[Here we have 300,000 job openings]

High-tech visas back on political agenda


By Terry Costlow and George Leopold
EE Times
(08/06/99, 5:22 p.m. EDT)

WASHINGTON - As GOP leaders positioning themselves as friends of
technology again raise the divisive issue of high-tech visas for
foreign workers, opponents in the engineering community are girding
for a replay of the H-1B temporary-visa battle that raged last year.

It's too soon to be raising H-1B visa caps again, said Paul Kostek,
president of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers-USA, based here. IEEE-USA wants Congress to hold off on
considering new legislation until it assesses results of a
congressionally mandated survey by the National Research Council to
determine whether a shortage of U.S. engineers actually exists. That
survey is among a number of unfinished studies on the subject, Kostek
said.

Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, co-sponsor of the Senate bill with Majority
Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., argued this week that H-1B visa holders
create jobs rather than take them from U.S. workers. Engineers dispute
that claim.

Lobbyists claim that bringing in foreign nationals will create jobs,
yet we've seen that the help-wanted index has gone down for the past
15 months, said Gene Nelson, an unemployed PhD who testified, along
with Kostek, before the house immigration panel this week. I see an
inverse relation; H-1B is more of a sink than a source.

The new legislation, introduced late last month, would raise the
annual cap on H-1B visas to 200,000 workers starting next year. Over
three years, the proposal would nearly double the number of H-1B
visas.

The legislation would also exempt foreign workers from the visa limit
if they have obtained a master's degree or higher, or if they earn at
least $60,000 a year.

Controversial legislation approved last year raised the cap to 115,000
annually. According to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization
Service, the limit for fiscal 1999 was reached on June 15.

Engineering groups backed by the Clinton administration want to shift
the focus of the H-1B debate to retraining workers. This is not a
short-term problem, Kostek said. We need to keep updating people's
skills as technology evolves.

Chip industry executives who favor another rise in the visa cap said
they can't wait that long. Retraining is kind of a long-term approach,
said Anne Craib, director of international trade and government
affairs for the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA).

The new legislation, New Workers for Economic Growth Act, is a key
plank in the Republican high-tech agenda heading into the 2000
elections. GOP lawmakers are backing a series of initiatives designed
to bring the nation's high-tech industry into the Republican fold. The
campaign agenda also includes a 10-year extension of the R&D tax
credit, which expired June 30 . The proposed extension is part of a
massive Republican-sponsored tax cut plan that appears certain to be
vetoed by President Clinton.

Sponsors say the temporary-visa legislation is designed to fill the
immediate need for high-tech workers-over 300,000 jobs-[and] hire
foreign workers with very specialized skills. Engineering groups,
meanwhile, argue that the program is taking jobs from qualified U.S.
engineers and that U.S. industry is seeking low-wage workers. Yet some
engineers concede that chip makers' skill requirements tend to be
higher than those in the IT industry, which also stands to benefit
from a visa increase.

Craib pointed to an SIA survey showing that 48 percent of the
engineering PhDs at U.S. universities go to foreign-born students,
while foreign students account for 42 percent of master's degrees. The
demand for [graduate engineering degrees] is not slacking at all,
Craib said.

Industry should be able to take advantage of foreign engineers
educated at taxpayer-supported U.S. universities, she said. Why should
we send them to work for [Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.]?

Others say the graduate-degree provision would be easy to skirt. In
practice, an unlimited quota for people with graduate degrees means
unlimited numbers of H-1B hires, said Norm Matloff, a computer science
professor at the University of California at Davis. A potential H-1B
[holder] will go out and get a quickie master's degree, so there will
be no limit on the number of people coming in.

One argument for raising the visa cap is that with thousands of job
openings being advertised, there must be a shortage of high-tech
workers. However, one analyst noted that job openings are always part
of the engineering world.Vacancies do not mean shortages, job
vacancies occur all the time as turnover takes place, said Bob Rivers,
publisher of the Engineering Manpower Newsletter (Orange, Mass.).
There are 2.1 million engineers, and the average turnover rate is
every seven years, which means 300,000 engineers change jobs every
year.

Added Rivers, If you add in the 2.5 percent of the labor force that
retires in a typical year, you've got 352,000 vacancies without any
expansion at all. Many of those jobs will be open for six months, so
we can expect to see a vacancy rate of over 150,000 almost all the
time.

IT groups appear less involved in the current debate than they were
last year, when they helped lead the fight to increase the visa cap.
Harris Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of
America (Arlington, Va.), said the group will likely jump into the
fray.

A couple of things have happened recently, and it's become a campaign
issue, Harris said. We still support an increase, and we'll be
involved this time around, but we have to take the temperature of our
member companies before we decide how much we'll get involved.

Nevertheless, observers said there is little time left this year to
approve legislation raising the visa cap. They predicted the issue is
likely to carry over into next year's presidential and congressional
races.