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WASHINGTON—In
a sleek, spartan office overlooking
Tysons Corner,
Virginia,
three young men in shirt sleeves hunch over computer
screens. Paul Murphy is designing a site for golf
tournaments. Pranay Gujjeti is creating an image-editing
program. Darren Gibney is producing a commercial for
fire alarms.
These
foreign-born software engineers—from Northern Ireland,
India and Ireland—are legal immigrants, spending several
years in the United States on special work visas. They
say they thrive on the exposure to America’s
cutting-edge technology and competitive culture. Their
boss at Virtual Atlantic Inc., Austin Farshi, says they
bring an eager attitude and exceptional talent.
But as
the emotionally charged issue of immigration consumes
the US Senate and the nation this month, skilled foreign
professionals are almost as contentious a part of the
restructuring debate as impoverished illegal immigrants
who sneak across the Mexican border to harvest crops or
hang drywall.
In many
ways, the proposed legislation favors high-skilled
immigrants and the industries that employ them. It would
increase the ceiling on new H-1B professional visas,
which allow one- to six-year stays, from 65,000 to
115,000 a year. More important, it would shift the
historic emphasis in US immigration law from
family-reunification to educational and skill levels in
determining who is eligible for permanent residency.
Companies that rely on skilled foreign workers say they
desperately need more of them, but opponents see their
proliferation as an invisible blight on the economy.
They argue that the H-1B visa program displaces tens of
thousands of US-born professionals, depresses wages and
exploits programmers from other countries.
“This is
a cheap labor program, a 20th-century version of
importing cheap tomato pickers,” said Mark Krikorian,
executive director of the Washington-based Center for
Immigration Studies. Older American professionals
seeking decent salaries and benefits, he said, are being
“squeezed out” of high-tech fields by young immigrants
who are “willing to sleep on the floor and work 18 hours
a day because they get something else: a shot at living
in the United States.”
In a
study released last week, the center found that “very
few” H-1B workers could be called highly skilled. It
also found that wages for such workers were on average
$12,000 below their US-born counterparts and that
employers often said the “prevailing” wage in a variety
of skilled fields—which the law says all H1-B visa
holders must be paid—was significantly lower than it
actually was.
Groups
representing
US
workers in several industries say they have suffered
from the H-1B phenomenon, especially electrical
engineers and computer programmers. John Bauman,
president of a Connecticut professional workers rights
group, said many members once held skilled jobs in the
state’s huge insurance industry but were gradually laid
off and replaced by low-cost foreigners.
“Our
cofounder once earned more than $100,000 with an
insurance firm. Now he’s driving an 18-wheeler,” Bauman
said.
Critics
of skilled labor visas say high-tech firms in particular
use a variety of tricks to replace domestic workers with
foreigners and pay them less than the law allows. One
such practice is to use subcontracting firms to sponsor
their visas so the actual employers are not subject to
the same legal restrictions. Another is to hire foreign
students, who are exempt from visa ceilings if they have
a graduate degree from a US institution.
“If
someone gets a master’s degree in basket weaving from a
fourth-rate diploma mill, should that be a fast track to
immigration?” demanded John Miano, a software industry
analyst affiliated with Krikorian’s organization. “Where
do you draw the line?”
Somewhat
surprisingly to the bill’s supporters in Congress and
the White House, advocates of skilled immigrants and the
high-tech field have heaped criticism instead of praise
on the proposal. They say that the higher visa ceiling
is still too low and that the new rules would make it
more cumbersome for companies to hire foreign workers,
removing their ability to select individual workers to
sponsor for visas.
“This
bill is pretty much a disaster for high-tech employers,”
said Stuart Anderson of the nonprofit National
Foundation for American Policy in Arlington County,
Virginia. He said the proposed rules, which would
require employers to prove a temporary foreign worker
has special skills and would not displace a US worker,
are “so onerous and vague that you would start shackling
fast-moving companies. The risk is that they may decide
it is better to expand outside the United States.”
A study
released last week by the policy group found that,
contrary to allegations that foreign workers are
flooding a number of high-skilled industries, new H-1B
visa holders account for only 0.07 percent of the total
US workforce and that 57 percent of them have advanced
degrees. It also found that, contrary to fears that
Americans are being displaced, computer and math
professions in the United States are at “virtual full
employment,” with jobless rates of 2.4 percent.
But many
employers of skilled visa workers, in a variety of
fields, say they genuinely need their abilities and are
not just looking to save money. They insist that US
universities produce nowhere near enough highly
qualified graduates in a number of technical fields and
that H-1B visas are their only relief.
“It’s
not mostly about the salary; it’s about the attitude,”
said Farshi, of Virtual Atlantic. “They do the same work
Americans do, and they earn the same amount. But they
have more technical expertise than many Americans coming
out of college, and they see working in this field as a
prestigious opportunity instead of taking it for
granted. We are getting the best of the best.” |
