Posted on 11/26/2007 8:46:56 AM PST by CarrotAndStick
Signs with the words "U.S. citizens and permanents only" greeted students at employers' booths at a recent career fair at Duke University, where I teach. In previous years only government jobs requiring security clearances were labeled off-limits to international students.
Foreign-born engineering graduates told me they were disappointed that employers like General Electric, IBM, and Carmax as well as smaller companies would not even interview them.
Recruiters told me they were frustrated that they could not fill critical positions. They have few options because the visas they need to hire foreign nationals simply aren't available.
This visa shortage is a problem for U.S. companies that depend on engineers because significantly more foreign-born students than Americans are completing higher degrees in engineering. According to the American Society of Engineering Education (asee.org), foreigners account for nearly 45% of masters-level engineering students and 60% of PhDs.
The result? Multinationals have little choice but to expand their engineering operations abroad, and smaller businesses that can't afford to expand overseas are unable to hire the talent they need.
Aaron McQuaid, a customer-support engineer at Cisco's Research Triangle Park (N.C.) group, has been helping the tech giant recruit from Duke. He says Cisco currently has more than 1,300 openings.
His team alone, he says, has been looking for two engineers for more than three months. McQuaid says barely 10% of the applicants from Duke were U.S. citizens, none had the skill set he needed, and his group couldn't find a way to hire highly qualified foreign nationals.
The visa system isn't working. Right now, when international students complete their degrees in the U.S., they are allowed to work for up to one year on a practical-training visa. After that they must obtain a temporary work visa called an H-1B, which is valid for up to six years.
Yes, companies are allowed to hire foreign students during the one-year practical training period. But those I spoke with worry that they won't be able to keep their recruits beyond this period because H-1B visas are in short supply.
(This year there were 65,000 H-1Bs available for any foreign-born worker who holds an undergraduate degree and an additional 20,000 for those with a master's degree. But U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services reported there were twice as many applications received by its April deadline for the undergraduate-degree H1-Bs for 2008 than the allotted number, and those were distributed via a lottery.)
Bad for Everybody
The problem with H-1Bs, which were originally intended to let U.S. companies recruit highly skilled workers, is that they can be misused. John Miano, of the anti-outsourcing advocacy group Programmers Guild (programmersguild.org). says these visas are frequently used to import low-level computer programmers who work at below-market salaries.
Miano estimates that 56% of computer workers, who make up 45% of the H-1B pool, are in this low-skill category. Yet these visas are also used to hire highly skilled engineers, scientists, doctors, and computer-information architects.
With the number of available visas drying up, there's no easy way for the current batch of international students to stay. This means they need to find jobs back home or in other countries.
Additionally, there is already a backlog of more than a million skilled immigrants working in the U.S., mostly on H-1B visas, who are waiting for a yearly allocation of 120,000 permanent-resident visas. So we are headed for a massive reverse brain drain of skilled workers and students.
Our loss is likely to be the gain of countries like India and China.
On October 5, Wim Elfrink, chief globalization officer for Cisco, paid a visit to Duke. He talked about the opportunities his company was seeing in international markets and innovative new technologies being developed for them.
Elfrink said he expects to hire 7,000 engineers over the next five years and to have 20% of Cisco's top talent located in India. He encouraged Duke students to apply for jobs in Bangalore.
What Undergrads Say
Will our current crop of foreign-born graduates end up in India or China? I asked my students about their plans.
Baris Guzel, 23, says he has a job offer in Germany and knows of opportunities back home in Turkey. But he wants to stay in the U.S. and join a financial-services or consulting firm.
What deters him are ads like those posted by Accenture on Duke's recruiting site that read: "Applicants for employment in the U.S. must possess work authorization which does not require sponsorship by the employer for a visa." How can he get a visa if employers won't sponsor him, Guzel asks.
Gauravjit Singh, 24, and his team won a $100,000 prize last September from Duke's CURE business plan competition.
He then co-founded a medical-device company to equip clinicians in the developing world with an affordable and effective technology in the fight against cervical cancer. They outsourced the technology development to a Cary (N.C.) design firm. Given how hard it is to get a visa, Gauravjit sees no choice but to return home and run his venture from Bangalore.
Jaineel Aga, 23, says he may have made the wrong decision about studying in the U.S. instead of Europe. The reason he picked the U.S. was because he believed it was more open and welcoming to international students. He wants to become a management consultant and is keen to stay in the U.S. He considers it a travesty that his career may ultimately be decided by a visa lottery.
