Thread: Wealthy Tech Execs to Lobby Obama for Increased H-1B Visas

December 10, 2008 2:48 PM PST

Hardly a great time to talk H-1Bs. Still, it's time

Posted by Charles Cooper

What with pink slips being handed out all over this country, now is probably the worst time for any political leader to urge a rethinking of our H-1B policy to lift the 65,000 annual limits on foreign guest workers in specialty occupations. It's not the sort of political stance that will play well in Peoria - or in many other places in the U.S. these days.

But it must be said: Maintaining the status quo on H-1B is the best news that China, India, Russia or any other would-be economic superpower could ever want to hear. The reverse brain drain returns smart people with advanced degrees to their countries of origin. And in the increasingly hot, flat and crowded world that the New York Times' Tom Friedman describes in his latest book, these are the sorts of folks every country will covet.

What we're not talking about here are rank-and-file jobs that come and go, depending upon the whims of the business cycle. This is the next generation of superstar engineers and entrepreneurs, who clearly will leave their mark. The only question is where.

"The current rules are nuts," adds Bob Muglia, a senior executive at Microsoft.

In particular, he pointed to the process in which foreigners, who get educated in the U.S., wind up getting exported back to their home countries. "It's crazy," he said, drawing a distinction between "highly-trained people and migrant farm workers."

His is a common refrain among tech types. This was the second consecutive year in which the federal government got swamped by applications well in excess of the annual 65,000 limit for H-1B visas within days of opening the visa window.

Barack Obama surely must be getting an earful about this from trusted tech advisors, like Google's Eric Schmidt and Xerox's Anne Mulcahy. What's more, computer industry executives, who have long chafed at numerical ceilings on the H-1B, are likely to take a more assertive tone after the new administration takes office next January.

That's the only way to get the ball moving. They haven't been happy with the situation for quite some time and in conversations, it's clear that their frustration is at the boiling point.

"It's the most ridiculous thing that I've ever seen," says Seagate CEO, Bill Watkins and the vice chairman of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group. "We train them and then don't let them stay here? Come on. More than half the companies in the (Silicon) Valley were formed by immigrants. You don't see that happening in the last three years."

Nobody's going to win a popularity contest by advocating we let more foreigners receive U.S. jobs. But now let's think about the long-term. For Watkins, a strong proponent of "getting "American companies to identify with America," the deadlock on over H-1Bs is yet more proof of rules and regulations which ultimately work against the country's economic self interest.

Seagate CEO Bill Watkins

"I've been moving operations offshore because that's where my grads are," he said. "It's a ridiculous situation that we're in."

Last spring, the SVLG traveled to Washington D.C. to make its case. Unfortunately for SVLG, its timing wasn't the best. Congress was then more concerned about illegal immigration and the fairness of bringing "cheaper" H-1B candidates into the country. The upshot: Nothing got done. f

For what it's worth, here's what they were asking for.

• Raise the H-1B cap and allow it to fluctuate to reflect market demand and unemployment rates

• Exempt US advanced degree graduates from the H-1B cap

• Apply existing 20,000 H-1B set-aside to foreign university advanced degree STEM graduates (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics)

• Increase the employment-based Green Card cap to reduce and prevent future backlogs

• Exempt US advanced degree graduates, as well as foreign advanced degree STEM with US work experience from the Green Card Cap

• Exempt from the green card cap those spouses and children of green card recipients

Once again, their timing is bad. The most recent employment report was abysmal the news isn't likely going to get much better anytime soon. I think an H-1B rethink is a good idea but try selling that one when unemployment is nearing double digits. When it comes to long-term thinking, most of us usually fall in with the short termers.


Charles is an executive editor with CNET News. He has covered technology and business for more than 25 years. A graduate of Queens College and Columbia University, Cooper began his career in journalism at the Associated Press before moving to technology coverage. Before joining CNET News, he worked at Computer & Software News, Computer Shopper, PC Week, and ZDNet. He received the Excellence in Journalism award from the Northern California branch of the Society for Professional Journalists for column writing. In addition to his blogging and podcast appearances, he is a co-host of the CNET News Daily Debrief. E-mail Charlie.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10787_3-10120548-60.html

Enough already.......

"The current rules are nuts," adds Bob Muglia, a senior executive at Microsoft.

