Most discussion of the H-1B work visa program focuses on IT, not
suprising since the computer fields take a plurality of the visas.  Yet
H-1B's impact on science and academia is equally important, with the
abuse being equally rampant (though, as with IT, fully legal).  Enclosed
below is a piece by Beryl Lieff Benderley in Science Careers, a
publication of Science Magazine, highlighting this issue.  It's
startling but gratifying to see such a staid publication take such an
un-PC, though correct, stance.  (I've also enclosed a second article by
Benderley.)

Many readers of this e-newsletter will recall that I've brought up the
subject myself in various ways, most recently in connection with Douglas
Prasher, the "almost-Nobelist" who is working as a van driver for a
Toyota dealer.  I urge you to read my entire posting at

http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/Prasher.txt

as Prasher exemplifies what Ms. Benderley writes about in the enclosures
even better than her own Dr. "Otto B. Doing-Better."  In summary:
Prasher's work was central to research that led to this year's Nobel
Prize in chemistry, and one of the winners said he could well have been
selected for the award himself.  Yet he went through a series of jobs in
science, with shorter and shorter duration and less and less security.
In the end he was reduced to driving the van for a living.

The point is that Prasher is a victim of a crushing oversupply of
scientists, in turn caused by a large influx imported from abroad under
the H-1B program, just as Ms. Benderley describes.  What Benderley
probably doesn't know, though, is that all of this was deliberate.  When the
National Science Foundation was lobbying Congress to establish the H-1B
program in the late 1980s, the NSF cited as a major goal holding down PhD
salaries, which would be accomplished by flooding the labor market with
H-1B PhDs.  The NSF also noted that the low salaries would drive away
American students from PhD programs, which is of course exactly what has
happened.  See Eric Weinstein's investigative reporting on this, at
http://nber.nber.org/~peat/PapersFolder/Papers/SG/NSF.html and quotes of it,
at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/ForeignStudentGreenCards.txt

Bottom line:  The H-1B program is being used in academia for cheap
labor, just like in IT.  It's ruining the careers and lives of people
like "Otto B. Doing-Better," even to the point of forcing a Nobel-level
researcher into blue collar work to earn a living.  And all this is
occurring unseen behind the hype that "Johnnie can't do science" and the
U.S. is on the verge of losing its technical edge.

Well, WHY is it unseen?  Are Benderley and Weinstein and I really the
only ones who know this?  Of course not.  Any academic with her eyes
open knows it.  Shirley M. Malcom, head of education and human resources
at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, knows there
is a huge oversupply of scientists, and surely understands the role of H-1B
in it.  She spoke of the oversupply on NPR (without explicitly mentioning
H-1B); see http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16150041

But almost no one is willing to rock the boat, as the personal
consequences would be severe.  Though I must note that my own university
has been remarkably tolerant of my gadfly writings on H-1B, even
bestowing its Distinguished Public Service Award on me in part because
of H-1B.  But if for example Dr. Malcom had mentioned H-1B explicitly in
that NPR segment, her days at AAAS likely would have been numbered, and
she would been blocked from obtaining other positions of that type.
Greg Zachary of the Wall Street Journal wrote some great pieces on H-1B
in the mid-90s, then later changed 180 degrees; why the change of heart?
Several academics who have been strongly H-1B have in the last year or
so come out in favor of expanding the employer-sponsored green card
program, in spite of that program having essentially the same adverse
effects as H-1B.

Hal Salzman, whose Urban Institute report is cited by Benderley (see
below), was on that show with Malcom, and he didn't mention H-1B
either--in spite of the fact that he was the investigator on a 2001
congressionally-commissioned study which found that use of H-1Bs as
cheap labor is rampant.  Again, I believe that this reticence on his
part is due to H-1B being a kind of Third Rail in the research world.