Tanya Srivastava, 24, says she never planned to stay permanently in the U.S. but did want to work for a few years to get some global experience and pay off the loans she took to complete her U.S. education. But she believes she can easily get a job back home in India if things don't work out here.
All these students said they would discourage their friends from coming to the U.S.
Unlike many of the problems facing the U.S., this one isn't hard to fix. All we need to do is increase the number of visas that are available for international students who get job offers from U.S. companies. An even better solution is to offer these students permanent-resident visas rather than H-1Bs. In the new global landscape, we need the world's best talent on our side.
Vivek Wadhwa, a former tech entrepreneur, is the Wertheim Fellow at the Harvard Law School and an executive-in-residence at Duke University. He writes a column on policy issues affecting entrepreneurs every month.
Note: The article is from an Indian website.
I love the way that all the computer jobs are touted as “engineering” positions. This is crock. I am in the IT field and NONE are engineers. An engineer has to pass the EIT and PE tests to receive a LICENSE to be a REAL engineer. The rest are just “feel good” titles for IT people.
Better solution = put a floor on salary to be paid to H1B visa holders at local market value + 20% When the cheaper, foreign labor is not available, watch how quickly the companies snap up the supposedly unavailable US workers.
good, now go home!
There is strong protectionist thought process on FR which is based on the 1900’s. In this technology age, we are insane to let a MIT Ph.D from India go back. A big part of the tech boom is directly linked to H-1’s that got green cards starting a business here. Would you rather they do that in India ?
You can just kiss my elbow, I remember well the attorney on the TV giving the seminar on how to get around the H-1 visa requirments and turn it into a scam. So when you prove it is not BS and run the ones out of the country that scammed the system get back to me. Other wise this is just another back door amnesty program.
If they have no interest in joining with american culture and seeking permenent citizen status, then they are no asset at all.
Let’s see, I got a Master’s degree, then got a H-1 which led to a green card and then citizenship. Took me 10 years in all and I followed the complete legal process. How is that amnesty ? Your reaction is just knee jerk without understanding the issue. I am staunchly against illegal immigration and do not want amnesty in any way. However to call a PhD. from MIT that wants a legal H-1 work visa the same things as amnesty for an illegal who has broken the law by coming across the border is ludicrous. Controlled high quality legal immigration is a huge plus for America. Ask anyone in the tech industry, one of our biggest problems is the lack of qualified engineers to hire. I work for a Fortune 500 company and we have had 1,000 open positions for engineers for 6 months or more.
A very long windup for an amazingly pointless solution. The primary problem with the H-1B visas is that they are being "wasted" on intro level Visual Basic programmers instead of the high level cream of the crop they are advertised as.
The obvious solution is to cap the number of H-1B visas and then have companies bid for them. Being willing to pay $20,000 for a slot for a Indian doctoral level researcher wouldn't be very expensive. On the other hand it would be ridiculous to pay it for someone just out of tech school who can barely figure out how to line up buttons on a screen.
Everybody with a screwdriver in his hand, a train driver, or any technician in an apartment building who works for the custodian is called an engineer.
One has to have a minimum of a B.S. from a REAL ENGINEERING SCHOOL to be called an engineer, with or without a PE.
“Feel good” titles are without the “REAL GOOD” pay that goes with them.
That reminds me of the 25-year old VPs, senior VPs and executive VPs in companies they don’t own and with no experience in business.
Agreed. We want to keep this talent here in the US.
And I say this as one that was affected by the offshore transition of my job (I found another... making more money).
Keeping highly educated talent in the US is nothing but good for the US.
The problem is with illegal freeloader immigrants, let’s not spread our angst to the legal immigrants.
I agree with you.
If we need skilled people, degreed or not, we should make it easier instead of being dumped upon by every third world country.
One ironclad condition, though. Whatever it takes for a background check including home country fingerprinted police report obtained by Americans working with the authorities of said country. Immediate approval of the proper visa should be forthcoming for successful, approved immigrants with backgrounds.
