Published Saturday, January 26, 2002

[size=6]Demand for foreign workers up last year[/size=6]

[size=4]14% increase seen in the number of work visa applications[/size=4]

By Jennifer Bjorhus
SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


U.S. demand for visas to hire skilled foreign workers rose last year despite a recession that caused more than 1 million people to lose their jobs.

U.S. companies and other groups applied for 342,035 H-1B work visas last year, up 14 percent from 2000, when the country's economy was strong. About 163,200 H-1B visas were actually granted last year, up more than 40 percent after Congress, under pressure from the technology industry, raised the cap on the number of visas the Immigration and Naturalization Service can issue.

At least 29,000 more visas are pending.

"I think it surprised everyone," said Mark Shevitz, a vice president at Chicago-based VisaNow.com, a company that processes visas for clients and that studied the increase. "All you hear about in the media is these huge layoffs, and the tech industry is just shedding workers."

The H-1B is a six-year visa used for bringing in skilled foreign workers in sectors where there are supposed to be shortages of qualified U.S. ones. The program is a political hot potato, and last year's increases, which seem counter-intuitive, are sure to fuel the ongoing debate about the controversial program.

Oracle, Cisco Systems, Intel and Sun Microsystems were among the top users of the program in 2000, as were universities such as Harvard and Yale. How many applications the tech giants filed last year amid layoffs wasn't immediately available. About half the H-1B visas the U.S. government grants each year are for computer-related jobs, and about half go to people from India, with China a far second.

Supporters of the H-1B program say the U.S. needs it because the nation's schools aren't graduating enough computer engineers to meet demand. Critics say companies are just trying to get workers cheap, and that H-1B workers get lower salaries.

INS spokesman Russ Bergeron said he's aware of VisaNow.com's report and argues that the agency is simply processing paperwork and has no role in determining H-1B need. That's the job of Congress and the U.S. Department of Labor, he said.
[more]

"If we had a dog in that fight, we'd be happy to weigh in," Bergeron said.

There are several possible reasons for the increase, says Shevitz. One is that despite rough times, the technology industry created 80,000 new engineering and computer jobs, he said.

Part of the increase may be because of the fact that last year, for the first time, colleges and universities shopping for researchers were made exempt from the cap on the number of visas that can be issued. That possibly spurred more applications from this group.

The increase may also be capturing some tech industry flux, Shevitz said, as H-1B visa workers transferring from one company to another or renewing H-1B visas granted earlier are counted as applications.

VisaNow.com based its report on data from the INS, Department of Labor and other agencies. The 2001 data reflected H-1B visa applications for the federal fiscal year ended Sept. 30.

Norman Matloff, a professor of computer science at UC Davis and a leading critic of the H-1B program, argues that the main reason for the increase is basic economics: during a recession, companies are more eager than ever to cut costs. Matloff cites several studies that conclude the average annual wages of computer programmers and engineers working in the United States on H-1B visas are 15 percent to 33 percent lower than those of U.S. citizens. That's despite laws about paying the immigrants the so-called prevailing wage, he said, because "prevailing wage" is a squishy legal concept.

[b]Fewer than half of the young U.S. computer programmers that U.S. companies hire are actually placed into programming positions, according to Matloff.

"Instead, more than half of the new graduates are shunted into nontechnical-semitechnical positions such as customer support, while the H-1Bs are hired into the technical positions," he said.[/b]

[url]www.contracostatimes.com/biztech/stories_business/ovisa_20020126.htm[/url]

I heard on Paul Harvey about two weeks ago that American industry shipped over forty four  percent of their programing overseas last year, this year that number is expected to go over sixty six percent.

Been there - I know EXACTLY what you are talking about.   Don't want to get into specifics as I want to work for those companies some day.

On the other hand, these guys are the best of the best in the world.  I would rather see them work for a company in the US than to give the US a run for its money in every field. Can't stop it, though.  

I understand some of the most advanced research in automation and machinetools is happening in China now, to name just one field.  Better tax structure, outright government subsidies, etc, much lower cost of labor, etc.  No reference, just what I picked up on the machine tool boards.

Yum, thank you US education system...  While our children are learning to be "tolerant and diverse", the children of the next world superpower are learning the real important subjects.  The Day Of Reckoning is getting closer all the time.