Meanwhile, those with huge vested interests in the program--academia,
industry and last-but-not-least the immigration attorneys--have been
flooding the press with PR, which is the source of the "Johnnie can't do
science" perception.  By the way, Benderley appears to be unaware that
one report she cites, by NAP, was written by a researcher who has been
quite partisan in favor of the industry and whose funding is suspected
to come from the immigration lawyers group.  See
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/NFAP.txt

And these people, e.g. Google CEO Eric Schmidt, have Barack Obama's ear.
Not coincidentally, Obama's Secretaries-designate of Commerce, DHS and
Labor all are in favor of expanding H-1B and employer-sponsored green
cards.  Obama's own position paper, linked to in Benderley's article,
might as well have been written by the industry, and may well have been.

And even though Obama's fellow senator from Illinois, Dick Durbin, has
sponsored a good H-1B reform bill and Durbin was one of Obama's most
active supporters in the election campaign, Obama doesn't seem to have
been educated by Durbin very much, or worse, Obama sees that reform of
H-1B is a political nonstarter.  I'm sure the Durbin-Grassley bill will
languish this coming year just as it did during the Bush years.

Voices like Lindsay Lowell, whose outstanding Urban Institute study with
Hal Salzman is cited below by Benderley, are lost in the shuffle.
Though UI is well-respected in DC and is especially valued by Democrats,
you could knock on doors on the Hill all day and not find more than one
or two staffers who are aware of the Lowell/Salzman report.  Similarly
you could talk to all the science and business reporters at the New York
Times and likely not find any who know about Lowell/Salzman.

Nor for that matter would you find congressional staffers who are aware
of Congress' own findings, in two of its commissioned reports (the one
by NRC that Salzman contributed to, as mentioned, and another by GAO),
that H-1B is used widely as a means of cheap labor--as reported by the
employers themselves.  You might find some staffers who know of a recent
DHS study that found a substantial percentages of irregularities (some
fraudulent, most not) in H-1B applications, but that is missing the
real point, which is that most abuse of H-1B for cheap labor is fully
legal, due to the loopholes, as pointed out in the GAO study.

The sad truth is that Congress hears what the monied and powerful want
them to hear.

Norm

http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2009_01_02/caredit.a0900001

Taken for Granted: Brother, Can You Spare a Temporary Worker Visa?

By Beryl Lieff Benderly

January 02, 2009

"Postdocs hired at U.S. universities have become, for some time now, a
new kind of cheap labor ... who are most of the time only allowed to do
those experiments that please their bosses, and, on the other hand,
cannot many times contribute to the creative scientific process."
--Otto B. Doing-Better

Four and a half years ago, a young scientist we'll call Otto B.
Doing-Better began what he thought would be his dream postdoctoral
appointment. Otto is one of the tens of thousands of foreign scientific
and technical workers in the United States on H-1B visas, which admit
nonimmigrant skilled workers for a limited number of years. A lab chief
we'll call Manny Grants had promised to help him get the prestigious
publications needed for a shot at a faculty post--and maybe even
permanent residence in the United States.

Instead of the career he had hoped for, today Otto has a life in ruins,
professionally and personally. His employment prospects are stymied,
and his permission to stay in this country is about to run out. He sees
no choice but to return to his native land and seek work outside of
science. "I am a postdoc who has been ground up by the current system
in U.S. academia, where most of us are foreigners who rely on visas to
remain in this country," he tells Science Careers.

Professor Grants proved dictatorial and duplicitous when Otto "made
interesting and reproducible findings," the young scientist says. Some
of these results "contradicted some of [Prof. Grants'] views." The lab
chief used his power, Otto says, to prevent their publication. He gave
Otto no raises and then, citing funding difficulties, fired him.
Lukewarm references kept Otto from moving to another lab, ultimately
costing him the right to remain in this country, which depends on his
staying employed. Most heartbreaking of all, Otto's American-born child
will stay here with his estranged wife, who has filed for divorce.

