Senator Dianne Feinstein has never been shy about grabbing hot-button law-and-order issues. So it was hardly surprising in the days after September 11 to see the California Democrat leading the charge for tougher visa restrictions and other controls on foreigners in the United States. As she pointed out, most of the plane hijackers who crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had been in this country legally.
Feinstein proposed a six-month moratorium on all student visas. Afterheated opposition from university presidents, whose institutions craveforeign-student tuition, the idea was quietly dropped. But it was soon succeededby a sweeping Feinstein bill, co-sponsored by Republican Senator John Kyl ofArizona, that would require tougher screening of all visa applicants, mandatebetter federal tracking of foreign visitors, require a background check beforeissuing any student visa, and block all student visas to individuals fromcountries that the State Department deems sponsors of terrorism.
Conspicuous by its absence was any revision of the dubious H-1B visa program,a Feinstein favorite. In theory, these special visas, now totaling nearly amillion, go to foreign high-tech workers in electronics and similar industries.Feinstein--like her fellow California Democrats Senator Barbara Boxer andCongresswoman Zoe Lofgren--has zealously supported them. Under the H-1B program,American companies (and some non-American ones) can bring in foreign engineers,programmers, and other techies for jobs that they claim can't be filled by U.S.workers.
In October 2000, even as the dot-coms were failing at eye-opening speeds andthe sinking Nasdaq was giving the words "Silicon Valley" an entirely new meaning,Congress rushed through a bill that raised the annual number of H-1Bs from115,000 (itself up from 65,000 in 1998) to 195,000. With renewals, the visa isgood for six years.
To be sure, Feinstein isn't solely responsible. Silicon Valley, led by TechNetand other industry groups, has become a master at intense, bipartisan lobbying.The industry spent an estimated $8 million in "soft money" in the past yearalone. The Senate--where Spencer Abraham, now George W. Bush's secretary ofenergy, got $43,000, and Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah received $36,000--passed thebill 96 to 1. The House, where some 350 members collected an average of $5,000 inhigh-tech contributions, approved the bill by voice vote in the middle of thenight.
The professed rationale was that things were desperate: The industry claimedthat it simply couldn't find enough people who knew the coding or the software.Without the bill, said the Information Technology Association of America, 850,000jobs would go unfilled. Oddly, many high-tech companies--those that weren'tfailing altogether--were already laying off thousands of people.
Even in good times, were employers really thatstrapped? Or werethey simply trying to cut costs by hiring people from India, China, or Pakistanto work for $40,000 in place of Americans who had earned $55,000 or $60,000--andthereby giving themselves the muscle to squeeze both kinds of employees? H-1Bworkers are eager for U.S. jobs that pay three times what similar jobs pay athome. But they are subject to deportation if they're fired and are vulnerable toexploitation in a number of other ways that, together, create a systemapproaching indentured servitude. Many are employed by "body shops"--so-calledconsultancies, the biggest of them foreign owned, that operate roughly like thecoyotes who supply Mexican farmworkers to agricultural employers ("outsourcing"them to software companies when there's work and "benching" them at low wageswhen there's not). "If they complain," a veteran (unemployed) software engineertold me, "they're reminded that if they don't like how they're treated, there'splenty more--in India or Taiwan--where they came from."
The contention that there's a real shortage of American techies wasdebunked long before high-tech began to tank. Before the recession, said NormanMatloff, a professor of computer science at the University of California at Davisand a longtime critic of H-1B, only 2 percent of the experienced softwareengineers who applied for jobs were hired. Many never even got interviews. "Ifemployers were so desperate to hire," Matloff said, "they couldn't afford to beso picky." There appears to be endemic ageism in the industry: Even applicants intheir forties are not just too expensive, but too old.
Rob Sanchez, an Arizona engineer who runs the only reliable database in thefield (www.zazona.com/ShameH1B/), estimates on the basis of federal immigration records that after the recent layoffs, there are still as many as one million H-1B visa holders in this country: more than 700 at Hewlett Packard and hundreds of others at scores of companies--including Microsoft, Motorola, Lucent, and Oracle--as well as those countless body shops. Thousands work on university campuses and at federal laboratories, including the Lawrence Livermore nuclear lab that the University of California runs for the U.S. Department of Energy. (It might interest Feinstein that two Chinese H-1Bs at Lucent were arrested and charged with industrial espionage earlier this year.) But because the feds don't track them, nobody really knows how many H-1Bs are in this country or how the recent layoffs have hit American high-tech workers versus foreign ones.
With the exception of a few overmatched organizations like the Programmers'Guild and established anti-immigration groups, there's little organizedopposition to the H-1B program. On the contrary, last March, as the dot-coms sankdeeper into recession, the generally sober Committee for Economic Developmentcalled for further liberalization.
As the economy continues to deteriorate, the events of September 11 could wellfuel another round of anti-immigrant backlash. Like Feinstein's bill, PresidentBush's quick abandonment of his fuzzy proposal to regularize the status of allillegal Mexican aliens provides ample evidence of that. Such backlash would bedeplorable, as it always is. But even at full employment and before September 11,there never was much justification for a foreign-worker program as huge as H-1B.There's even less now.
