Deja Vu All Over Again - Part II
Dr. Norm Matloff : October 17 , 2007

The following commentary is provided by Dr. Norm Matloff, a professor of computer science at the University of California at Davis

CLICK HERE TO READ PART I OF DR. MATLOFF'S COMMENTARY

Continuing the point in my last post about the lack of memory in the H-1B debate (except for the industry lobbyists, who remember only too well), the two articles below report on a letter recently sent to Congress jointly by the Semiconductor Industry Association and IEEE-USA. The articles, and some of the critics of H-1B quoted therein, make it sound like IEEE-USA had suddenly "gone over to the dark side," by siding with the SIA's call for fast-track green cards for foreign students. But the fact is that IEEE-USA has held this position since 2000! It's a position that I strongly disagree with (more on this below), but there is nothing new here.

IEEE-USA is the U.S. branch of IEEE. Contrary to the statement in the first article below that the IEEE-USA has usually "stayed out of the crossfire" on H-1B, actually during the 1990s IEEE-USA vigorously opposed the H-1B program. But the IEEE parent organization started to object in the late 1990s, when H-1B became very controversial. IEEE said that its objection was based on its being an international organization, so that it should not be "anti-immigration." The real reason, though, was that IEEE was dominated by industry and academic people who had vested interests in the H-1B program. In any case, it put heavy pressure on IEEE-USA to greatly soften its anti-H-1B stance.

And that's exactly what IEEE-USA did, in 2000. The centerpiece of its actions in that regard was to propose a fast-track green card program. Their new motto was "green cards, not H-1B." The organization has continuously pushed for such a program ever since then. IEEE-USA gets quoted a lot in the press regarding H-1B, and in most of their statements to the press since 2000 they've made their "green cards, not H-1B" pitch. And when Congress actually did propose such a program last year, IEEE-USA of course endorsed it. Thus the Programmers Guild should not have been shocked at all by the joint letter by SIA and IEEE-USA, which basically just endorsed those bills again.

In theory, "green cards, not H-1B" idea would seem to have some merit. The problem with H-1B is that the workers are usually de facto indentured servants, thus exploitable; giving them green cards would solve that problem. But it would not solve the BASIC problem.

As I've said so often, including in my post sent just before this one, the dirty little secret about H-1B involves AGE. The employers save a lot of money by hiring young workers instead of old ones. They save even more by hiring young H-1Bs instead of young Americans, but the most important thing to them is having a large pool of young workers. And THAT is why the proposals to give fast-track green cards to foreign students is basically just as harmful as H-1B; the proposals in Congress would make these special green cards available only to new graduates, and of course the vast majority of those are young. In other words, these proposals would still flood the job market with large numbers of young workers, just like H-1B is doing now.

I can sympathize with IEEE-USA's predicament--IEEE has threatened to disband them--and I greatly appreciate the good work they did in the 1990s on this issue. But as the Guild points out in the articles below, IEEE-USA has not polled its members on this issue, and thus is falsely representing them. The fact is that IEEE-USA is greatly undermining the work of the Programmers Guild, by sending mixed signals to Congress.

In one of the more egregious cases, a former IEEE-USA official who still holds the "green cards, not H-1B" viewpoint, dismissed the infamous "TubeGate" videos (in which a prominent immigration law firm was teaching employers how to exploit loopholes involving the hiring of foreign workers) as irrelevant, supposedly because the videos involved green cards and not H-1B. This statement was factually incorrect, because some of the videos in the set did discuss H-1B, but my point here was that IEEE-USA is so wedded to this "green cards, not H-1B" stance that it publicly dismissed the best public relations advantage the anti-H-1B movement has ever had.

I've mentioned IEEE-USA's "green cards, not H-1B" policy here in my e-newsletter repeatedly, and have written a CIS article criticizing it (www.cis.org/articles/2006/back506.html). IEEE-USA (several of whose top officials subscribe to this e-newsletter) knows my objections, and we simply must "agree to disagree," which is fine. But the fact that many critics of H-1B (many individuals, in addition to the PG) were shocked by the joint SIA/IEEE-USA letter illustrates again the point I made in my last posting here, that "anti-H-1B activists come and go," thus creating a system with no memory.

One of the most detailed postings I've made on the IEEE-USA issue is archived at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/I ... Demise.txt But instead of just giving this link, I'm going to do something different, and actually include that document at the end of this message, so as to make sure everyone understands the history here.

By the way, one point brought up by the Programmers Guild is that the SIA/IEEE-USA letter says that even foreign students with just a bachelor's degree should be covered by the fast-track program. This is a deviation from the proposed legislation, which requires at least a master's. It seems to me that that reference to bachelor's degrees was an error, as the letter states how important advanced degrees are. (As I've explained before, I disagree with the notion that giving visas is OK if the foreign worker has an advanced degrees, but that is not the point here.) I did send e-mail to an IEEE-USA official on Sunday to ask about this, but have not received a response. Maybe the delay is due to IEEE-USA and SIA conferring on this point.

Dr. Matloff suggests reading the following article to learn more about this issue:

http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnf ... 302399.htm Immigration Reform October 15, 2007, U.S. Tech Workers Fight Back

http://www.numbersusa.com/news?ID=8952