H-1B holders' vulnerability to their employers' whims is only one of
the many features of this controversial visa that attract sharp
criticism. Just about everyone with a stake in the system--American
engineers, scientists, and IT professionals; high-tech executives and
their lobbyists; influential U.S. senators and the Department of
Homeland Security--finds fault with the program's provisions,
enforcement, or both.

Visa holders such as Otto complain of exploitation and abuse. But many
American scientists and technical professionals blame the H-1B visa for
allowing temporary foreign workers to drive down wages and displace
them from jobs. Employers, meanwhile, denounce limits on the number of
H-1B visas available, which they say keep them from finding the skilled
employees they need.

In ordinary times, the controversy flares into public consciousness in
the spring, during well-orchestrated industry lobbying and PR campaigns
seeking more visas. This year, with unemployment mounting and degreed
workers feeling the effects more strongly than in past recessions, the
issue appears likely to grow much hotter than usual.

Missing Data

Taken For Granted logo

Complicating the debate, as usual, is a shortage of basic facts about
the H-1B and its effect on the American scientific and technical labor
market. Complete statistics are not collected on how many temporary
foreign scientific and technical workers are in the country, where they
work, and whether they leave the country when their visas expire or, as
critics suggest, move into the illegal immigrant pool. One widely
quoted report asserts a relationship between the presence of foreign
workers and increased job opportunities for Americans, although another
analysis debunks the claim. Recently, the number of available
engineering positions has fallen as H-1B availability remained
constant.

What those claiming a technical talent shortage lack in evidence, they
make up for in well-funded persuasion. Indeed, the industry view has
won over most national politicians and policymakers. The plan for
science and technology proposed by the Obama campaign, for example,
calls for "comprehensive immigration reform that improves our visa
programs to attract some of the world's most talented people to
America" and supports an increase in the number of foreign scientists
and technical people permitted to study, work, and stay in the United
States.

Thousands of Americans struggling to start or maintain scientific and
technical careers are unlikely to support such a plan. The plan does,
however, promise to answer some of Otto's complaints by ensuring that
"workers are less dependent on their employers for their right to stay
in the country" and holding accountable employers "who abuse the system
and their workers."

The Obama document goes on to note that "while highly skilled
immigrants make strong contributions to our domestic technology
industry, there are Americans who could be filling those positions
given appropriate opportunities for training." These are encouraging
words, but the statement doesn't go far enough: What about the
thousands of Americans already able to fill those jobs without any
further training? The United States routinely graduates several times
more people with scientific and technical degrees than it employs in
those fields, according to the National Science Board's Science and
Engineering Indicators 2008. Even without importing scientific and
technical workers from overseas, these figures indicate, employers can
find a large supply of skilled talent.

But employers would very likely have to pay these workers more than
they pay temporary visa holders. The desire to pay lower wages--and not
a talent shortage--is the real reason behind the demand for more H-1B
visas, critics insist. And, though it may lack political clout, this
view has some world-class intellectual backing. "There is no doubt that
the [H-1B] program is a benefit to their employers, enabling them to
get workers at a lower wage, and to that extent, it is a subsidy, " the
late Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, godfather of market
economics, has been quoted as saying. "If you get a number of computer
programmers who are moving to the United States, as we do under the
H-1B program, ... then computer programmers' earnings are either going
to be hurt or not rise as much as otherwise," agreed Friedman's fellow
economics Nobelist and University of Chicago faculty colleague Gary
Becker in a lecture.

Reaching for Reform

When the H-1B visa was established in 1990, it was "intended to fill
jobs for a temporary amount of time while the country invested in
American workers to pick up the skills they needed. ... Unfortunately,
the H-1B program is so popular that it's now replacing the U.S. labor
force," said Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) on the Senate floor in
November 2007, according to a press report. "Some employers have abused
the H-1B and L-1 temporary work visa programs, using them to bypass
qualified American job applicants," added Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) in
a statement. Recently, a report by the Department of Homeland
Security's U.S. Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services found
widespread fraud in the H-1B system.

