The ticket to our future: Immigrants

Date: Monday, January 20, 2003 2:01 PM

H-1B and JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER

www.ZaZona.com

Judy Olian, Dean of Penn State University's Smeal College of Business,
warns that nobody should be tempted to protect domestic workers and
explains that cutting the flow of H-1Bs would be a bad mistake. She
shouldn't worry because nobody in our government or industry is
concerned with protecting American workers.

This article must be an industry plant because it's appearing in
newspapers all over the country.

Following this article are some reactions to her article.

http://www.abqtrib.com/shns/story.cfm?pk=OLIAN-01-17-03&cat=FF

The ticket to our future: Immigrants
By JUDY OLIAN
Scripps Howard News Service
January 17, 2003

- We are a welcoming country, a melting pot for immigrants, a society
predicated on social openness and mobility. These values are at the
heart of our democracy. They are also key to our continued market
growth and dominance in the global economy.

The US economy has expanded at a rate of 3.7 percent over the last
decade and as a country we have welcomed 1 million immigrants annually.
Economists attribute part of the unprecedented growth to the influx of
a new labor supply. In contrast, countries that are not as willing as
the US to absorb new immigrants are suffering population implosion as
well as brain drain. For example, Germany would have to grow its
immigration rate by a factor of 20, and Japan by a factor of 50, to
maintain the size of their current populations.

Even with consistent inflow of immigrants, we will suffer severe labor
shortages by 2010, especially among technical professionals. Yes, there
is life after this recession. The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts
that the number of technology-related jobs in the US will rise from 3.3
million in 2000 to 5.5 million in 2010, with too few technically
trained graduates to fill them. For example, there are less than
110,000 annual undergraduates and graduates in electrical engineering
in the US, compared to 200,000 in China. Of the US graduates, more than
half of the engineering doctorates return to their home countries once
they complete their degrees. With only limited numbers of domestic
graduates entering the work force, American employers must turn
elsewhere, to immigrants and temporary visitors from abroad to
replenish an aging workforce and to fuel a growing knowledge-based
economy.

That's where H-1B visas for foreign workers come into play. These are
visas granted to professionals for a stay of up to 6 years in the US,
that then can be converted into permanent residency with employer
sponsorship. Georgetown University researchers estimate that as many as
710,000 individuals in this country hold H-1B visas, and more than half
are concentrated in engineering programming and other computer-related
jobs. Traditionally, the annual award of H-1B visas was capped at
65,000. After intense lobbying from the electronics industry at the
heyday of the dot.coms, the American Competitiveness and Workforce
Improvement Act was passed in 2000 raising the H-1B cap to 195,000
through September 2003. Over half of the applications in 2000 were in
computer-related fields, and 42 percent of the applicants originated in
India. At the peak economic boom in 2001, the INS granted a total of
163,000 H-1B visas for the year. That's 163,000 system engineers,
software designers, or information security professionals available to
US firms they could not otherwise have hired. Congress will be
re-evaluating the H-1B cap this year given expiration of the Act and
excess supply of hi tech professionals.

Looking beyond present economic woes, major technical corporations in
the US including Intel and Microsoft are fairly glum about the
prospects for an adequate pipeline of technical talent. This talent is
the essential ingredient for continued leadership of US corporations in
the global competition for technology innovation. So over the longer
term, our dependency on non-domestic talent, especially in technical
areas, will persist.

But we are in a changed time, in the midst of a protracted recession,
with 2 million Americans laid off in 2001 and 1.5 million layoffs in
2002 according to the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas.
And post 9-11 there are heightened needs to protect Americans from the
foreign elements who seek to harm us. These difficult economic and
security challenges cause friction among workers, tempting us first to
protect domestic workers and to clamp down on admission of
professionals from other countries regardless of the talent need.
Several groups including the Institute of Electrical and Electronic
Engineers - U.S.A. and the Coalition for Fair Employment in Silicon
Valley are challenging visa and immigration caps that in their view
disadvantage US residents and citizens by creating a labor glut during
this market downturn. And employers are caught in the epicenter of this
dilemma.

It would be a mistake to close our national doors to outside talent and
creativity. That's been an essential ingredient of our economic
vitality and innovation. Employers must find the difficult balance
between policies and practices that protect their long time employees,
prepare for talent succession during the next economic boom, and
safeguard our national security. In some instances, it's a teetering
balance but it will determine our economic vibrancy into the future.

