To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter 162
One of the industry lobbyists' favorite lines is that the H-1Bs are "the
best and the brightest" from around the world. Although I do support
the immigration of top talents, only a small percentage of H-1Bs are in
that league. I've shown this in great detail; see
http://www.cis.org/articles/2008/back508.html
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/MichJLawReform.pdf
But the lobbyists keep pushing it, hence my current posting. Here I'll
give you a look at some other aspects, including the background of some
of those who are making the "best and brightest" claims.
Let's start with Dan Siciliano, a lecturer in Stanford University's law
school. He made the following comments to the Wall Street Journal, June
30, 2006:
# Economists worry about another place owning the very next big thing" --
# the next groundbreaking technology, If the heart and mind of the next
# great thing emerges somewhere else because the talent is there, then we
# will be hurt...[an increase in the H-1B cap is needed] to avoid
# irreversible damage to the economy.
So, what are Siciliano's qualifications for making such strong claims
about the innovative quality of the H-1Bs? Here are his
"qualifications":
Siciliano was previously an immigration lawyer with Bacon and Dear, one
of the most prominent immigration law firms in the nation
(www.sinoedu.com/stanford-cg05.htm); Sun Microsystems retained Roxanne
Bacon when Sun engineer Guy Santiglia sued Sun after they laid him off
while keeping H-1Bs. Siciliano also is CEO of LawLogix, a firm that
develops software systems for immigration lawyers. To top it off,
Siciliano is on the Board of Trustees of the American Immigration Law
Foundation, which is the research arm of the American Immigration
Lawyers Association. He is also a research fellow with the AILF. Note
by the way that the vice chair of that board is Kirsten Schlenger, with
whom I participated in a TV debate on H-1B; the video is at
http://www.democraticclub-scc.org/StraightTalk/H-1Bvisas.wmv
So Siciliano has a vested interest, to put it mildly. Unfortunately, he
doesn't seem to mention these things when he talks to the press. In the
above WSJ article, for instance, he was described as "a Stanford
economist." When he was on CNBC on March 6, he was asked his views "as
an educator," and though his affiliation with the Immigration Policy
Center was mentioned, there was no mention of IPC's connection to
AILA/AILF.
On that CNBC show, Siciliano referred to my CIS study, the one at the
www.cis.org Web link above, and grossly (though not necessarily
deliberately) misinterpreted my findings. Here is what happened:
As one of several approaches I took to assessing the industry lobbyists'
claim that the H-1Bs are "the best and the brightest," I compared actual
salary to legal prevailing wage. If the H-1Bs were indeed outstanding
talents, they would be paid well above the legal prevailing wage, so I
calculated the ratio of actual wage to prevailing wage, calling it the
Talent Measure (TM). Just as I suspected, the TM value was a hair above
1.0 for the industry as a whole, and for almost all prominent tech
firms.
Microsoft was an exception, with TM equal to 1.19. Siciliano, who was
debating CIS Fellow John Miano on the CNBC segment, tried to refute
Miano's claim that H-1Bs are underpaid, saying "CIS' own study found
that Microsoft pays 19% above prevailing wage." This of course ignored
the fact that Microsoft's 1.19 figure was very unusual, and much more
importantly, it ignored the disclaimer in my study:
# Typically the employer will cite government data as the source. The
# legal definition of prevailing wage in both the law and regulations
# contains major loopholes (see my previous Backgrounder mentioned above),
# but the industry lobbyists insist that the foreign workers are not
# underpaid. Since here the focus is on another industry claim, that the
# foreign workers are of outstanding talent, for the purpose of the
# present analysis, it will be assumed that the prevailing wage is the
# real market wage.
In other words, to address the industry claim that the H-1Bs are "the
best and the brightest," my approach was to take at face value the
industry's claim that legal prevailing wage is the real market wage,
and then investigate what they are paying the H-1Bs relative to
prevailing wage. If the answer is that they are paying no higher than
legal prevailing wage, one must conclude that one of their two claims is
wrong--either they are underpaying the H-1Bs or the H-1Bs are not
outstanding talents. The TM figures should be used only to assess
the "best/brightest" claims, not to determine whether these firms are
paying their foreign workers market wages.
Since I and others have found a 15-30% difference between the prevailing
wage and real market wage, that 1.19 figure for Microsoft could in fact
be as low as 0.90.
Siciliano ignored all this, or didn't read the study he was citing in
the first place.
Now let's turn to the recent Washington Post op-ed by Vivek Wadhwa,
enclosed below. Unlike Siciliano, Wadhwa has actually done research on
H-1B and related topics, and though I've found fault with some of his
work, he has done some very good studies. Yet Wadhwa has chosen some
odd poster children for his own claim that we are losing "the best and
the brightest," ostensibly because they weary of the long wait for green
cards.
