Offshoring 192
Enclosed below is a profile Beryl Benderly recently wrote on me in
Science Careers, a publication of the American Association for
Advancement of Science, run by the publishers of the prestigious Science
magazine. Ms. Benderly is the author of the superb piece on postdocs
that I reviewed a few days ago, archived at
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/PostdocGauntlet.txt
Keep in mind, for use below, that large numbers of those postdocs are
foreigners holding H-1B visas.
Several journalists have written profiles of me in the past, including:
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/BusinessWeekProfile.txt
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/SalonMagProfile.txt
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/CWProfile.txt
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/UCDRecognition.txt
Other than the unfair BusinessWeek piece that I suspect was legally
libelous, most of the profiles have been positive--especially, I'm proud
to say, the one by my own university's official magazine.
I typically don't know what to say in reviewing my own profile. I find
writing such a review to be rather surreal. Nevertheless, I am
definitely including the Benderly piece here, because it is the most
thorough and most accurate account of "where I'm coming from" on the
H-1B and related issues. This I highly appreciate.
I won't comment much on her piece itself. Instead, I wish to expand on
the theme Benderly chose for her opening. She begins with a reference to
my May 25 post, http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/FedsGiveTakeAway.txt
in which I noted the sad irony of the federal government on the one
hand funding a "retraining" program for unemployed IT people, to do
work of a simpler nature than they are qualified for, while on the
other hand approving the hiring of an H-1B in southern California for
work those unemployed IT people could easily do. This idea of
different parts of the government working at cross purposes to each
other is no doubt something that especially resonates with DC
dwellers like Benderly, even more than the rest of us who only visit
the place.
But those are not the only such contradictions, no sir, no ma'am. How
about this one? The National Science Foundation is funding that
retraining program for unemployed IT workers, while at the same time
pouring tons of money into grants to find ways to increase college
enrollment in IT! NSF's CPATH program, for instance, is aimed at
increasing computer science enrollment, again at the same time NSF is
funding the training of unemployed IT professionals to become high
school teachers. And even sadder, the recipient of the unemployed IT
worker retraining funds, Georgia Tech, is also one of the universities
that NSF awarded CPATH funding to.
Similarly, NSF's STEP program is aimed at increasing STEM enrollment.
Yet at the same time, the NSF is complicit in the shameful, abusive
postdoc system Benderly wrote about (NSF funds many of the postdocs) as
symbolizing the near-hopelessness the postdocs have for a career in
science. And this in spite of the fact, reported by Benderly, that we
already have plenty of college students studying STEM.
Reminds me of today's Wall Street Journal report that preliminary U.S.
government investigations of the Toyota "stuck accelerator" accidents
seem to show that some of the drivers unwittingly had their feet on the
accelerator instead of the brake. Well, in the NSF's case, the
government has its foot BOTH on the accelerator AND on the brake.
Needless to say, it goes far beyond the NSF. Many other government
agencies are funding efforts to increase STEM/IT enrollment, while
simultaneously the feds are approving hundreds of thousands of H-1B visas
(new and renewal), not to mention the foreign-student OPT work permits,
L-1s and so on, all of which make it very difficult for American STEM/IT
students to attain lifelong careers in those fields.
This feds giveth/feds taketh away theme was poignantly illustrated in a
CNN interview of students at Georgia Tech last year, probing their
anxiety over the poor job market they might be facing on graduation.
See my review, http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/AgeIsTheMainH1BIssue.txt
One of the students interviewed was Christine Liu, who spoke of her engineer
dad, an immigrant from China (emphasis added):
# Currently the job market with my dad, because he's an engineer, is
# hard, really hard, to stay up because we have all these Georgia Tech
# students who are up with the new information and stuff like that.
# THEY'RE COMING IN AND TAKING THE OLDER PEOPLE'S JOBS, so my dad
# doesn't have the opportunity to get a job. He's a really smart guy,
# so he's considering going back to China and starting a job there.
# That should never be an option!...It makes me angry.
What Ms. Liu doesn't understand is that a lot of those young people
taking her dad's job are H-1Bs. As I've explained so many times, H-1B
is at its core a vehicle used by employers to shun older (age 35+)
American workers. Ironically, H-1B is probably the visa Mr. Liu held
when he first started work in the U.S. The feds gave to his father, and
are now taking away, in this case beneficiary and victim being the same
person.
