To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter 170

Over the weekend, the New York Times ran a piece whose theme, roughly
stated, was "Here is a brilliant H-1B hired by Google whom the firm (and
the U.S.) will lose due to overly restrictive immigration laws."  The
piece seemed to be so extreme that a friend of mine, a Chinese-Vietnamese
Australian who doesn't live in the U.S. but keenly follows American politics,
wrote to me ask why the Times would run such an obviously biased article.

I must say it's hard for me to escape the conclusion that the author set
out to write a pro-industry article.  On the other hand, I must strongly
commend the Times for giving us five panelists from last's blog
a chance to comment on the article.  Ms. Terry Tang, who put the blog
together, deserves special credit for all of this.

The panelists' commentary on the article is enclosed below; the article is at
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/business/12immig.html?ref=technology
and last week's blog is at

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/do-we-need-foreign-technology-workers/

The most important of the five panelists' writeups is that of John
Miano.  I consider it to be ONE OF THE MOST SIGNIFICANT STATEMENTS ABOUT
H-1B TO APPEAR IN QUITE A WHILE.  Here's why:

I've stated many times that although I support bringing in "the best and
the brightest" from around the world, only a tiny percentage of H-1Bs
are in the league.  On occasion, I've even challenged the industry's
claims that certain of its "poster children" are indeed of that caliber
(http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/NotBestAndBrightest3.txt).  But
in this case, I wanted to keep my commentary on the broader H-1B issue,
so I didn't pay much attention to the current poster child, Sanjay
Mavinkurve.  Fortunately, John Miano looked more closely at Mavinkurve
than I did.  John points out (emphasis added):

#  One particular item in the article leapt out at me. The article
#  describes the problem of slow downloads of maps to cellphones at
#  Google. No one at Google was able to solve the problem until Mr.
#  Mavinkurve came up with the idea of reducing the number of colors.
# 
#  This standard technique, known "color quantization," has been used for
#  years to reduce images size and speed up the drawing of images. That
#  solution would come immediately to anyone with experience working with
#  images. IT'S HARD TO BELIEVE THAT NO ONE AT GOOGLE, OTHER THAN MR.
#  MAVINKURVE, COULD COME UP WITH THIS TRIED AND TRUE METHOD. THIS
#  SUGGESTS THAT GOOGLE IS IGNORING THE VAST POOL OF EXPERIENCED WORKERS
#  WHO HAVE THE KNOWLEDGE GOOGLE NEEDS, WHILE IT CLAIMS IT MUST HAVE H-1B
#  WORKERS.

This is huge!  Here the industry comes up with what at first looks like
a perfect illustration of the good side of the H-1B program, the
"foreign genius," and yet he turns out to be ignorant of a standard
technique.

Granted, one can't know everything, but the technique is actually an
example of a general computer science principle.  Any good undergraduate
could come up with it.  Really, it's not more than the fact, known even
to non-techie readers of this e-newsletter, that you can make an image's
storage space needs smaller by reducing the resolution.  And yet
Mavinkurve is presented as a genius, a hero at Google, for this
"insight." 

Mind you, this doesn't disprove the claim that Mavinkurve has special
talent in user interface design (which is more art or psychology than
technology).  I'm willing to believe that he does.  I personally enjoy
the Google user interface, and if they say he'll contribute to more of
the same, that's great.  And I can tell you for sure that Google has
indeed hired some H-1Bs that really are "the best and the brightest."

But I'm can equally say that there are many Google H-1Bs who are not
brilliant.  (Of course, this is not picking on Google; I'd make the same
statement for any employer.)  And most importantly, I strongly agree
with John's point that GOOGLE PROBABLY COULD HAVE HIRED AN AMERICAN AS
GOOD AS, OR BETTER THAN, MAVINKURVE.

Hence the title of my posting here, "`BEST AND BRIGHTEST' MYTH
UNMASKED."  Again, I consider John's point here to be of the utmost
significance. 

Concerning the other panelists' remarks:

Yes, Prof. Jasso is correct in saying that the immigration system places
lots of emotional stresses on people, including on marriages.  Many
improvements should be made.  But Jasso might also do some research on
the impact on U.S. citizens and permanent residents whose marriages have
been strained by the displacement of a engineer husband and/or wife from
the job market by the employers' hiring of H-1Bs.  One programmer who
was replaced from his job with the Bank of America by H-1Bs even
committed suicide in the bank parking lot.

Mr. Heesen should read John Miano's blog from last week.  Heesen
apparently claims we're going to lose top foreign engineers who tire of
waiting in the long green card line.  John pointed readers to the State
Dept.'s Visa Bulletin, which shows that there is essentially no wait for
those in the EB-1 class, called Extraorinary Ability.  We're NOT losing
"the best and the brightest" due to long waits.

Vivek Wadhwa's statement on entrepreneurship is answered by my own writeup
below, where I point out that immigrant engineers and native engineers
have the same rates of founding startups.  A similar statement holds for
patents; if you follow his link to Prof. Hunt's paper, you will see that
she makes an explicit disclaimer that she is not claiming that immigrant
engineers are more patent-prone than native engineers.