The claim is unfounded in the first place. The employer-sponsored green
card categories used by the tech industry consist of three levels, EB-1, EB-2
and EB-3, in order from most to least talented. The fact is that there have
been long waits in recent years only for EB-3, which is for ordinary workers
of no special talents. See http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/WadhwaIII.txt
As mentioned, Wadhwa's examples here don't support his "best and
brightest" assertion. His first example, Sandeep Nijsure, attended
mediocre universities in both India (per my Web search) and the U.S.
(per Wadhwa's op-ed). And though I dislike judging someone by the
schools they attended, there certainly is no indication that Nijsure
plays in the "best and brightest" league.
Another example Wadhwa offers us is Girija Subramaniam, a test engineer
at Texas Instruments. Come on, Vivek--a test engineer???? This is no
job for geniuses. So this example doesn't work either.
His third example, Meijie Tang, may be different. She's mentioned a lot
in an NYT article http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/magazine/01China.t.html
and she seems to be an interesting person. After acing a bunch of
China's standardized tests she gained some fame in that country before
she came to the U.S. for study. I'm not a fan of those tests, but maybe
she does qualify as "the best and the brightest" in some senses. On the
other hand, it's not in the technology sense; Tang is an econ major,
according to the Web. And look what our best-and-brightest economists
have done to the world recently.
So, the Best and Brightest count is two no's and one maybe. Is that the
best Wadhwa could come up with? Again, I strongly support facilitating
the immigration of outstanding talents, but I don't regard these as the
type I have in mind.
Before I go on, I'd like to point out that many U.S. native "best and
brightest" are being displaced. Gene Nelson won a National Science Fair
award when he was in high school, which arguably makes his case somewhat
similar to Tang's. He later earned a PhD in biophysics, but once he got
older (remember, even 35 is "old") the jobs started drying up for
him--and taken by H-1Bs.
I've mentioned before my former student, whose innovative engineering
work at a major name-brand firm got him a mention in the Wall Street
Journal, arguably also a best-and-brightest quality. He was sloughed
off by the industry a few years ago, around age 36, and after working
only sporadically for several years, he finally bit the bullet and
switched to another profession.
I've got several readers of this e-newsletter with degrees from MIT who
find it hard to get tech work too. Presumably MIT only admits the best
and brightest too.
A man who earned his PhD in computer security in my department about 10
years ago is out of work, has been for almost a year. He was a top
student academically, had prior industry experience before coming back
to grad school, and is personable and articulate. He's willing to take
any tech job, and I'm sure he can do many jobs occupied by H-1Bs better
than they can.
And let's not forget Douglas Prasher, the almost-Nobel laureate who's
working as a van driver for a Toyota dealer. He could do a lot of those
research jobs in biotech that are filled by H-1Bs.
So H-1B is crowding out many of our own best and brightest, and causing
many of the best and brightest college students to avoid tech in the
first place. (Some of you may have seen news articles the last couple
of days showing that computer science enrollment is finally up somewhat
this year. What they don't tell you is that in many cases this was
accomplished by lowering the bar for admission.)
As I have shown in the studies cited at the outset of this posting, the
vast majority of H-1Bs are NOT in the best-and-brightest league. On the
contrary, many are rote-memory trained and quite lacking in the insight
needed to develop a good product. Here is an incident reported to me
recently by a reader of this e-newsletter (posted with his permission):
# In 2003, I was an employee (U.S. citizen) at a major retail firm's IT
# shop. A team of Indians from Covansys was developing a Java-based
# stores POS application. The application was running painfully slow - 6
# minutes to process a single transaction. The Indians' performance
# recommendation was to buy a larger, faster server. Management called me
# in to give performance tips. I looked at the code. The Java
# application was creating a String object, then modifying it 100,000
# times. As any Java programmer and most Java students should know,
# Strings are immutable. Each time a String is modified, a new object is
# created. After modifying a String 100,000 times, this application had
# 100,001 String objects consuming memory, which naturally crippled
# performance. I asked the Indian guys why they didn't use StringBuffer
# instead of String. StringBuffers are mutable and only create one
# object, i.e., after modifying a StringBuffer 100,000 times, you still
# have only have one object in memory, not 100,001. The fewer objects
# clogging memory, the faster everything will run. That one quick change
# improved the POS application’s performance by 60-fold, saving the cost
# of buying a faster, bigger server.
Once again, I do strongly support bringing in the best and the
brightest, but if H-1B were limited to that, as it was (at least on
paper) for the old H-1 statute, a yearly cap of 10 or 20 thousand would
be plenty.