The clock is ticking right on down.

[IMG]http://www.minorannoyance.net/~spin/Smilies/contrib/aahmed/sad.gif[/IMG]

About half of the engineers I work with are from other countries. China, India, Taiwan, Japan are probably the most prevalent origin countries. I would say half of them arrived here with their education already while the other half finished their education here. Some are now citizens and other aren't and I've talked with several who plan on returning to their homeland after they make enough money here.

Doesn't surprise me. I said so on this board last year. The number of visa's requested will continue to go up,regardless of whether the economy is good or bad; and why not, they'll work for less, and that's what the corporations want.

When will congress realize THERE IS NO SKILL SHORTAGE and end these phony baloney requests! It's an excuse for them to save $10k+ per skilled worker, nothing more.

If they really had skills that americans did not they would be commanding average salaries HIGHER than americans at the same corporations, doing the same jobs. Millions of available and skilled people here and they're flying them in by the hundreds of thousands...

--- I like this part ---



So they must be laying off only the ones who spontaneously became unskilled. I mean, it's a skills shortage after all! BWAHAHAHAHA

You may very well be guilty of "Thinking Outside the Box."

[:D]

Post from pogo -

We're still smarting from Wen Ho Lee. I'm certain that he was the best in his field too.

The Red Chinese thought so as well.

'Course, good old red-blooded Americans have never thought twice about spying for the Reds.

But we needn't import more spies, either.

Eric The(HireAmerican)Hun[>]:)]

When I was in school, half the engineering students were from overseas.  These guys blew away the US born students for dedication.

When many of the US students didn't do the homework, these guys were trying to derive equations in supplemental textbooks that noone else even bothered looking for in the bookstore.

Pretty humbling.  I am playing catchup on some of the stuff I didn't realize was important, but these guys took nothing for granted.  No wonder that cutting edge companies are looking for foreigners.

There seems to be a mixed bag coming from abroad, at least in the software field. I have worked with many Indians who hold no engineering degree at all, at least by US standards. Many appear to hold technical degrees, which at best are representative of what we call an AA degree here in the US. Some have even less education. They seem to specialize in a certain area, for instance Visual C++ and MFC, or Oracle applications development, but lack a general computer science education. At the same time, these same companies require a BSCS/MSCS from the Americans. I know this is not true in all cases, but with the 40-50 foreign engineers I have worked with, that was the case.

There is clearly a double standard here. There is nothing wrong with our universities; they are producing top-notch engineers, and more than usual as of late. The problem is the playing field is not level. Our companies view engineers as a commodity and do not really value their employment. If they can find Indians and Chinese for 30% less, then that's what they go after. But this is not in the spirit of the H1-B program. By law, US companies must look for local talent before tapping the H1-B program. They are not doing that. I know one company that posted want ads in the maintenance worker's lunchroom, fully expecting no one would apply. Of course, no one did, so they used it as an excuse to sign-up with a body shop specializing in foreign engineers.

In any case, with all the technical people out of work, I fail to see how the H1-B program is justified at this time. Perhaps someone can enlighten me.

pogo, I'm sure that happens. But don't discount the fact US universities make a fortune from students paying foreign tuition. In fact, I know one case where a Chinese girl was accepted into UCLA with a 3.3 GPA, where they normally require 3.9/4.0 for US students. What does that tell you?

Wen Ho Lee was in the wrong place.  We are talking critical national security issues here.

A security clearance is not generally necessary to design a car engine, a better stereo system, or mousetraps.  Doing advanced nuclear weapons design work does require some allegiance to the country sponsoring the work, though (except in the middle east).

What still bugs me about the engineering curriculum is that a whole year is wasted in coursework that has NOTHING to do with being an engineer.  

Music appreciation, history of ethics,  pass/fail English 101, filmmaking, etc.  We were force fed some of this CRAP to keep whole  departments in existance.  I could have used a first and second semester design course better than micro and macro enconomics.

THis might be part of a classical education, but I came here to learn engineering.  It was expensive, too.

EDIT:  Matt, I don't really know that 3.3 GPA tells me.  They pay regular out of state tuition, same as I did.  We had one guy that old JR Simplot (the guy who owns half of Idaho)sent to the U of I with a basket of money telling the president to "take care of our boy.  We want him to get an education."  I know it is not a level field.    

