In a message dated 1/5/08 2:49:31 A.M. Central Standard Time, matloff@cs.ucdavis.edu writes:
To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter 106

The article enclosed below appeared in a publication associated with
Science magazine.  It's a good account of the situation with H-1B and
employer-sponsored green cards, focusing mainly on PhD scientists but
also discussing engineers and programmers.

There's a lot of good material here, and in the earlier companion
article.  I urge you to read them both.

I do take issue with this passage, though:

- So, is the shortage argument simply a cover for cheap labor, as some in
- the IT community believe? Tietelbaum doesn't think so. The reports
- claiming shortage are the work of "respected people who are stating a
- point of view that they believe," he says. " I don’t think they’re
- simply telling a falsehood in order to get cheaper workers." But senior
- figures such as university presidents are "not out recruiting students.
- They’re hearing from their faculty who were not getting enough people
- applying to graduate school." Many scientists, he adds, "feel trapped in
- this situation they can’t change."

The "not a deliberate falsehood" assertion must be looked at carefully.

First of all, who is Teitelbaum referring to?  To my knowledge, there
has not been a single study showing a shortage of tech/science people,
other than studies sponsored by the industry and others with vested
interests, such as the immigration lawyers.  Even the PISA and TIMSS
studies on math and science education do not say we have a shortage.

Second, concerning applicants for grad school (with the implication that
foreign students make up the deficit):  Are the university presidents
really that naive?  Do they really fail to understand that if only
graduate stipends were higher and PhD career prospects were better (in
the science fields, those prospects are really dismal), these doctoral
program would get tons of U.S. applicants?  I doubt that they are that
ignorant.  But you don't become a university president--and you don't
retain your position as such--by rocking the boat.  So, they go along
with the "shortage" claims, knowing that the claims are misleading.
That's a deliberate falsehood in my book.

Norm

http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_development/previous_issues/articles/2008_01_04/caredit_a0800002

Feeling the Elephant
Beryl Lieff Benderly
United States
4 January 2008

A persistent anomaly, the mythology of science tells us, makes
scientists curious and, on occasion, leads them to major discoveries.
But one conspicuous anomaly has inspired notably little curiosity from
the scientific community: the striking discrepancy between the glutted
market for early-career scientists and the numerous prestigious reports
calling for training and importing ever more scientists to head off a
looming shortage. Numerous labor-market experts have found no such
shortage, but the highly publicized perception of a dearth, often linked
to inadequate K-12 education, persists.

"I’ve puzzled," says Michael Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan
Foundation, author of numerous labor market studies, in an interview
with Science Careers. A number of the shortage proponents "are people I
know well and think very highly of." It’s not "a point of view… put
forward by hired guns…spouting whatever the client is telling them."
"I’ve been totally puzzled as well" by "all the misinformation out
there," agrees former high-tech entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa, now
researching globalization at Duke and Harvard. His studies have revealed
"myth after myth," he tells Science Careers. "Every data point I look at
seems to be incorrect."

Myth busters

Wadhwa found no general shortage, only "specific shortages in…specific
areas of technology" such as the newly emerging field of biofuels, he
says. Dozens of employers asked to compare American engineers to their
much-vaunted colleagues from India and China agreed that "in education,
training, quality of work, you name it, in every which way, Americans
are better." Even the best schools in those countries "don’t hold a
candle to our best schools," he continues. Newly hired American
university graduates "become productive within 30 days or so. If you
hire a graduate of an Indian university, it takes between 3 and 6 months
for them to become productive." The image of shortage arises from
"emotion versus fact" and "misinformation that feeds on itself," Wadhwa
says.

It’s the old story of "the elephant, with the blind people feeling
different parts," Teitelbaum says. The "energetic re-assertions of the
Conventional Portrait of 'shortages,' shortfalls, failures of K-12
science and math teaching" are "expressions of interests by interest
groups and their lobbyists," he testified at a November Congressional
hearing. Interest groups include employers seeking "an ample pool of
qualified hires, without need to raise wages and benefits;….some
universities and university associations [needing] graduate student
enrollment and postdocs to conduct funded lab research;….some funding
agencies [seeking] increased funding; [and]…some immigration lawyers and
their associations [wanting]…high-volume visas, with legal fees paid by
employers."

Another possible contributor to these widespread misperceptions: a
failure to distinguish between the general situation and specific,
narrow, local needs. A "perverse funding structure for graduate
education" that supports students and postdocs on research grants,
Teitelbaum testified, encourages universities to recruit according to
their amount of funding rather than the career opportunities awaiting
students and trainees after graduation. A faculty member may have
"research funding [for] 15 graduate research assistants and 10
postdocs…but there aren’t enough people applying to be graduate students
and postdocs from the US. From your perspective, that could be deemed to
be shortage. The demand is inside the institution,… not in the labor
market…. You’re not thinking about whether there’s demand for people who
have gotten Ph.D.s or done postdocs."

