H-1Bs and the Dream Work Force

The H-1B is an immigration program that once had specific aims to bring highly skilled immigrants with unique abilities into the US to provide our companies with knowledge that would advance our innovation and benefit all citizens.  It is a temporary permit to work in the US, and the worker must be sponsored and hired by a US company, and if the company or the worker ends the employment, the worker has to go home.  But the clever folks in the Multi-National corporations saw a gold mine, reduced costs and a captive pliable immigrant work force, coupled with tax breaks.  A bonanza indeed.

The program has been hijacked by the outsourcing industry, and along with offshoring is destroying opportunity in the US.  Imagine the joy it brings to US employers that they can get rid of their American IT  staff that on average makes $70,000 with good benefits and replace them with workers from Asia, primarily India, who will cost about $50,000 and no benefits.  And for icing on the cake, the H-1B staff can't leave their job for a better one in this country!

At the same time another breakthrough in technology was making its way into the picture.  The internet and communications technology advances meant that workers anywhere in the world could access computers anywhere else, thus bringing IT offshoring into the picture, and the H-1Bs and offshoring could be used in tandem.  The workers could come to the US as temporary workers, learn how to do the jobs of US workers, then go home and work from there, thus saving much, much more for the US companies.  And that's how it is being used today.  20% of H-1B petitions granted last year went to just four firms, all outsourcers.

In order to sell the H-1B as a good thing though, IT needed a cover story, so enter the phony worker shortage in the US.  We are told that:

America is being out-innovated by other countries, and Silicon Valley is in danger of withering as restrictive immigration policies lead to a drought of highly skilled workers.

A big part of the problem, say the tech billionaires and credulous pundits, is our higher education system, which somehow can't turn out nearly enough science-savvy grads. The buzzword of the year is "STEM," which stands for science, technology, engineering, and math. When it comes to STEM grads, we're falling behind the rest of the world, they say.

Don't believe it. There is no shortage of STEM graduates, and as I wrote ln February, Silicon Valley is pretending there is a labor shortage as it relentlessly lobbies to let in thousands of additional foreign IT workers under the H-1B visa program.

Although STEM sounds like a precise term, it turns out that different organizations tracking such info use different definitions for it. But the bottom line is clear: We're producing more and more scientists, mathematicians, and engineers every year. And we're innovating at a breakneck pace.

The United States leads the world in STEM grads, producing 348,484 in 2008, according to a report by Congress' Joint Economic Committee. The number of grads in engineering and science has grown enormously, increasing from just under 400,000 in 2000, to 494,000 in 2008, according to the National Science Foundation.

In this article the argument for reform is made.

Not every H-1B recipient gets abused, displaces an American or goes to work at an outsourcer. But the H-1B is ripe for reform.
No matter what you think of the H-1B program, we don't outsource to innovate. We outsource to cut costs. Cut enough, and eventually we can't innovate without outsourcing, as has happened in vast parts of what used to be our manufacturing economy. (See Producing Prosperity: Why America Needs A Manufacturing Renaissance, by Gary P. Pisano and Willy Shih.) It can happen to our IT economy, too. True, reformers rarely get what they hope for. When Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle, he wanted labor reform, and instead got the Pure Food and Drug Administration. He rued, "I aimed for the public's heart and by accident hit them in the stomach."
The H-1B isn't supposed to aim at our wallets, except by boosting our collective brainpower. That's gone off track. Let's make sure we change the H-1B so it's no longer the outsourcing visa, but the innovation visa. 

Just business as usual.