CNN of course chose Georgia Tech as its interview site because the
campus is just a couple of miles from CNN headquarters. But actually,
Georgia Tech is something of a hotbed of pro-H-1B activity. Google names
like Peter Freeman and Jim Foley to see some examples. My favorite is
the comment Freeman, then Dean of Computing Sciences at Georgia Tech,
gave to a reporter, derisively dismissing my research as "spitting into
the wind"; see http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/CSEnrollmentDrop4.txt
About a year and half ago, I was in Atlanta for a research conference,
and while there I thought I'd drop by Georgia Tech. Beautiful campus,
well funded. On a whim, I decided to seek out a dean there whom I had
talked to briefly on the phone some months earlier. No appointment, no
prior warning, nothing; I just suddenly showed up at his office. But
the guy couldn't have been nicer. He dropped everything, and spent a
full hour with me, discussing lots of aspects of computer science
education. I was so impressed with this man, who clearly had a
heartfelt concern for students, and who by the way overcame considerable
adversity himself as a youngster, ending up as a dean at a prestigious
university.
And yet... He mentioned that in computer science (a full school at
Georgia Tech, consisting of several departments), the push was to have
more and more classes taught by temps, lecturers and other types of
nonregular instructors. He readily admitted that this was having a negative
impact on the students, who came to Tech expecting to be taught by the
Tech's full professors, many of them world-renowned experts in their
fields. But, he said, what counts most is that staffing lots of courses
with nonregular instructors "gives you more bang for you buck." Once
again, it boils down to cheap labor. See what I'm saying?
Norm
http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2010_07_09/caredit.a1000069
Science Careers from the journal Science
Taken for Granted: The Immigration Guru
By Beryl Lieff Benderly
July 09, 2010
"It boils down to cheap, compliant labor." -- Norman Matloff
In connection with President Barack Obama's push for reform of
immigration laws, two recent articles deserve attention. The first
describes Operation Reboot, a $2.5 million, federally funded program to
train middle-aged, out-of-work computer professionals for jobs as high
school computer teachers. The second recounts the hiring of Yuying Lu,
a recent alumna of California State University, Long Beach, for a
computer job with a California company on an H-1B visa, the temporary
work permit ostensibly intended to relieve shortages of technical
personnel. A Chinese national who arrived in the United States in 2007,
Lu earned a master's degree in a subject called educational technology.
"So, in essence one branch of the federal government is funding
unemployed ITers to 'retrain' for something well beneath their
qualifications, while another federal agency is approving work permits
for foreign students [for jobs] that unemployed Americans could easily
do," writes the man to whom I owe my knowledge of this piquant
contrast, computer science professor Norman Matloff of the University
of California, Davis. He continues, "Of course, the fact that the
Georgia Tech [Georgia Institute of Technology] program is funded by the
NSF [National Science Foundation], which has been a promoter of H-1B,
makes it all the more ironic."
Based on his analysis of the Long Beach curriculum, Matloff judges the
"computer content" of Lu's degree to be "quite shallow. ... It ought to
be obvious that the 'former' IT professionals in the Georgia Tech
program, or their counterparts in the southern California area, could
easily be doing that job that Lu was hired for." Matloff's criticism,
let me hasten to note, is of national policies and not of Lu, who has
only taken advantage of opportunities legally available to her. "The
H-1B does not require employers to give hiring priority to Americans,"
Matloff continues. Although "the spirit of the program is to fill
shortages, ... I don't think there is a shortage here."
Norm Matloff (Courtesy of Norman Matloff)
(Courtesy of Norman Matloff)
Norm Matloff
Nor, adds Matloff in a recent interview with Science Careers, does any
discernible shortage of scientists exist on American university
campuses, where some of the scientists working as postdocs were
admitted to the United States on H-1Bs. Although they, therefore, do no
affect all foreign postdocs, the provisions of the H-1B nonetheless
permit abuses. As in industry, the employer holds the visas, and the
workers are not free to seek other positions. Although many differences
distinguish IT employees from postdoc researchers, Matloff sees an
overriding similarity. "It's exactly the same issue," he says. "It
boils down to cheap, compliant labor."
Sharp eye, straight talk
This combination of straight talk and expert knowledge is probably
familiar to readers who see the e-mail newsletter on immigration and
employment that Matloff sends out at irregular intervals, from which I
quoted above. His newsletter essays often present detailed analyses of
the statistical claims or methodological bases of statements, often
published in (purportedly) scientific reports and articles. Also
familiar to those readers will be his views on the H-1B, about which he
has made himself something of a national expert, a determined gadfly,
and an interview subject for media outlets including CNN, NPR, PBS, and
others. His interest grew out of the experiences of his computer
students. (To receive the newsletter, e-mail a request to
matloff@cs.ucdavis.edu.)
Critics of immigration policies often find themselves accused of
hostility to immigrants, a charge that fits Matloff poorly. The
self-described offspring of "one-and-a-half immigrants" -- his
American-born mother grew up in an immigrant community -- he is married
to a U.S. citizen who is originally from China. A largely self-taught
speaker of Mandarin and Cantonese, Matloff is something of a polymath.