Norm
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/06/AR2009030601926.html
They're Taking Their Brains and Going Home
By Vivek Wadhwa
Sunday, March 8, 2009; Page B02
Seven years ago, Sandeep Nijsure left his home in Mumbai to study
computer science at the University of North Texas. Master's degree in
hand, he went to work for Microsoft. He valued his education and
enjoyed the job, but he worried about his aging parents. He missed
watching cricket, celebrating Hindu festivals and following the twists
of Indian politics. His wife was homesick, too, and her visa didn't
allow her to work.
Not long ago, Sandeep would have faced a tough choice: either go home
and give up opportunities for wealth and U.S. citizenship, or stay and
bide his time until his application for a green card goes through. But
last year, Sandeep returned to India and landed a software development
position with Amazon.com in Hyderabad. He and his wife live a few
blocks from their families in a spacious, air-conditioned house. No
longer at the mercy of the American employer sponsoring his visa,
Sandeep can more easily determine the course of his career. "We are
very happy with our move," he told me in an e-mail.
The United States has always been the country to which the world's best
and brightest -- people like Sandeep -- have flocked in pursuit of
education and to seek their fortunes. Over the past four decades, India
and China suffered a major "brain drain" as tens of thousands of
talented people made their way here, dreaming the American dream.
But burgeoning new economies abroad and flagging prospects in the
United States have changed everything. And as opportunities pull
immigrants home, the lumbering U.S. immigration bureaucracy helps push
them away.
When I started teaching at Duke University in 2005, almost all the
international students graduating from our Master of Engineering
Management program said that they planned to stay in the United States
for at least a few years. In the class of 2009, most of our 80
international students are buying one-way tickets home. It's the same
at Harvard. Senior economics major Meijie Tang, from China, isn't even
bothering to look for a job in the United States. After hearing from
other students that it's "impossible" to get an H-1B visa -- the kind
given to highly-skilled workers in fields such as engineering and
science -- she teamed up with a classmate to start a technology company
in Shanghai. Investors in China offered to put up millions even before
23-year-old Meijie and her 21-year-old colleague completed their
business plan.
When smart young foreigners leave these shores, they take with them the
seeds of tomorrow's innovation. Almost 25 percent of all international
patent applications filed from the United States in 2006 named foreign
nationals as inventors. Immigrants founded a quarter of all U.S.
engineering and technology companies started between 1995 and 2005,
including half of those in Silicon Valley. In 2005 alone, immigrants'
businesses generated $52 billion in sales and employed 450,000 workers.
Yet rather than welcome these entrepreneurs, the U.S. government is
confining many of them to a painful purgatory. As of Sept. 30, 2006,
more than a million people were waiting for the 120,000
permanent-resident visas granted each year to skilled workers and their
family members. No nation may claim more than 7 percent, so years may
pass before immigrants from populous countries such as India and China
are even considered.
Like many Indians, Girija Subramaniam is fed up. After earning a
master's in electrical engineering from the University of Virginia in
1998, she joined Texas Instruments as a test engineer. She wanted to
stay in the United States, applied for permanent residency in 2002 and
has been trapped in immigration limbo ever since. If she so much as
accepts a promotion or, heaven forbid, starts her own company, she will
lose her place in line. Frustrated, she has applied for fast-track
Canadian permanent residency and expects to move north of the border by
the end of the year.
For the Kaufmann Foundation, I recently surveyed 1,200 Indians and
Chinese who worked or studied in the United States and then returned
home. Most were in their 30s, and 80 percent held master's degrees or
doctorates in management, technology or science -- precisely the kind
of people who could make the greatest contribution to the U.S. economy.
A sizable number said that they had advanced significantly in their
careers since leaving the United States. They were more optimistic
about opportunities for entrepreneurship, and more than half planned to
start their own businesses, if they had not done so already. Only a
quarter said that they were likely to return to the United States.
Why does all this matter? Because just as the United States has relied
on foreigners to underwrite its deficit, it has also depended on smart
immigrants to staff its laboratories, engineering design studios and
tech firms. An analysis of the 2000 Census showed that although
immigrants accounted for only 12 percent of the U.S. workforce, they
made up 47 percent of all scientists and engineers with doctorates.
What's more, 67 percent of all those who entered the fields of science
and engineering between 1995 and 2006 were immigrants. What will happen
to America's competitive edge when these people go home?
Immigrants who leave the United States will launch companies, file
patents and fill the intellectual coffers of other countries. Their
talents will benefit nations such as India, China and Canada, not the
United States. America's loss will be the world's gain.