I must again thank the Times and especially Ms. Tang for running last
week's blog and today's further panelist commentary.  The Times had some
good coverage of H-1B during 1998-2000, but for some reason has not
addressed the topic in recent years.

Norm

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/13/skilled-guest-workers-american-jobs/#more-4465

Room for Debate | A New York Times Blog
  __________________________________________________________________
April 13, 2009, 2:41 pm

Skilled Guest Workers, American Jobs

By The Editors

In a continuing series on immigration, Room for Debate last week
featured a discussion on how immigration policy affects high-skilled
workers and the industries that rely on them. This forum preceded an
article by Matt Richtel, a Times business and technology reporter, that
appeared on Sunday, titled, "Tech Recruiting Clashes With Immigration
Rules."

We asked the experts from our discussion to weigh in again after
reading Mr. Richtel's article, which focused on a Google worker, Sanjay
Mavinkurve, who is the United States on a H-1B guest worker visa.
Here's what they had to say.

* Mark Heesen, National Venture Capital Association
* Ron Hira, public policy professor, Rochester Institute of
Technology
* Guillermina Jasso, sociology professor, N.Y.U.
* Norman Matloff, computer science professor, U.C. Davis
* Vivek Wadhwa, Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University
* John Miano, lawyer and computer programmer
__________________________________________________________________

Winning the Next Technology Battle

Mark Heese

Mark Heesen is president of the National Venture Capital Association.

The article highlights why immigration has helped the United States
become the information-technology power that it's been. Many venture
capitalists will tell you that particularly over the past five years
there are more concerns that America is beginning to lose the general
technology battle not just to China and India, but also to Europe.

The new battle is in life sciences and clean technology -- but many
experts in those fields are moving aroad.

The new technology battle is not over information technology; that is
the past battle. The new battle is in life sciences and clean
technology, with many experts in those fields now residing abroad after
being educated in the U.S. Many have left the U.S. voluntarily as
economies around the world have become more developed, anti-immigration
polices of the U.S. have become more pronounced and the technology
infrastructure in other countries has become more advanced.

The burdens of trying to stay in the U.S. are just too much to deal
with when technologists can live anywhere in the world. It is critical
to recognize that as stories on immigration continue to focus on
information technology, other countries see the future differently.
They are looking to the next huge wave of technological breakthroughs
being developed in their countries as their citizens return home with
their U.S. educations ready to use their engineering and medical
training to create domestic life science and clean technology
companies.

The argument that foreign-born U.S.-educated engineers are unable to
"think outside the box" is quickly being displaced as the globalization
of the technology community moves forward. The U.S. has much to lose in
the technology revolution. Shortsighted thinking that restricts
immigration in economically depressed times will only hasten our
already tenuous position in the next new technologies which will build
upon the information technology revolution we have already witnessed.
__________________________________________________________________

Unanswered Questions

Ron Hira

Ron Hira is assistant professor of public policy at Rochester Institute
of Technology and co-author of "Outsourcing America."

There is broad support for policies to welcome the best and brightest
to come to the U.S. and settle permanently. But it should be done in a
way that is fair to both foreign and American workers. The article says
little about the critical decisions that should shape permanent
immigration policy for skilled workers. What criteria should determine
who is, and is not, admitted? Should it be based on degree level,
occupational fields in demand, or whether someone earns a degree from a
U.S. university?

What process should people undergo before being granted permanent
residence? Should they be "probationary Americans" beholden to a
particular employer?

What process should people undergo before being granted permanent
residence? Should they be "probationary Americans" on a guest worker
visa beholden to a particular employer? Or should they be able to
sponsor themselves?

Finally, how many permanent visas should be allocated to skilled
immigrants? Should an increase of the current quota of 140,000 come at
the expense of family-based permanent immigration?

Rather than address these issues, which the featured Google worker
faces, the article delves into H-1B policy, but ignores fundamental
problems corrupting the H-1B program. As we know, employers regularly
exploit loopholes in that program to pay below-market wages, drive
Americans out of their jobs, force some to train foreign replacements
and take advantage of the vulnerable position of foreign workers.
Closing those loopholes can be done without losing the best and
brightest.

The workers who are hurt by these tactics -- which are, in fact, legal
-- don't have high-priced lobbyists representing them in Washington yet
their story is just as important.
__________________________________________________________________

Visa-Driven Stresses

Guillermina Jasso

Guillermina Jasso is professor of sociology at New York University,
research fellow at IZA Bonn and a principal investigator on the New
Immigrant Survey.

It seems inconsistent with American principles to impose inequality on
hundreds of thousands of marriages, as we do when spouses of
temporary-visa workers are prohibited from working. Such marital
inequality has wide-ranging consequences, affecting the well-being not
only of the couples, but also of their children.

The article also shows that the process of applying for a permanent
visa is long and arduous. Data from the New Immigrant Survey cohort of
2003 indicate that 21 percent of the highly skilled workers experienced
depression because of the visa process compared with 17 percent of the
whole group. If stress affects the productivity of temporary workers,
then, given the fluidity of permanent and temporary workers, it might
be worth considering a streamlined process -- or an experiment -- in
which permanent visas are granted to a subset of temporary-visa
applicants.
__________________________________________________________________

A Law Riddled With Loopholes

Norman Matloff

Norman Matloff is a professor of computer science at the University of
California, Davis.

