The bill would increase the number of visas for highly skilled workers, a goal long sought by the high-tech industry. Senator Bernard Sanders, independent of Vermont, won adoption of an amendment that would increase the fee charged to employers for such a visa, known as an H-1B, to $5,000, from $1,500. The money would be used to finance scholarships for American citizens studying engineering, mathematics, computer science or health care.
Robert P. Hoffman, a vice president of Oracle, said the higher fees represented “an onerous tax increase on America’s most innovative companies.”
Sayeth Kim Berry in response:
Compete America, headed by Hoffman, claims that “too few American students are seeking degrees in science, engineering and mathematics.” (Public Policy Institute of California recently made a similar claim.) But rather than support a $15,000 annual scholarship so that Americans can attend American universities, Hoffman proposes that “the H-1B and green card programs should exempt foreign-born Masters and PhD graduates of U.S. universities from arbitrary visa caps."
(The Programmers Guild refutes that there is any shortage of Americans students, citing declining salaries and tech workers over age 40 unable to find jobs. A recent Duke University study reached the same conclusion: "we did not find any indication of a shortage of engineers in the United States.")
As I discovered when I turned 40, Information Technology, and especially web development, is a young person's game. It gets wearing to go to work every day when you're on grants, living in terror that if the grant money runs out, YOU will be the one deemed expendable, and knowing that if that happens, your career is over. Ads for tech jobs contain code words like "fun company" and "Friday tailgate parties" that make the message clear. I used to think that it was possible to be the coolest old person around. But I came to realize that no matter how cool you are, to the 25-year-old in the next office, you are "Mom."
This country is full of tech workers over 40 who have given up on their careers because they are tired of being humiliated on job interviews, and are working for seven bucks an hour at Circuit City or at Trader Joe's. There is no shortage of IT workers, there is just a shortage of IT workers willing to take 50% pay cuts to be competitive with H-1Bs brought in who can be worked to death and then discarded.
Politicians in both parties are giving lip service to the notions of "retraining" and "education" as a panacea for the employment problems in this country; problems hidden by the way "unemployment" is calculated. But young people aren't stupid. They see what's going on. And while we tend to think we'll be young forever when we're young, these kids ARE able to look down the road and see what's coming. And why should they bust their asses preparing for a career in which they can be replaced tomorrow by someone from an H-1B body shop?
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