Bill Gates and Steven A. Ballmer of Microsoft have led a parade of high-tech executives to Capitol Hill, urging lawmakers to provide more visas for temporary foreign workers and permanent immigrants who can fill critical jobs.
Google has reminded senators that one of its founders, Sergey Brin, came from the Soviet Union as a young boy. To stay competitive in a “knowledge-based economy,” company officials have said, Google needs to hire many more immigrants as software engineers, mathematicians and computer scientists.
High-tech companies want to be able to hire larger numbers of well-educated, foreign-born professionals who, they say, can help them succeed in the global economy. For these scientists and engineers, they seek permanent-residence visas, known as green cards, and H-1B visas. The H-1B program provides temporary work visas for people who have university degrees or the equivalent to fill jobs in specialty occupations including health care and technology. The Senate bill would expand the number of work visas for skilled professionals, but high-tech companies say the proposed increase is not nearly enough. Several provisions of the Senate bill are meant to enhance protections for American workers and to prevent visa fraud and abuse.
High-tech companies were surprised and upset by the bill that emerged last month from secret Senate negotiations. E. John Krumholtz, director of federal affairs at Microsoft, said the bill was “worse than the status quo, and the status quo is a disaster.”
In the last two weeks, these businesses have quietly negotiated for changes to meet some of their needs. But the bill still falls far short of what they want, an outcome suggesting that their political clout does not match their economic strength.
Stephen W. Yale-Loehr, a co-author of a treatise on immigration law, said: “High-tech companies are very organized. They have numerous lobby groups. When Bill Gates advocates more H-1B visas and green cards for tech workers, everyone listens.
“But that supposed influence has not translated into legislative results,” Mr. Yale-Loehr, who teaches at Cornell Law School, continued. “High-tech companies have been lobbying unsuccessfully since 2003 for more H-1B visas. It’s hard to get anything through Congress these days. In addition, anti-immigrant groups are well organized. U.S. computer programmers are constantly arguing that H-1B workers undercut their wages.”
There is no shortage of American high-tech workers. There IS, however, a shortage of American high-tech workers who are under 30 and willing to work 100 hour weeks for pay competitive with programmers in Bangalore. To major in computer science is to commit yourself to a career path in which your top skills today will be obsolete in a year, that requires constant updating of skills, which don't make you any more marketable. Because if your current employer uses skill A, B, and C, and you teach yourself D, E, and F on the side, after you've trained your H-1B replacement, your next potential employer, which uses D, E, and F, won't hire you because you haven't used it on the job.
Who needs this?
American tech workers are going the way of manufacturing workers because the investment in continuing education, just so one can get shafted by employers constantly looking to cut costs while increasing the executive pay share of the pie, hardly seems worth the effort.
When companies tell American workers that the special commitments an IT career requires will be rewarded if they make the effort, and when companies stop deciding that anyone over 35 is too old to learn anything new, and when companies realize that the commitment to continuous updating of skills ought to be compensated accordingly, they won't need to hire foreign workers because there WILL be enough Americans to fill the need.
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