Tech bust hits immigrants hard

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Tech bust hits immigrants hard

April 22, 2001

BY DAVE NEWBART STAFF REPORTER

When Mei-Ling began looking for a job in 1999, during the peak of the tech boom, she was in high demand. The computer systems engineer from China, who had worked for cell phone maker Ericsson, immediately had four job offers.

She chose Motorola. Her choice may have cost her a place in the United States.

Mei-Ling moved from New York to Schaumburg, bought a car and rented an apartment. She fell in love with Chicago, which she found similar to Beijing.

She quickly was granted a special visa, known as H-1B, created for foreign professionals with special skills. About 800,000 workers have used the visas to come to the United States since 1992, when businesses complained of a critical shortage of high-tech workers. About 500,000 of the workers are estimated to still be in the country.

Like most of these workers, Mei-Ling then applied for a green card, hoping to become a permanent resident.

Then the tech economy tanked. Mei-Ling and hundreds of thousands of tech workers--including untold thousands of H-1B employees--lost their jobs.

Unlike others without jobs, immigrants such as Mei-Ling now face an added hardship: being classified as undocumented and, eventually, deported or not allowed to work in this country again for several years.

They are scrambling to find new work and, in some cases, taking less-skilled jobs with dramatic pay cuts. Mei-Ling hasn't even been able to get an interview since she was let go last month, because so many companies have hiring freezes.

"It's really difficult," said Mei-Ling, 33, who like other immigrants interviewed for this story asked that her real name not be used. "I don't know what I'm going to do, but I don't want to be here illegally."

* * *

Immigrants who have created technologies and written software are now leaving the United States.

"It's brain drain in reverse," said R.S. Rajan, administrative director of the Indo-American Center in Chicago. Nearly half of all H-1B workers are from India.

Nowhere is that more evident then at Motorola, the largest employer of immigrants with H-1B visas in the nation. The company has 3,700 on staff.

"A lot of new technology has been developed and written by a significant number of foreign employees," said Belkis Muldoon, director of global immigration services.

But Motorola has been forced to lay off a large number of such workers among the 22,000 workers let go. Muldoon said the company has also dramatically scaled back its hiring of foreigners.

The downturn has also affected specialized consulting companies that bring in foreign workers and contract them to companies as temporary help.

Not long ago, the companies couldn't keep up with demand, particularly in preparation for Y2K. Now they've stopped encouraging workers to come to the United States, and workers already here remain on the payroll but without work, a status called being "on the bench."

"We are definitely seeing a slowdown, and it's had a huge impact on the whole cycle of our business," said Naveen Irubayaraj, marketing manager of FourthTechnologies in Hoffman Estates. About 20 of Forth's 400 consultants--all H-1Bs--are on the bench, compared with a handful in the past, he said.

Because most tech companies give no notice of layoffs, the H-1B workers immediately find themselves without legal working status and in danger of being in violation of immigration law, or "out of status." Any progress toward getting a green card is halted.

"They are totally dependent on this job, and if they lose it, they could be gone," said Chicago immigration attorney Susan Fortino-Brown.

That dependency has allowed some companies to exploit such workers, said Suresh Kumar, chief financial officer with the Immigrants Support Network, an H-1B advocacy group with 20,000 members. H-1B workers often work longer hours and for less pay than their American co-workers, he said.

"You tie the guy down to your company and make him work all kinds of hours," said Kumar, a native of India who lives in Elkhart, Ind., and who now has a green card. "Some people call it indentured servitude."

The status of H-1B workers was improved in a law signed last October by former President Bill Clinton. It not only allowed H-1B workers to transfer to another job without having to first leave the country, but also allowed those whose visas expired after six years to remain in the country if a green card application was pending.

* * *

Navigating the new rules can be a dizzying process for even longtime immigration lawyers.

For example, the conventional wisdom is that such workers have 10 days to find a job if they are laid off, because in the past, workers had 10 days to leave the country if their visas expired. But INS spokeswoman Eyleen Schmidt said the law states only that immigrants have a "reasonable" time to leave.

That could be a short time if a single worker has advance notice of a layoff, or could be a few months if a worker is laid off with no notice or has a child in school, Schmidt said.

***

VISAS GRANTED

Immigrants with special skills are allowed to work in the United States on what's called an H-1B visa. Here's the number of visas issued since they were created in 1992:

1992 48,645

1993 61,591

1994 60,279

1995 54,178

1996 55,141

1997 65,000

1998 65,000

1999154,000

2000 165,000

2001 72,000*

*through March

SOURCE: Immigration and Naturalization Service

http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/visa22.html

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), April 22, 2001

Answers

This doesn't phase me in the least, I hope thousands are sent packing. For years they have been keeping the labor pool flooded and the wages paid to IT professional depressed by bring in foreign workers.

It's not like the migrant farm workers, these are jobs that take hard earned skills. Jobs that should pay higher wages. Jobs that require you to completely re-educate yourself every 5-7 years.

Companies don't want to help re-educate IT staff. They want young and naive. Staff they can obsolete and replace in 5 years. American can't graduate enough of these every year. So we import them.

I'm an Applications/Network Engineer, over 15 years experience. A few years back I was replaced by a "green card". My 10 years experience with the company made me too expensive. I hope they leave.

-- Tom Flook (tflook@earthlink.net), April 22, 2001.


The H1B program now keeps even Green Card holders out of work! The H1B program provids the super-rich IT industry with indentured servents. These visa holders cannot switch jobs, as citizens and Green Card holders can. It is no secret that citizens and resident aliens cannot get jobs in IT anymore because the government did the bidding of it's IT masters and increased the H1B program.

BTW, they are now using the tack to recruit teachers from overseas. This in spite of the fact that I know of severdal qualified teachers in the Northeast who cannot get permanent teachers jobs. The school administrators have turned these excellent teachers into "permatemps" (sound familiar, IT workers?). Don't send your kids to college to become teachers if this is not stopped because they will not get jobs when they get out!

-- K (infosurf@yahoo.com), April 23, 2001.


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