I get about 30+ resumes a week from people loooking for software development positions at my company. They may all be American citizens, but the number that aren't of asian (Chinese or Indian) extraction is less than 1%.

The last time we had openings it took us 6 months to find 4 appropriate qualified developers. They were all in the US on H-1B status. One of them lasted 6 weeks. We've been looking for a qualified replacement for 3 months now. None of them are paid any less than our US citizen developers, regardless of visa status. You can't pay top people less than they're worth. The problem isn't the visa program per say; it's the body shops that make use of it to undercut the run-of-the-mill US developer/engineer/whatever.

Actually, you can pay them less than they're worth if you hang a carrot in front of them. The carrot is the green card and I know from experience even the best foreign engineers will do just about anything for one.

It's pretty amazing to me that people would object to an American company wanting to save money, or make their products cheaper.  Last I heard that was called "capitalism", something we used to believe in in this country.

This from the same people that crow about saving $100 on a pre-ban, or getting hi-cap mags cheap.  When a company does it, I guess it's wrong.  Funny!

Published Monday, January 28, 2002

[size=6]Changes in student visas hit obstacles[/size=6]

[size=4]Personnel shortages and financial concerns hold up new policies for foreign students[/size=4]

By Kate Zernike and Christopher Drew
NEW YORK TIMES


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Despite promises to tighten controls on student visas after Sept. 11, the government is at least a year away from making the system safer from terrorists, like those who used the visas while plotting the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the September attacks, immigration officials say.

A computer network to track foreign students in the country, originally ordered by Congress six years ago, is still being tested and will not be up and running until next year.

Even then, immigration service officials said, there will not be enough enforcement agents to check on all of the visa violators flagged by the system.

[b]Moreover, colleges that see foreign students as a lucrative market are raising concerns about how the system will be paid for and operated, and their objections could delay it even further.[/b]

Currently, officials concede, they do not know where the 547,000 people holding student visas are attending school, or whether they actually are.

The halting efforts to plug holes in the student visa system reflect the overall difficulty of improving domestic defense, most notably airline security.

Even in a world said to be forever changed by terrorism, demands for better security are, just four months later, hitting an old reality of competing interests, entrenched lobbies and reluctance to make financial or practical sacrifices.

"As we get further and further from Sept. 11, there has been kind of a resumption of the traditional battle lines," said Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y.

Certainly, the Sept. 11 attacks inspired widespread agreement about the need to change a system that allowed the names of foreign students to pile up unread in immigration offices and permitted Hani Hanjour, for example, to enter this country on a student visa and roam free until he flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon.

But last week, higher education institutions again raised a raft of objections, sending a letter to the Immigration and Naturalization Service that called the planned system unworkable and demanding technical advisory groups and training.

Keeping track of newcomers on student visas might seem straightforward. But like other issues of domestic defense, it gets tangled in complexities.
[more]

Universities say that policing students violates the culture of academic freedom. In addition, any new push to monitor the 74,000 universities and technical schools where foreign students are enrolled will strain government agencies that even before Sept. 11 were considered the weakest link in fighting terrorism.

Even in big cities, the immigration service assigns only one person to work with colleges on visas.

[b]The issue is particularly pressing for community and technical colleges, which rely heavily on foreign students because they pay higher tuition.[/b]

The colleges aggressively market themselves with Web sites in Arabic and recruiting trips around the world.

The Illinois Institute of Technology, for example, enrolls a higher percentage of foreign students than do Harvard, New York University or Columbia. Overall, foreign students spent $12 billion in the United States last year.

President Bush first promised better monitoring of student visas in October. On Friday, he said he was increasing the immigration service budget by 29 percent, which immigration officials said would largely be used for computer systems to track the more than 30 million visas issued in this country each year.

Immigration officials said it was unclear if they would be able to hire more enforcement agents.

They said many of the extra resources the agency had received in recent years had gone toward tightening the Mexican border.

There are currently only 2,000 immigration enforcement agents nationwide, who have an array of duties including tracking hundreds of thousands of visa violators.