Some faculty members, Teitelbaum continues in the interview, confirm his
analysis and say they are "very worried" about the situation. But they
find it "very hard to say this in their departments or to their
colleagues" he says, "because it’s very threatening to the structure by
which research is done," raising the central question of "Who’s going to
actually do the bench research?"

IT troubles

A similar clash of perceptions has roiled the information technology
(IT) industry for years. Central to the controversy, argues computer
scientist Norman Matloff of the University of California-Davis in an
article in the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, is the
issue of temporary H-1B visas for technical workers. "In 1997 the IT
industry began to heavily lobby Congress to increase the yearly cap on
the H-1B category… to cope with a severe high-tech labor shortage,"
Matloff writes. Opponents "contended that the industry’s claim of a
desperate labor shortage was invalid and was devised to hide the
industry’s real goal -- to use the H-1B program as a source of cheap
labor." Matloff’s article quotes Peter Cappelli of the Wharton School:
"Researchers uniformly believe that there isn’t a shortage while
[industry] representatives vociferously believe that there is."
"An employer may find that it cannot hire the workers it needs because
it cannot afford to pay the new, higher wages that scarcity has
produced," writes Cappelli. "From the perspective of an individual
employer, this situation looks like a shortage…. From the perspective of
the economist and perhaps even of the industry, there is no shortage,
just higher wages."

But in a true labor shortage, Wadhwa notes, "salaries should start
shooting through the roof." Technically trained young Americans have not
seen such salary spurts and many seek careers in finance, law, and other
non-technical areas. "Students are smart," Wadhwa notes. Were salaries
to rise, they’d say "‘Hey, this pays more than JP Morgan does! Let’s use
our engineering for engineering rather than becoming investment
bankers.’"

Another symptom of a true shortage: Employers "take people with lesser
skills and train them up," Matloff wrote. But employers still expect to
find new hires with "exactly the right skills …Microsoft uses software
to weed out resumes, they get so many of them….They want the exact
skills that they need at the lowest possible price."
Indeed, some employers resist teaching Americans new skills, Matloff
writes, because "then the newly-enfranchised programmer may demand a
higher salary, threatening to leave for another employer….Thus the
employers claim a 'shortage,' when in fact it is once again simply a
matter of a shortage of cheap workers."

The visa vice

The H-1B visa, according to Wadhwa and the Matloff article, admirably
suits the needs of employers wishing to pay bottom dollar. Many
foreigners "will work for any salary" for the chance to come to America,
Wadhwa observes. Because the H-1B belongs to the employer rather than
the worker and the wait for permanent residence now extends as long as
10 years, the visa effectively prevents workers from changing jobs and
thus, Wadhwa says, from demanding higher pay. Citizens and green card
holders "can shift jobs. If you don’t pay the market value, they’ll go
and work for the next company."

Many interests separate grant-funded research universities from private
high-tech companies, but one thing that binds them together is the H-1B,
which is used to admit limited numbers of tech workers -- but unlimited
numbers of postdocs. "Research university lobbyists… have told me that
they have made a deal with the lobbyists for the companies that wanted
increased numbers of the H-1B visas," Teitelbaum says. "The companies
wanted the universities to support their lobbying position…. The
university lobbyists said, 'We don’t really benefit from the H-1B visas
very much…. What do we get out of this?'"

The result? "A great, typical Washington compromise. If the universities
would support the tripling of the quota… that the companies wanted,"
Teitelbaum says, "then the companies would support exempting the
universities from the limit." The arrangement "costs people indirectly,
but from the point of view of the universities and companies, it
doesn’t cost anything," he says.

So, is the shortage argument simply a cover for cheap labor, as some in
the IT community believe? Tietelbaum doesn't think so. The reports
claiming shortage are the work of "respected people who are stating a
point of view that they believe," he says. " I don’t think they’re
simply telling a falsehood in order to get cheaper workers." But senior
figures such as university presidents are "not out recruiting students.
They’re hearing from their faculty who were not getting enough people
applying to graduate school." Many scientists, he adds, "feel trapped in
this situation they can’t change."

Says Wadhwa, "Everyone gets a lot out of [the present situation]…..All
the people who put the reports together have one or another of their
personal needs fulfilled … but it doesn’t help the nation." And it
doesn't help early career scientists seeking employment in a glutted
labor market.

This is the second article of a two-part series. Part 1, “Rising Above ‘The
Gathering Storm’”, appeared on 14 December 2007.
Beryl Lieff Benderly writes from Washington, DC.
Comments, suggestions? Please send your feedback to our editor,
snweditor@aaas.org

Photo: Brian Snelson


Related CONTENT

  Rising Above "The Gathering Storm"
          14 December 2007,
http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_development/previous_issues/articles/2007_12_14/caredit_a0700179/(parent)/158