An implicit message in the article is that the immigrants have some
special knack for founding tech firms. Yet the data show otherwise. The
work of two researchers, Vivek Wadhwa and AnnaLee Saxenian, quoted in
the article found that 52.4 percent of Silicon Valley startups from
1995 to 2005 had a least one immigrant founder. Yet the census data
show that 62 percent of Silicon Valley programmers and engineers were
foreign-born as of 2000. That says entrepreneurship rates are about the
same for immigrants and natives, with the immigrants even lagging
slightly behind.

The article's list of "foreign-born elite" is quite misleading.
Yahoo!'s Jerry Yang and Google's Sergey Brin came to the U.S. as
children under the family immigration law, and Andy Grove of Intel came
to the U.S. as a refugee. They are irrelevant to the H-1B debate.
Moreover, no firm, foreign- or domestic-founded, has been pivotal to
the technological advance of the industry. We could do Web searches
without Yahoo! or Google, on machines running non-Intel chips.

The vast majority of H-1Bs visa holders are not of "best and brightest"
caliber, and most H-1B holders don't come out of Ivy League schools, as
did Sanjay Mavinkurve. Existing law already offers those of
extraordinary ability fast green cards, called EB-1,with work benefits
for their spouses. Minor technical adjustments may be warranted for
EB-1 and similar visas, but in any event, Mr. Mavinkurve's case offers
no argument for increasing the cap on H-1B visas.

The article fails to focus on the central issue of the H-1B
controversy, the use of the visa for cheap labor. Though the lobbyists
claim that the financial industry needs such temporary guest workers to
help the industry recover, institutions like the Bank of America have
an abominable track record of replacing Americans with foreign workers.
Even Vivek Wadhwa has stated, "I know from my experience as a tech CEO
that H-1Bs are cheaper than domestic hires." These workers are supposed
to be paid a prevailing wage, but the law is riddled with loopholes
that allow employers to get around this requirement.
__________________________________________________________________

More Foreigners, More Patents

Vivek Wadhwa

Vivek Wadhwa is an executive in residence for the Pratt School of
Engineering at Duke University and a senior research associate in the
labor and work-life program at Harvard Law School.

While protectionists are lobbying to close America's doors, the best
and brightest are fleeing our shores. Other countries like Canada and
Singapore are welcoming them with open arms. These countries have
learned from our success - that skilled immigrants create jobs and
provide competitive advantage, and they enrich our culture and improve
our standard of living.

Some argue that we have enough American-born programmers to fill all
the open jobs in the tech industries, but my view is that you can never
have enough workers like Sanjay Mavinkurve. Many of these skilled
workers are starting companies that create jobs for native-born
Americans and immigrants alike. While they enter the country as
lower-level programmers, our research has shown, immigrants often start
tech companies 13 years after arriving in the U.S.

The fact is, skilled foreigners are more likely to start technology
businesses than the general populace. For example, India-born
immigrants constitute about .7 percent of the U.S. population yet they
founded 6.7 percent of our tech companies from 1995-2005, including
15.5 percent of those in Silicon Valley. And as research by Jennifer
Hunt of McGill University has shown, for every one-percent increase in
immigrants with university degrees, the total percent of patents filed
per capita goes up by 6 percent in the U.S. We should be making it
easier for foreign workers to make America their home.
__________________________________________________________________

Glossing Over the Downside

John Miano

John Miano is a lawyer and computer programmer.

This article gives the impression that no innovation comes from
native-born Americans and that we are now entirely dependent upon
immigrants. Actually, Intel was founded by two native-born Americans,
Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore, (not Andrew Grove, as reported).

The argument here is not whether we should keep highly skilled people
out of America but rather how do we identify such highly skilled people
and how do we avoid adverse impact on U.S. workers.

The vast majority of Americans will agree that a worker who has been
told to train his replacement has a legitimate gripe with the
immigration law.

The big problem in the article, the negative impact of the H-1B program
get glossed over. What about the U.S. workers who replaced with
lower-paid foreign workers at Pfizer, Chrysler, Nielson, Bank of
America and other companies? What about the 21 percent violation rate
that the Department of Homeland Security found in the H-1B program?

When a U.S. worker gets fired and replaced by a foreign worker and is
told to train his replacement to collect a severance package; the vast
majority of Americans will agree that such a worker has a legitimate
gripe with the immigration law. But the article doesn't deal with those
objections.

One particular item in the article leapt out at me. The article
describes the problem of slow downloads of maps to cellphones at
Google. No one at Google was able to solve the problem until Mr.
Mavinkurve came up with the idea of reducing the number of colors.

This standard technique, known "color quantization," has been used for
years to reduce images size and speed up the drawing of images. That
solution would come immediately to anyone with experience working with
images. It's hard to believe that no one at Google, other than Mr.
Mavinkurve, could come up with this tried and true method. This
suggests that Google is ignoring the vast pool of experienced workers
who have the knowledge Google needs, while it claims it must have H-1B
workers.