I see Bill Gates is training his staff to make stupid statements in order to get more cheap foreign labor.

Originally Posted by Texas2step

Seagate CEO Bill Watkins

"I've been moving operations offshore because that's where my grads are," he said. "It's a ridiculous situation that we're in."

Ya. OK. Bill? Can I call you Bill?

Aren't you really moving your highly vaunted "operations" offshore because you can exploit the local third-world population for slave wages?

Are you really so dumb to believe that anyone is going to believe this crap? If you are that dumb, isn't it time you got yourself replaced by an H1-B? Your company deserves someone smarter than a "dumb American"...

See this article from April that's still relevant:

April 30, 2008 - 2:52 P.M.
Let's end the H-1B best-and-brightest nonsense

A leading critic of the H-1B visa program, Prof. Norman Matloff, is challenging tech industry assertions that visa holders represent "the best and the brightest." His paper for the Center for Immigration Studies attempts to prove this point through a statistical analysis of labor data.

I don't know why he bothered.

H-1B visa holders aren’t "the best and brightest." It's inside-the-beltway rhetoric that evaporates in two seconds of debate.

The labor data, in terms of wages, occupations and companies that use the visa, clearly shows that the vast majority of H-1B holders aren’t building rockets.

The more interesting question is the one Matloff asked in 1998. At a time when few were even aware of the visa and offshore outsourcing, it was Matloff, a University of California at Davis computer science professor, who warned of its potential consequences.

In testimony he gave ten years ago before a U.S. House subcommittee, he saw the H-1B visa as a potential punch in the gut to U.S. students. He wrote:

University students are beginning to be aware of this problem, and though computer science enrollment trends are currently on the upswing … in the future this may deter many of them from pursuing computer science majors.

Enrollments were indeed rising in 1998 as Matloff noted, and then plunged with the dot.com bust and have not recovered since. In every interview that I’ve done over the years with computer science professors, the reasons for this decline have remained consistent. It's seen as a lingering effect of the dot.com bust, offshore outsourcing and its close companion, the H-1B visa. (For enrollment details, see Computer Research Association data.)

Matloff argues with a Grapes of Wrath fervor about a struggle he sees between the powerful and the powerless; students, his students, who loose job opportunities to foreign workers, as well as older workers at risk of age discrimination.

There’s a lot more here, of course, to this issue. H-1B opponents say visas holders are cheap, time stamped labor and will speed offshoring. Proponents say more visas will keep jobs onshore and grow the economy.

But the question that Matloff raised in 1998 may even be more important today.

If the U.S. opens the door wide to foreign nationals, gives unfettered access to the labor market and increases the competitive labor pool, will it also discourage U.S. students from entering computer science and related fields.

http://blogs.computerworld.com/lets_end ... t_nonsense

Part of CIS report here:

H-1Bs: Still Not the Best and the Brightest

May 2008

Discussion and Conclusions

The lobbyists for the tech industry and the American Immigration Lawyers Association know that crying educational doom-and-gloom sells. Even though it was people born and educated in the United States who were primarily responsible for developing the computer industry, and even though all major East Asian governments have lamented their educational systems' stifling of creativity, the lobbyists have convinced Congress that the industry needs foreign workers from Asia in order to innovate.

The data show otherwise. Most foreign tech workers, particularly those from Asia, are in fact of only average talent. Moreover, they are hired for low-level jobs of limited responsibility, not positions that generate innovation. This is true both overall and in the key tech occupations, and most importantly, in the firms most stridently demanding that Congress admit more foreign workers.

Note again that the analyses presented here confirm and provide much sharper quantitative insight into previous work showing that the H-1Bs are of just average talent. It has been shown for instance that foreign students in the U.S. tend to be concentrated in the less-selective universities, and that they receive a lower percentage of research awards relative to their numbers in the student population. In the workforce, the foreign nationals in the U.S. participate in teams applying for patents at the same percentage as do the U.S. citizens, and so on.

To be sure, the author is a strong supporter of facilitating the immigration of the world's best and brightest. He has acted on that belief, by championing the hiring of extraordinarily talented researchers, mostly from India and China, into his department faculty. But as seen here, very few of the foreign workers are of that caliber.

Expansion of the guest worker programs - both H-1B visas and green cards - is unwarranted

Full report here:

http://www.cis.org/articles/2008/back508.html