Do high-tech firms really need imported workers

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http://www.numbersusa.com/cgi/text.cgi?09-21-00-USATODAY

USA TODAY September 21, 2000

'Do high-tech firms really need imported workers' By John Miano

In recent years, news reports across the country have cited studies that claim there is a huge shortage of workers in the technology industry. These claims have been repeated so often that they have become "fact" to many people.

What the public does not realize is that, in most cases, the groups putting out these studies are the same ones who are lobbying to allow more foreign workers into the country. These groups contend that if they can't import more foreign programmers, the new economy may collapse.

Let's not be too hasty. Congress' General Accounting Office (GAO), which recently analyzed various studies that estimated shortages between 700,000 and 190,000, concluded that "more information is needed to characterize the (information technology) labor market and determine the extent of any shortage."

If the shortage is suspect, what do these employers really want?

They want cheap programmers from other countries. I'll start believing there is a shortage when programmer salaries start rising half as fast as CEO salaries, or when I see half as many African-Americans at work as H-1B workers.

Recently, I responded to two dozen job postings on the Web. Only one company got back to me, but said I was "overqualified." That kind of response does not suggest a desperate programmer shortage.

What should outrage Americans is the industry's solution to its mythical labor shortage: the H-1B visa program. These visas allow employers to import temporary workers in "specialty occupations" for up to six years. That sounds innocent enough, but the details should concern you. The law, for example, contains a loophole that allows employers to fire hard-working American workers and replace them with foreign workers.

I learned of the H-1B program after cleaning up the widely reported mess at American International Group (AIG), a company that fired its programming staff and replaced it with foreign workers. By using lower-paid H-1B workers, AIG expected to save millions of dollars a year. But the foreign programmers were incompetent, so the firm saved nothing.

What it did is perfectly legal. Supporters tell us H-1B can't be used for cheap labor because H-1B workers have to be paid the prevailing wage. They neglect to mention that the employer determines the prevailing wage. The government, as GAO reported, can "initiate investigations to address potential (abuse) only if narrowly restricted circumstances are met."

When you have a system designed to be abused with impunity, it generates high demand. H-1B was originally limited to 65,000 visas a year, but was raised to 115,000 in 1998. Now lobbyists are demanding this be increased to 200,000.

H-1B is simply a welfare program for wealthy campaign contributors that should be ended. But despite the audits documenting abuse, calls from government officials to clean things up and the opposition of 84% of Americans to the program, Congress has refused to do anything but grovel for cash. As Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., noted, "This (H-1B) is a very important issue for the high-tech executives who give the money."

Americans need to realize the depth to which money has corrupted Congress, and act accordingly at the ballot box Nov. 7. They also should lobby members of Congress to vote against the H-1B visa legislation.

John Miano is a software programmer, a writer of programmer books and chairman of the Programmers Guild, an organization that is not a labor union.

-- K (infosurf@yahoo.com), September 23, 2000


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