But far more important and damaging than dishonesty, critics insist,
are the loopholes and abuses clearly permitted by existing law. Indian
outsourcing firms, for example, currently use large numbers of H-1B
visas to bring workers into the country to train for jobs that are then
moved overseas. In 2007, Grassley and Durbin co-sponsored a bill, as
yet unpassed, that would increase protections for both American workers
and H-1B visa holders.

As the recession deepens, bringing hiring freezes and furloughs to
budget-strapped universities across the country and threatening the
solvency of private-sector firms, supporters of the Grassley-Durbin
proposals appear likely to press anew to pass the bill. At the very
least, H-1B critics will have strong ammunition--in the form of high
unemployment rates--against industry's annual campaign to get lawmakers
to raise the H-1B limit.

None of this, of course, is any help to current H-1B casualties like
Otto, who is leaving the country embittered by an academic system he
believes harms not just powerless individuals but science itself.
"Postdocs hired at U.S. universities have become, for some time now, a
new kind of cheap labor ... who are most of the time only allowed to do
those experiments that please their bosses, and, on the other hand,
cannot many times contribute to the creative scientific process," he
says. His former lab chief "used his powerful position to impose his
will and cover up some exciting results of mine, which could have moved
the field of cancer research forward." The H-1B, Otto argues, made this
possible.

If the Obama Administration truly wishes to inspire a new generation of
Americans "to excel in, and embrace, science and engineering" without
excluding "innovators from overseas" as its science and technology
document proclaims, then it needs to craft programs that protect both
the many Americans hoping for decent-paying science and technology jobs
and the foreign scientists coming to this country to work and learn. An
overhaul of the H-1B is an obvious place to start.

Beryl Lieff Benderly writes from Washington, D.C.


http://www.scienceprogress.org/2008/08/its-the-money-stupid/

It's the Money, Stupid

What's Really Wrong with American Science

Law, medicine, research science. The first two pay. SOURCE: SP It isn't
a scientist shortage or a poor public education system. It's the lack
of decent-paying, tenured job opportunities for young graduate and
postgraduate research scientists.
By Beryl Lieff Benderly | Thursday, August 7th, 2008 | Share This |
Print  Print

According to a continuing stream of reports and white papers from
eminent think tanks and government agencies across the country, the
United States faces a shortage of technical talent that threatens our
future competitiveness. This shortage, they say, arises largely from
inadequate public school Kindergarten through 12th grade education in
science, technology, engineering and math, the so-called STEM
curriculum. But this perception of dearth and mediocrity, though
widespread and widely accepted in political and policy circles, ignores
the real flaws in U.S. science. Reforms are urgently needed, but not
the ones that shortage proponents suggest.

Prominent labor economists who have examined the problem from a
different perspective argue that poor STEM education isn't the problem
at all. In fact, they believe there are far too many qualified
student-scientists. Rather, it's the perverse financial incentives that
American society (and specifically the U.S. government) provide wannabe
American scientists that lie at the heart of our nation's science and
technology competitiveness crisis.

At first glance, though, the scientist-shortage supporters make some
valid points. It's true that fewer top students from the demographic
that long provided the bulk the nation's technical and research
professionals--native-born white males--are pursuing graduate studies
in science. Ditto that a growing percentage of the
scientists-in-training at the nation's universities are
foreign-born.[1] And the average performance of U.S. K- 12 students on
international standards is indeed undistinguished.

It's the perverse financial incentives that American society (and
specifically the U.S. government) provide wannabe American scientists
that lie at the heart of our nation's science and technology
competitiveness crisis.