With a Ph.D. in mathematics and as a former professor of statistics at
the university where he now holds a full professorship in computer
science, he is one of very few technology experts to have contributed a
long, invited scholarly article to a law journal published by a leading
law school. His "On the Need for Reform of the H-1B Nonimmigrant Work
Visa in Computer-Related Occupations", published in the University of
Michigan Journal of Law Reform, is considered required reading by
skeptics of the tech industry's claims of worker shortages. His fans
are drawn heavily from scientifically and technically trained people
dissatisfied with existing job opportunities, especially IT
professionals unable to find work in their desired field.
What bothers Matloff is not immigration or national origin, but waste,
unfairness, and mendacity -- all major elements, he believes, of
today's technical and scientific labor markets. He denies the
significance of shortages or educational standards or any of the other
supposed problems cited by "extremely slick" H-1B proponents, and
points out ways that visas save employers money. "Type I," he says, "is
where an H-1B of the same qualifications as an American gets paid less
than an American. ... That's not illegal [because] there are so many
loopholes [in the law]. Type II is hiring the younger H-1B instead of
the older American. That's really the same thing [because in general],
younger people are cheaper in salary; they're cheaper in benefits.
That's really what it boils down to."
In academe, the cost-saving method is even more straightforward.
Postdocs receive what universities term training wages rather than
faculty-worthy salaries, and large numbers admitted on H-1Bs (and other
visas) make possible the depressed pay scale.
In his law review article, Matloff documents some of the effects of
these techniques, including what he calls the "striking" attrition rate
among computer science graduates, many fewer of whom, he writes, are
working in their degree field 15 or 20 years after graduation than are
people in other technical specialties. At a point when they are only in
their early 40s, less than one-fifth of computer science graduates are
still working in the field -- in contrast, for example, to almost 60%
of civil engineering graduates still working as civil engineers. Such a
situation, Matloff writes, quoting a National Research Council report,
"is consistent with actions taken by employers motivated by the
reduction of labor costs. For example, an employer that terminated more
experienced (hence older), higher-salaried workers and hired less
experienced (hence younger), lower paid workers would not necessarily
be violating the statutes prohibiting age discrimination. ... It was a
waste of education and experience."
Solutions?
For these and other reasons, many of them discussed previously in this
space, the H-1B needs to be reformed. Matloff's law-journal article
proposes several changes, including requiring employers wanting to hire
H-1Bs to attest that they have not "laid off Americans in the same ...
job category within the past 6 months ... and will not lay off
Americans in the same ... job category within the next 6 months."
Furthermore, "the wage paid ... must be at least equal to the median
national wage for the given job category, according to the government
... data." The wage, in other words, must not be lower than what a
person of similar skills and qualification would receive on the open
job market.
All potential H-1B hiring, furthermore, would have to be done through
"a public, Web-based process" with a clear and declared preference
required for Americans who have the minimum qualifications to become
"reasonably productive in the use of that skill within a month, via
on-the-job learning." Americans could not be rejected as
"overqualified."
Short of Congress enacting his suggestions in full, he favors passage
of the Durbin-Grassley Bill, though with the proviso that only "certain
parts are good," such as the expansion of rules against layoffs by
employers who hire H-1Bs. The best part of Durbin-Grassley, Matloff
says, would "clean up the definition of prevailing wage," eliminating
loopholes that permit "the legal prevailing wage [to be] well short of
the market rate."
"Many supporters of reform ... have the wrong idea that the employers
that are underpaying the H-1Bs must be breaking the law," he continues.
This view plays "right into the hands of industry, because industry
loves to hear these news stories that say, 'People must be breaking the
law. You need better enforcement.' But they're not breaking the law"
because of the many abuses permitted by loopholes.
The universal bottom line
The desire for cheap, compliant labor is hardly limited to American
tech companies or universities, Matloff notes. Last month, a trip to
China that included family visits and meetings with professional
colleagues provided a number of chances to discuss employment issues.
Thanks to Chinese government policies in recent years, Matloff says,
"Suddenly, there are a lot of college graduates. This used to be your
ticket to the elite. Now they're not getting jobs. There's a surplus of
people." A relative who is an engineer with a "very nice job" and a
"gorgeous condo" in a provincial city, Matloff says, commented on the
current "terrible" job market for new college graduates. "My wife said
that of course it must be good for engineers," Matloff reports, "and he
was just puzzled that we would just say that."
Lunch with a faculty member at a prestigious Chinese university
produced another surprise. "I was saying to our host [that] I think the
Chinese system is better because [in China graduate] students are paid
by the university; they're not paid from grants" as in the United
States. "Paying from grants is kind of a corrupting influence. And he
said, no, he really prefers the American way. ... He's not paying his
students," so he can't determine how long they stay. When the
university declares their research finished, he complained, the
students leave. "You see," Matloff concludes, "it goes back to
compliant labor." If, as President Obama hopes, the nation does
undertake a serious overhaul of immigration law, the H-1B is high on
the list of problems that need attention.
Beryl Lieff Benderly writes from Washington, D.C.