(Judy Olian is Dean of Penn State University's Smeal College of
Business and a leading expert on strategic human resources management.)

Dr. Norman Matloffs Age Discrimination Newsletter 1/18/2003

Your first reaction in reading this op-ed might be, "Doesn't this woman
read the newspapers? The tech job market is dead, and yet she says we
need immigrants to fill the jobs."

But in actuality, her article has all the telltale signs of being an industry plant. It has all the latest industry lobbyist arguments
(e.g.
the number of engineers in China, a point the industry lobbyists have
been making for about 4 or 5 months now), and again, surely a business
school dean would know what is going on in the tech labor market.

These op-eds have generally appeared in the past when the industry was
preparing for legislation in Congress. In other words, I suspect that
this may be a trial balloon, to gauge whether the public would accept
renewal of the expanded H-1B cap this year.

So, I strongly urge you to write letters to the editor (whatever your
view is) in response to this op-ed. (Note: Write letters to the
editor, which will hopefully be published. Your temptation might be to
write to Ms. Olian; it's fine to do both, but the letters to the editor
are the higher-priority item.)

The letters address for the Albuquerque Tribune is letters@abqtrib.com
Please see http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/letters.html for advice before
you write, particularly concerning the need to keep your letter SHORT,
say 250 words max.

Since this is a wire-service piece, it may have appeared in other
newspapers, so you may wish to check whether your local paper ran it,
yesterday or some other time, and if so, then write letters to the
editor there too.

Norm

Judy Olian's argument that this country cannot survive without
immigrant labor is insulting and factually wrong.

Thousands of American citizens who are highly educated and possessing
years of experience are losing their jobs at the same time the high
tech industry is importing cheaper foreign labor to fill what they say
is a "labor shortage." There is no shortage, and Olian knows it. This
is about corporate greed and the goal of one day seeing American wages
at the same level that can be found in Third World countries. American
companies do not "need" this labor, they "want" it.

Only a very small fraction of the nearly 2 million people (legal and
illegal) that are arriving here each year have advanced education and
skills. The rest are - and will remain - a burden on our society
because they will never be able to earn enough to generate taxes to pay
for the social services they are using far more than our native born.

American workers are getting it from both sides. Those who aren't
losing their jobs to foreigners in their own communities are also
watching many good-paying jobs being sent overseas.

Shame on Olian for her lack of compassion for her fellow Americans and
lack of faith in their ability to do these jobs as well or better than
their foreign replacements. We wonder what song she would sing if her
employers one day decided to replace her with a foreigner carrying the
same credentials
and a willingness to work for much less.

Dave Gorak
Executive Director
Midwest Coalition to Reduce Immigration

"The ticket to our future: Immigrants" (Judy Olian, 1/17) should win
"non
sequitur of the year."

Concern of a U.S. population implosion is misplaced. Even if
immigration
stopped today, U.S. population would increase for 50 years. An
appropriate
concern is how we are going to maintain our standard of living with a
population of one half billion, given current immigration levels.

Judy's plea that the U.S. must "find ways to attract and absorb
non-U.S.
talent into our workforce" is unwarranted. There are 2 billion people
in
India and China eager to come to the U.S. - the attraction is the
higher
wage and quality of life.

We have absorbed 600,000 H-1B workers in the past three years, at the
cost
of displacing an equivalent number of U.S. workers. Judy advocates
continuing this program -- which allows employers to hire foreign
workers in
spite of qualified American applicants, and lay off Americans while
forcing
them to train their foreign replacements. The H-1B visa provides a
loophole
whereby nonimmigrants can sponsor their fellow foreigners for
immigration.

Judy fails to grasp that the "e-gold rush" might be over. Rather than
fret
over hypothetical labor shortages in 2010, we should act swiftly to
provide
jobs for the 500,000 IT workers who are unemployed today.

The fraudulent H-1B program should be suspended immediately.

Sincerely
Mr. Kim Berry - computer programmer
kimberry007@hotmail.com
webmaster: www.familyinjustice.com/h1b/

Help to Keep ZaZona.com Online

Donate to the Cause at
http://www.zazona.com/Donations.htm
To Subscribe or Unsubcribe send an email to

Back to archives