But these facts do not add up to the crises that critics describe.
Rather, according to a number of distinguished economists, they reveal
a labor market gone seriously awry. In the first place, average test
scores tell nothing about the supply of students capable of becoming
scientists. Such youngsters are not average for their age group, but
outstanding, and the U.S. produces them in large numbers. One
frequently cited international comparison, for example, shows that the
United States had far more top-performing science students than any
other nation tested, as well as a big lead in the number of
top-performing readers, according to Hal Salzman of the Urban Institute
and B. Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown University.[2] Americans also came
second only to Japan in the number of top scorers in math.

What pulled down the U.S. average was not any overall deficit but the
very poor performance of the students at the bottom, largely products
of inferior schools serving poor minority communities. These
disparities are a national disgrace that must be ended, which in turn
would result in an even more qualified and more diverse pool of talent
to improve our nation's competitiveness. But our poor test scores say
nothing about the quality of America's best schools, which rank among
the world's finest.

An Enticing Promise, An Elusive Goal

The top performers from those excellent schools then proceed to study
at some of the world's best universities, also conveniently located
here. Professors at these universities encourage the most promising to
continue on for science PhDs, in preparation for careers as academic
researchers. The students who take this advice hope for satisfying
careers resembling those their senior professors have enjoyed, pursuing
their best ideas as independent researchers, heading labs amply
supported by federal funding, and enjoying job stability and
comfortable upper-middle class incomes as faculty members in secure
tenured positions.

But the world that nurtured today's senior professors, with PhDs earned
in four years and appointments as faculty members and lab heads in
their 20s, has vanished. What the great majority of today's young
scientists find instead is a penurious decade or more working in
university labs, first as graduate students and then as postdoctoral
researchers earning a "trainee" wage comparable to what a new liberal
arts BA graduate makes.[3]

Their search for the faculty post essential to starting their own
academic research careers overwhelmingly ends in frustration, as they
futilely compete for every advertised faculty opening against hundreds
of other qualified applicants--all of whom sport good degrees and lists
of publications from their graduate and postdoc years. The odds that a
young PhD will ever land a faculty job at any four-year institution are
now less than 25 percent, and at the kind of research university where
big-deal science is done, well under 15 percent.[4]

Across the United States, therefore, professors are bemoaning the
choice by many of their brightest undergraduates to eschew science
graduate study in favor of medical, law, or business school. These
students don't reject science because they're bad at math, but because
they're good at it. Anyone bright enough to get a science PhD is bright
enough to run the numbers showing that an average of seven years of
graduate school, followed by five or more postdoc years, followed by
long odds against getting the job one was ostensibly preparing for, add
up to a lousy investment.

For foreigners, however, especially those from developing countries,
grad school or a postdoc in America is exceedingly enticing. Why?
Because the virtually unlimited visas that universities can supply make
such training an otherwise largely unobtainable ticket into the
country.

Built-in Perversity

Labor economists including Paula Stephan of Georgia State University
and Richard Freeman of Harvard University believe this excess of young
American scientists unable to start their academic careers results from
"the perverse funding structure of science graduate education," as
fellow labor economist Michael Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan
Foundation put it in congressional testimony last November.[5]^ Stephan
adds that we "staff our labs primarily with graduate students and
postdocs" who as a condition of participating in their educational
programs, do the overwhelming bulk of the labor needed for the academic
research that the federal government funds to the tune of more than $70
billion a year.[6]

Research grants to individual professors from the National Institutes
of Health, National Science Foundation, and other agencies finance the
great bulk of graduate students and postdocs. To get the grants and
renewals needed to keep their labs going, professors must produce
steady streams of journal articles. That, in turn, encourages them to
have as many grad students and postdocs as they can possibly afford to
do the bench work. This highly skilled cheap labor makes American
research very economical, but produces as a byproduct "so much pressure
on the system to absorb the continual new cohort" into mostly
nonexistent jobs, Stephan says. "We haven't had much luck in absorbing
it."

