Every year, the U.S. issues 65000 H-1B visas allowing "foreigners" to work here on a temporary basis. Those here on a student visa can't apply until they graduate, and that's apparently leaving a lot of them in the lurch when it comes to accepting offers from U.S. companies.
That's because each year's allotment of H-IB visas are given out starting April 1st. This year, the supply had dried up by April 2nd. (Source: US Citizenship and Immigration Service, used in a the Boston Globe article cited below.)
Hiawatha Bray's recent article on foreign born grads "stymied" in their attempts to get visas that would enable them to work in the States focused on Harvard grads-to-be with golden opportunities with outfits like Lehman Brothers and Google. But it also laid out the overall problem, with both sides heard from on the let-them-in/keep-them-out debate.
Apparently, this year's problem with the H1-B visas is multi-fold. Partially, it's because of the tech boom, which has increased demand for workers to the go-go levels last seen in the late 1990's. Because of the tech-bust that followed the go-go years, however, the number of H1-B visa available had been reduced by 2/3rd's - from its high of 195,000 to the current 65,000.
According to the spokesperson Bray quotes for the lobbying group that opposes an increase in H1-B visas (Jessica Vaughn of the Center for Immigration Studies), the program has been "swamped" by tech services companies like Tata, Wipro, and Infosys that have gobbled up the visas for workers who take jobs from American workers because they're willing to work for far less. (When I worked at Wang in the 1980's, the company had many imported Indian and Chinese programmers and QA professionals. I don't know how they were paid vis a vis their American counterparts, but there were some in my group and I do know that they lived cheaply in crowded apartments, commuted together, and sent savings home.)
On the other hand, technology and other companies that want to hire talented, high-skilled college grads are limited in what they can do. When sectors of the economy are growing rapidly, and need all the good workers they can lay their mitts on, it seems to make sense to keep these talented, high-skilled college grads here for a while, rather than see them take jobs in London or Singapore or some other place where it's easier for them to find a welcome.
No, these aren't the tired, the poor yearning to breathe free.
They're young, educated, and ambitious. But they are, indeed, huddled, and it sounds like the immigration folks should do a bit of huddling of their own. And figure out a program that is flexible enough to contract and expand with the economy, that prevents the Tata's and Wipro's of the world from flooding the market and undercutting salaries, and that keeps those with the brain-power and ability to help our economy keep expanding stay put for a while.
Great post! I've not visited for a while (still trying to fine-tune my feed thingie) and so am catching up today. These stories always make me think of our own great-grandparents who were illegal immigrants from Norway: just out of their teens, the young men stood in line at the Canadian border clutching the requisite 3 American dollars each to be allowed in. Some of them didn't have it, so they carefully palmed bills to share up and down the line, or folded them over to make them look like two...
ReplyDeleteWhat a complicated problem, is modern immigration. We are so afraid of terrorists and people who will take away our jobs (as if I really WANT to wash dishes for $2/hr!) I don't know the answer, but agree we need to keep working at it, and not give in to absolutists on either side, even if that would make it much simpler. Sighhhh....
It's a tough issue, but I tend to agree with where you're going.
ReplyDeleteIn a connected world, protectionism just doesn't work. Keeping out lower-paid people at any level is an exercise in cutting off our nose to spite our feet.
Besides--having foreigners in helps a navel-gazing country get less xenophobic; gives foreigners a great first-hand knowledge of what a good country this is, which they then take back and use to become walking anti-terrorist and pro-US lobbyests; and, as you say, the income they generate, as well as taxes on it, stays to a great extent within this country.
Not to mention a sound immigration policy is our best solution to the rat-in-the-python demographic bulge that is the boomer generation, about to retire with not enough youngsters to pay our bloated way. Import some young taxpaying workers? Sounds good to me.
H-1B as a remedy for labor shortages and as a means of hiring "the best and the brightest" from around the world (which I
ReplyDeletestrongly support), the vast majority are ordinary people doing ordinary work. Instead of being about talent, H-1B is about cheap labor.
H-1B visa holders may only work for sponsoring employers after approval by the Departments of Labor and Homeland Security.
Although most of the non-compliant H-1B workers had posted wages from employers in fields associated with technical or
specialty occupations, the report noted that one H-1B worker had earnings from a restaurant and janitorial service.
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H-1b visa