H1-B visas allow US employers to hire non-US-citizens to work in ‘specialty’ occupations. The science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and medical fields account for a large fraction of H1-B visas. The cap is nominally 65,000 per year but, with waivers permitted by existing law, on the order of 120,000 H1-B visas have been issued each year for the past few years. (I’ve known a number of H1-B holders – all with Ph.D.’s and experts in fields where there are few worldwide. In order to get their jobs the positions needed to advertised and if a qualified US citizen had applied they wouldn’t have been hired.) The H1-B program works as-is. It has no obvious problems in need of fixing. Nonetheless changes are afoot. Those changes should be opposed, which brings me to the details of the proposed changes and why we should oppose them…
America’s Genius Glut by Ross Eisenbrey (emphasis mine):
While genuine immigration reform has the potential to fix a seriously broken system, four senators have introduced a bill to solve a problem we don’t have: the supply of high-tech workers.
The bill’s authors … argue that America would benefit from letting more immigrants trained in science, technology, engineering and math work in the country, with the sponsorship of high-tech companies like Microsoft and I.B.M.
But the opposite is the case: the bill would flood the job market with indentured foreign workers, people who could not switch employers to improve their wages or working conditions; damage the employment prospects of hundreds of thousands of skilled Americans; and narrow the educational pipeline that produces these skilled workers domestically.
The impetus for the bill, which would give six-year visas to as many as 300,000 foreign high-tech workers a year, is the longstanding lament by business leaders that they cannot find the talent they need in the American labor market. In their version, there is a shortage of scientists and engineers, and the United States is failing to keep substantial numbers of foreign students in the country. As a result, our position as the world’s leading high-tech economy is in danger.
Fortunately, they argue, H-1B visas — our guest-worker program for high-tech workers — brings us “the best and the brightest” in the world. We just don’t give out enough of them.
But America’s technology leadership is not, in fact, endangered. According to the economist Richard B. Freeman, the United States, with just 5 percent of the world’s population, employs a third of its high-tech researchers, accounts for 40 percent of its research and development, and publishes over a third of its science and engineering articles. And a marked new crop of billion-dollar high-tech companies has sprung up in Silicon Valley recently, without the help of an expanded guest-worker program.
Nor are we turning away foreign students, or forcing them to leave once they’ve graduated. According to the Congressional Research Service, the number of full-time foreign graduate students in science, engineering and health fields has grown by more than 50 percent, from 91,150 in 1990 to 148,900 in 2009. And over the 2000s, the United States granted permanent residence to almost 300,000 high-tech workers, in addition to granting temporary work permits (for up to six years) to hundreds of thousands more.
The bill’s proponents argue that for the sake of our global competitiveness, we shouldn’t train and then return the tens of thousands of Chinese and Indian students who come here every year. But almost 90 percent of the Chinese students who earn science and technology doctorates in America stay here; the number is only slightly lower for Indians. If they’re talented enough to get a job here, they’re already almost guaranteed a visa.
So, is there really a shortage of high tech workers? No.
If anything, we have too many high-tech workers: more than nine million people have degrees in a science, technology, engineering or math field, but only about three million have a job in one. That’s largely because pay levels don’t reward their skills. Salaries in computer- and math-related fields for workers with a college degree rose only 4.5 percent between 2000 and 2011. If these skills are so valuable and in such short supply, salaries should at least keep pace with the tech companies’ profits, which have exploded.
A couple points: First point: when I was an undergrad and then a grad student in the mid-80s until 1995 I noticed that a substantial fraction of science majors (undergrads) ended up going to med school rather than pursuing graduate degrees in the sciences. While a few of those people had always wanted to be doctors, I’m fairly certain that wages and benefits were a primary consideration for most of the rest. Similarly, a significant fraction of my peers in grad school went into patent law. Some were certainly interested in patent law but I believe far more were motivated by the fact that it was a heck of lot easier to find a good job as a patent lawyer than as scientist. (Not sure the extent to which that’s still the case but it was very much so in the mid- to late-90s.) Second point: I’m pretty sure that tech company profits accrue primarily to the owners/founders not the grunts doing the day-to-day work after the company has taken off.
Back to Eisenbrey:
And while unemployment for high-tech workers may seem low — currently 3.7 percent — that’s more than twice as high as it was before the recession.
So why import workers when you could train ones already here?
If there is no shortage of high-tech workers, why would companies be pushing for more? Simple: workers under the H-1B program aren’t like domestic workers — because they have to be sponsored by an employer, they are more or less indentured, tied to their job and whatever wage the employer decides to give them.
Let’s be clear who we’re talking about here. By and large it’s not Ph.D.s who stand to be displaced, it’s primarily people with two-year and four-year degrees – intro-level programmers and the like:
Moreover, too many are paid at wages below the average for their occupation and location: over half of all H-1B guest workers are certified for wages in the bottom quarter of the wage scale.
Bringing over more — there are already 500,000 workers on H-1B visas — would obviously darken job prospects for America’s struggling young scientists and engineers. But it would also hurt our efforts to produce more: if the message to American students is, “Don’t bother working hard for a high-tech degree, because we can import someone to do the job for less,” we could do significant long-term damage to the high-tech educational system we value so dearly.
See also Microsoft’s call for more H1-B visas and green cards draws ire by Ted Samson. Bottom line: H1-B visas and green cards are good things. The proposed changes to the H1-B program are not good.