Michael Becraft, the acting deputy commissioner of the INS, recently told Congress that it has been hard for the enforcement agents to monitor foreign students because the agents are "focused in a lot of different directions."

Once the tracking system is completed, the agency will need to find ways to scan the database to pinpoint the visa violators who seem most likely to pose a threat.

[url]www.contracostatimes.com/news/nation/stories/xvisas_20020128.htm[/url]

DK-Prof, I think this article has relevance. But to answer your question, you are correct - UCLA, at least, makes no distinction between American students from out-of-state and foreign students. Both groups pay the same tuition. And I would agree that foreign students are not members of a protected class, as are minority American students. All I can say is I saw what I saw. J

DScott, the issue is of fairness and what's best for the country in the long-term. On the one hand, companies complain that there are not enough American engineering graduates to meet the need, yet they hire cheap, foreign labor, undercutting the bargaining position of US residents, which makes young people think twice about getting into engineering at all. I don't know what field you work in, but I'm sure you would not be too happy knowing you will be replace by two foreign workers once you're in your mid-40's and at the top of your pay scale. The unions would never have it, why should any other American worker?

One of my old college roomates recently applied for a job at the University.  He is German and got his Masters degree here and returned to Germany for his PhD.  He found out that he is the only one that applied for the job.  This leads me to suspect that there is a shortage of qualified engineers of University caliber.

At the company I used to work all of the Oracle DBAs were from India and here on H-1Bs.  All of the Americans that applied were not even close to qualified for the job.  Most of the senior level programmers were from China.  Again, the resumes I saw from American applicants were stictly junior level.  This was a few years ago and things may have changed, but I doubt it.  If the company was not allowed to hire the H1-B workers they would have had to train unqualified junior programmers, which would have pushed project schedules back at least a year.

What [are] [b]you[/b] talking about?  Mattja did [b]not[/b] say that foreign students pay more than out-of-state students.

What he said was, "US universities make a fortune from students paying foreign tuition"

According to the UCLA web site current-term non-resident tuition is an extra $3,568 [u]per quarter[/u], which California residents do [b]not[/b] pay.

I am a degreed EE, and have been a R&D design engineer my whole career. Foreign engineers are NOT better than American. They have their share of duds who couldn't design their way out of a paper bag, just as we do. More motivated? Harder workers? Hardly. Some are OK, and the rest are mostly introverted robot-like geeks without social skills who work very hard because they wouldn't be around otherwise. Their cultures generally emphasize a strong work ethic and slave-like devotion to the training above everything else, like CREATIVITY. When they graduate, a lot are so burnt out their production suffers.

H1B visas are a license to steal jobs from qualified Americans. This is why I quit the IEEE. Fuck diversity! Give me someone who can take the ball and run with it. Someone who can think creatively. Someone who speaks English! The job ads these folks apply for are a freaking joke! "Must have MSEE, work long hours, 10 years industry experience. $55k/yr"! The industry publications are FULL of ads like that. BWAHAHAHA! No wonder all they get is H1B foreigners applying for peanuts like that.

Damn Straight!
I have found that workforce Engineering talent is not ethnically biased and I work with alot of people from all walks of life.

How many of them can;
build a bomb from household chemicals,
arc and mig weld,
rebuild a V8 engine,
knock a .25 @ 100yrds,
ride a wheelie on a dirtbike,
womanize chicks,
AND: design a direct-launch 2GHz CDMA Transmitter???

I agree. Foreign engineers are not better than American engineers. Many that I have seen have good school skills but lack the drive and common sense to get the job done. The reason that students don't go into engineering is because it is probably the crappiest shitiest worst profession in America to get into. You work like a dog for 50 hrs a week for nothing. I have a masters degree in civil engineering, my PE license for three states, and I am required to take continuing education classes every year. Also, I take all of the risk and liability for construction projects worth thousands of dollars. Yet, I still make 8K less a year than my neighbor who is a computer tech with no formal education and is 6 years younger than I am. I have a friend who is a cop that will eventually make more money than me. I have another friend from high school who is a union carpenter that has always made more money than I have.

I like what I do, but I feel very bitter when I look back at all the work I went though just to get paid crap. It is not worth it. If you love your children, don’t let them go into engineering.

... Yeah but [u]we[/u] know where the nice Sushi bars and best big breasted topless dancers are.