Shortage proponents counter that low unemployment among early career
scientists proves there is no glut. But in fact the postdoc pool, now
numbering possibly 90,000, is more than half foreign-born (the actual
numbers are unknown),[7] and functions as disguised unemployment,
holding "trainees" off the market. The United States, meanwhile,
annually produces 30,000 new science and engineering PhDs, about 18,000
of them American-born, although faculty openings at research
universities in the most glutted fields number probably in the hundreds
(again, the number is unknown).

The tiny minority who do land research-based faculty jobs have spent so
much time "training" that, in biomedical science, for example, they
average 42 years of age when they finally launch their independent
research careers by winning their first competitive federal grant.[8]
At that age, scientists of previous generations--Albert Einstein,
Marshall Nirenberg, Thomas Cech--were collecting Nobel Prizes for
discoveries made in their 20s.

"I try to keep my best undergraduates away from my postdocs," one
professor confided, because meeting them would reveal what really lies
ahead on the grad school track. But talented young Americans would
flock to science study if it offered them the kind of career
opportunities that previous generations enjoyed. Instead of a needless
general overhaul of K -12 education, or an increase in graduate
fellowships, which would only make things worse, the United States
needs to overhaul what Brown University biochemistry chair Susan Gerbi
calls the "pyramid paradigm."

Instead of paying universities to use grad students and postdocs as
very smart migrant laborers, the U.S. government needs a funding
structure that provides large numbers of them a solid career ladder
into the life that so many were implicitly promised. The jobs on that
ladder need not compete financially with corporate law, medical
specialization, or investment banking, because science offers
intellectual riches so much more dazzling than money that they long
enticed the ablest young Americans to accept more modest remuneration
in exchange for the chance to do great research. But the futures we
provide to the young people we ask to devote their lives and talents to
learning and doing science must match those other careers in providing
at least a reasonable likelihood that hard work and devotion can attain
their goal.

At present, the United States does not give them that opportunity. One
way to start doing so could be to structure funding to encourage
universities and lab chiefs to create jobs for permanent staff
scientists who receive professional-level salaries, benefits, and
status within the university and employ them rather than grad students
and postdocs. Another could be requiring universities to limit the
graduate student and postdoc positions they create to the number of
people who could reasonably be expected to find career-level employment
after they leave their professors' labs. Another could be requiring
universities and lab chiefs to track their grad school and postdoc
alumni and report on their employment experience to new applicants, as
professional and business schools routinely do.

When the nation once again provides its young scientists a decent shot
at the life they hope for, our best youth will race to answer science's
call.

Washington, D.C. science journalist Beryl Lieff Benderly contributes
the monthly "Taken for Granted" column on labor force and early career
issues to the website of Science magazine and articles to other major
magazines and websites.

Notes

[1] National Science Board, "Science Indicators 2008" (Arlington, VA:
National Science Foundation, 2008).

[2]H. Salzman and L. Lowell, "Making the Grade," Nature 543 (2008):
28-30.

[3] G. Davis, "Doctors without orders," American Scientist 93 (2005)
(3, supplement), available at http://postdoc.sigmaxi.org/results/.

[4] National Science Board.

[5] Michael Teitelbaum, Testimony before the House Committee on Science
and Technology Subcommittee on Technology and Innovation, Committee,
November 6, 2007, available at
http://democrats.science.house.gov/Media/File/Commdocs/hearings/2007/te
ch/06nov/Teitelbaum_testimony.pdf.

[6] Intersociety Working Group, American Association for the
Advancement of Science, AAAS Report XXXIII: Research and Development FY
2009 (Washington, D.C., 2008).

[7] National Science Board.

[8] Committee on Bridges to Independence: Identifying Opportunities for
and Challenges to Fostering the Independence of Young Investigators in
the Life Sciences, Board on Life Sciences, National Research Council of
the National Academies, Bridges to Independence: Fostering the
Independence of New Investigators in Biomedical Research (Washington,
D.C.: National Academies Press, 2005).