August 11, 2008

    12:11 a.m.

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    CEE writes:

    In order to solve the problem, a national database structured like the federal jobs database (USAJOBS.gov) should be created. Every job would be required to be posted to this database before it could be authorized for any guest worker visa or before an existing H-1B visa for the job could be renewed.

    Only if there are no qualified US citizen or legal permanent resident worker applied for the job could it be authorized for a guest worker visa.

    The objective nature of the USAJOBS database removes the discrimination against job applicants on the basis of age, disability, and race. Any job database should continue to include the preferences for US military veterans - especially those returning from service in the war zones.

    US workers get the first chance at US jobs; US companies get workers when no US worker is available. Why will not Congress and American corporations support this idea?

  • August 11, 2008

    12:52 a.m.

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    danarothrock writes:

    Over 600,000 science and engineering degrees are granted annually from American universities.(1) The US produces only 120,000 science and engineering jobs per year.(2) That leaves 480,000 graduates per year without jobs in their chosen careers. Add to this over 240,000 H-1B visas and an equal number of L-1 visas each year. Half a million Americans are losing their jobs to cheap foreign technical workers every year. Another half million Americans waste their S&E degrees on non-S&E jobs.
    SOURCES:
    (1) Tabulated by National Science Foundation/Division of Science Resources Statistics (NSF/SRS); data from Department of Education/National Center for Education Statistics: Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System Completions Survey and NSF/SRS: Survey of Earned Doctorates.
    http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d0...
    (2) http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2004/02/a... page 83

    H-1B and L-1 visas are the Trojan Horse to offshoring of American Jobs.
    http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/lou.d...

  • August 11, 2008

    6:59 a.m.

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    VVVV writes:

    I would prefer to bring the employees here to the US than to send the work, companies, and standard of living outside the US. In engineering we hear all about the coming loss of workforce due to the retirement of the baby boomers. India and China are going through their own boom, so we can either let them come here and share, or close shop and send it all over there with nothing left for us but to try to immigrate to India.

    Had congress, the states, and everyone else involved been looking further ahead than the nightly news, maybe a plan could have been set up to provide cheap or even free college educations to the children who showed technical promise, regardless of the background. Then maybe employers wouldn't be so tempted to ship jobs offshore. But just like the auto workers union, shortage and our own selfish ways have priced us out of competition, effectively guaranteeing our own destitution. We have one last chance to keep the technical jobs and companies in the US. To deny visas now is to shoot ourselves in the head.

  • August 11, 2008

    10:53 a.m.

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    BrightFutureJobs writes:

    Advertise the jobs!
    It's that simple. If there really is a shortage of technical workers, why not advertise the H-1B guest worker jobs to the American public?

    Most of the 600,000 STEM (Science, Technical, Engineering, Math) graduates will not be able to find jobs in their field.

    The guest worker system has no auditing. How do we even know the H-1Bs are the best and the brightest? Are the H-1Bs smarter than Americans? The United States is the center of the computing world. We must have gotten stupid in a very short period of time.

  • August 11, 2008

    12:03 p.m.

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    Professor8 writes:

    The trouble with VVVV's argument is that it's a false choice. The H-1B and L-1 visas programs are being used/abused to facilitate off-shoring, and India's minister of trade has admitted it.

    More student visas means more in the pipe-line for work visas means more off-shoring, and more student visas mean fewer opportunities for US students, fewer assistantships and fellowships for US students, fewer chances for US students to learn and to apply the latest research techniques, more knowledge transfer off-shore, and less national security.

    We stopped dealing in "the best and brightest" decades ago; 1,000 visas per year would have more than sufficed for them.

  • August 11, 2008

    4:48 p.m.

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    CEE writes:

    Well qualified American students (4.0 undergraduate GPA, National Merit Scholars) are being denied opportunities at many institutions because the students do not meet the diversity goals. American students are expected to pay their own way while available assistantships and fellowships are given to foreign nationals.

  • August 12, 2008

    8:57 a.m.

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    mrfxx writes:

    It's Op Ed pieces like this which give the lie to "Mainstream Media is Too Liberal". This article is a blatant push BY BUSINESS to put more citizens/permanent residents out of work to be replaced by imported (and cheaper) labor which is only allowed to stay on their H1B visas for up to 6 years. Perhaps if the business toady who is too gutless to put his/her name to the article had spent 10 minutes googling, he/she would have found that in 2006 (somebody explain to me why the Feds run at least 2 years behind in their statistical information - foreign programmers, perhaps) there were almost 4 times as many citizens/permanent residents in the IT and engineering fields out of work as there are H1Bs allowed in annually - and the large IT companies (such as IBM, HP, Sun and Microsoft) are offshoring more of these jobs on a daily basis, generally to less experienced and often much less qualified workers. The US-based workers are often forced to work OT and/or work varying schedules (both against Federal labor law, but most are too afraid that if they rat out the employers, they will end up "paying") - and are lucky to see a 2% increase every 5-6 YEARS (while CEOs and boards get 10-15% increases year after year).