... Seriously, most hired guns in my business are "job shoppers" and they serve a specific (and usually temporary) service. To "hard badges" it means a buffer zone at layoff time.

DScott,

Since it is late I don’t have the time to explain this correctly but lets just say that this is one reason that Capitalism is not as good as we seem to think it is. Nothing is perfect including Capitalism and we all should know that Communism is really screwed up to be polite. The fact is that hiring foreigners instead of hiring Americans is not Patriotic and is not good for our country or I should say citizens of our country. Capitalism is very good for the GNP but not for the common worker. I read about a programmer who as told to teach a programmer from India to do what she did and when he was finished learning he was going to take the other programmers job back to India. And this programmer had received awards for the quality of her work.

By the way DScott I do not believe you would feel the way you feel about Companies hiring foreign workers if you found yourself  out of work and could not get another job because of the greed of American Corporations.

Damn! You suck.  I pitty you... Hehe J/K [:D]

The problem is not foreigners that come here to work, but lamers already here that don't.  I would glady welcome a bunch of hard working foreigners if we could only get rid of lazy tax sucking leeches that claim to be Americans. Get rid of them and the problem is solved.

It's interesting you said you quit the IEEE. I read a statement from them once where they did not condemn the H1-B program, but instead, urged Congress to provide money to better train American workers. A lot of engineers I know read behind the lines, and figuring they are in the pocket of the ITAA and other special interest groups, quit paying their dues. Pretty soon the IEEE will be to engineers what the AMA is to thinking medical professionals.

One has to wonder why the American junior engineers are unqualified? There was a time when companies would train CS graduates to do the job, but obviously that time is behind us.

Furthermore, one has to wonder why the Indians are qualified? Could they be graduates of those technical "colleges" I spoke about; the schools offering majors in Visual C++ and Oracle Applications? Last I checked there were no BS degrees in Oracle.

Why would a company hire a foreigner to be an oracle DBA, when they can hire a CS graduate, or in the case of the early 90's, one of the thousands of experienced software engineers who worked in the aerospace field but were laid off as the result of the recession? Why would they prefer someone with a "degree" in Oracle, when they can have another with a full fledged engineering degree, fluent in most aspects of computer science?

It's obvious they want people with very specific knowledge they can get up and running quickly. That's understandable. However, before the H1-B, they had to train people for their specific needs, which in many cases led to a long-term relationship that benefited both the company and the worker. Today, they could give a crap less about the worker.

Today, they view engineers as commodities, and the H1-B program simply makes it all the more possible.

You're not really that easily amazed, are you?
If so, I guess it escaped you that "save money" and "make their products cheaper" is, in the context of this thread, being done at cost of taking jobs out of the hands of U.S. talent.

No wait, maybe that doesn't bother you. But you might be a little uneasy at the idea that Rajeev sends a lot of his pay back to his family back home and it's spent in [b]their[/b] economy.

No?  Well how about the idea that before long, there will be enough for his ailing parents to immigrate and take advantage of wonderful U.S. Gov't programs?

OK, maybe that doesn't bother you.
Think of it as corporate welfare.
How?  By creating loopholes in the immigration quotas strictly for the benefit of certain domestic industries.  This based on the "shortage" of "qualified" talent here at home.  I put those quotes around those words because they are self-determined by the beneficiary industries, and are subject to manipulation to suit their needs.

Maybe that's no problem to you, either.  Think about America's technological edge slipping offshore as trade secrets go East for reverse-engineering.




Only superficially.  In a similiar sense, all you need to do to make money in the stock market is 'buy low' and 'sell high'.

We used to also believe in putting American citizens first, and keeping America strategically strong,  



There's a huge difference between shopping for the best price on an AR-15 or G.I. mags, and selling out your workforce for a bunch of foreigners.  If (your reasoning seems to head in this direction) price is the only factor, you'd have us all buy Chinese knockoffs of USA mags.

 

That was after I quit, they used to claim we needed MORE H1Bs, and they also supported Clinton, etc., etc. You are right about the "thinking professionals". Right on. The only reason to be in the IEEE that I could see was the Spectrum (great magazine) and cheap life insurance. I'm still in SMPTE and the AES.