For Export Only
By Keith Perine
The Industry Standard Issue Date: Jun 04 2001

During the boom, tech companies lobbied to hire more foreign workers. Now that many are losing their jobs, the industry is turning its back.


WASHINGTON - A few years ago when technology workers were a precious commodity, industry pushed hard for a particular fix to the labor shortage: Allow more foreign engineers and software programmers to come to America under the H-1B visa program for professionals.
"Immigration has to be part of the solution," testified Harris Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of America, at a 1998 Senate hearing. Backed by Microsoft, Sun Microsystems and other tech heavyweights, the ITAA denounced limits on H-1B visas as a drag on prosperity.

Miller got what he wanted. Congress last year raised the annual H-1B quota by 70 percent. But those visas, once the ticket to the American dream, are becoming a liability for foreign workers who've lost their jobs in the tech collapse and now face deportation. The visas are valid for up to six years, but under the unforgiving terms of the program, pink-slipped foreign tech workers must pack their bags and head home unless they immediately line up new jobs with companies that will sponsor them. The workers' plight, however, is eliciting little sympathy from the very companies that spent years pressuring Congress to let them immigrate.

"They see their H-1B as an 'ally-ally-in-free' card, which it is not," Miller says now. "We're not going to make the argument that they should be allowed to hang around the United States as long as they want."

In raising the visa limits, Congress last year passed a law making it easier for foreign tech workers to stay in the U.S. while they look for new jobs. But the Immigration and Naturalization Service has been slow to issue regulations implementing the law, and it's not getting much encouragement these days from the tech lobby to do so. "They haven't been pressing nearly as hard as they have in the past," says INS spokeswoman Eyleen Schmidt.

That's an understatement. A Sun spokesman says the issue "hasn't been a policy priority" for the company. His counterpart at Hewlett-Packard took a similar position. A Microsoft representative declined to comment.

So the H-1B workers are on their own. "It is totally cruel to bring people over here and say, 'If you're out of a job you can't go to work anywhere until we give you permission to do so,'" says Murali Krishna Devarakonda, a spokesman for the Immigrants Support Network, a Budd Lake, N.J., nonprofit.

The number of H-1B workers forced to return to their homelands is unknown. Between October 1997 and September 2000, the State Department issued nearly 342,000 H-1B visas. (That number includes visas issued to nontech skilled workers, such as architects.) Last year, the majority came from India and China. "There's a lot of panic going through the community," says John Clement, a Farmington Hills, Mich., immigration attorney.

Take the case of an Indian national who recently lost his job at EMC, a Hopkinton, Mass., data-storage company. "I'm living on my savings," says the programmer, who requested anonymity. "My wife is five months' pregnant. If we leave, we'll be losing lots of things."

For him and other H-1B workers, that means forgoing the chance to parlay a visa into a green card, guaranteeing permanent residency. "That's the biggest thing weighing on everyone's mind," says Devarakonda.

An EMC spokeswoman says the company recently let go of about 700 employees based on performance reviews. She adds that last year the company lobbied for more H-1B visas but now focuses on education issues.

In March, an Australian software engineer was on his way to work at Oracle when his mailman handed him a letter notifying him that his project - and job - had been abruptly terminated after 10 months. Oracle had been sponsoring the Silicon Valley transplant's green card application, which is now in limbo. "The immigration laws and procedures are a complete mess," he says.

TechNet executive Connie Correll calls H-1B visas a "short-term fix" and says her lobbying group is now more interested in training homegrown workers. But that may be just another short-term fix. After all, if good times return, those skilled foreign workers will be back in demand and the industry may wish it had done more to lend them a helping hand.