Maneesh, I think you are right. The key to this is getting control of our borders and making sure those who come here are chosen by us, and have something to contribute THAT WE NEED. “Controlled high quality legal immigration” is what we were promised in 1965, and again in 1986 and 1996. The problem has been that the government has never lived up to that promise. And the effect of that, as you can see, is that so many people have come to reject the idea of immigration entirely. People feel like their country is being overrun. They are constantly exposed to people who come here and don’t want to live like we live, for instance, crowding a dozen people or so into a home that we would expect to hold a nuclear family of four or five. And they are constantly exposed to people who have brought their Old World problems here, and expect us to put up with them and deal with them. And then, of course, there are people who have immigrated here who hate our country and our Constitution, and want to impose their corrupt old traditions and religion on us. Bottom line is, IF PEOPLE DON’T WANT TO ASSIMILATE, COMPLETELY, LANGUAGE, CUSTOMS AND LIFESTYLE, THEY SHOULD NOT COME HERE. And, realistically, not everyone in the world can come here, even if they are engineers. Some people need to stay home and build their own countries. Everything you say makes sense, but you have to take into consideration the way people who were born here are perceiving the situation.
I agree with you 100 %. The two-tired system we have is insane, in that we discourage lots of people we should be welcoming, yet turn a blind eye toward those ( especially criminal elements) we should be prohibiting.
The tighter we make the laws, the more we encourage the lawbreakers. Yet, you can't really blame us native Americans who feel like we're getting the short end of the stick here. We have been more than gracious and welcoming, yet are constantly called racists, greedy, and treated with second-class status in our own homeland, by our own government.
Anyone who saw that H-1B visa video has call to feel bad. So, you have to be a little understanding.
A Freudian slip? LOL
I agree. The two-tiered system is a too-tired one, to say the least.
Go to India, Japan, Europe, Middle East.... and see how “outsiders” are treated there. We are the greatest nation god gave man as someone who grew up outside this nation I may have an even greater appreciation of that undeniable truth of life.
“I love the way that all the computer jobs are touted as “engineering” positions. This is crock. I am in the IT field and NONE are engineers. An engineer has to pass the EIT and PE tests to receive a LICENSE to be a REAL engineer. The rest are just “feel good” titles for IT people.”
Nonsense.
Petrochemical Distribution Engineer = Gas station attendant
Flammable Pharmaceutical Production Engineer = Crack / Meth Cooker
Regional Herbal Enhancement Procurement and Distribution Engineer = Kid on the corner who sells pot.
Comparative Fictional Vocalization / Auditory Engineer = Lawyer
The list goes on.....................
Excellent post. I support your position.
Without licensing, you cannot hold the legitimate title of Engineer. Can you drop out of Med school and call yourself a Doctor????
Sorry, but people like you do not have a RIGHT to earn American citizenship. The American People extended to you the PRIVILEGE of becoming one of us, a concept that you are apparently unable to grasp.
"Highly skilled young people" from non-Western cultures are not an asset to America, IMO, because they take jobs away from "highly skilled young people" already here.
“we” fund a lot of development projects that require engineers and scientists in a variety of fields. When we evaluate someone we look at his resume and look at the following: 1. Does she have an advanced degree from a highly rated school (no one actually knows what ABET means) such as UCali, Michigan, GaTech, MIT, Cal Tech, etc. 2. Does she have experience on challenging projects that have been successful. 3. Are her jobs mostly with reputabel companies and organizations. 4. Is there much fluff in the resume?
Somewhere down at the bottom we might look at whether the person is a PE, as a sort of odd peculiarity, which may or may not be ragarded as useless fluff depending upon how much the applicant makes of it. Finding someone who is licensed to sign plans, in those few places where it is required, is the very easy part of a project and not a skill we will pay much for.
The fact is that government licensing exams do not test the ability of someone to do anything beyond the basic government minimum, and do not test creativity or ability to do anything really hard where the answer isn’t already in the back of the book
That is the cheap and easy part of most engineering problems, and has nothing to do with advanced computing and electronic systems, aerospace, etc.
Not at all. The more brains on staff, the more successful the company gets and more jobs that end up getting created. This competition/battlefield metaphor that is so common on FR is totally wrong - building successful businesses is a creative enterprise, and when more creative minds are mobilized to work toward a company's (or a nation's) success, the more opportunity results for everyone. The job market is not a zero-sum game.
Bottom line is: we'll take all the the young, driven, Indian PhD's we can get our hands on. We might, however, be a bit overstocked with Mexican gardeners. ;)
The principal issue is that more native engineers will only come about when the economics are such that starting and mid career salaries are not 1/4 - 1/10 those of an attorney.
Yes, I think that is a trenchant observation.
Unless you want to become a lawyer in one of the 43 states that require a law degree from an accredited law school to sit for the bar.
The above observation excludes the software / IT industry, and I’m aware of the H1-B scam that is rampant in this field of industry.
We’ve been debunking this myth for a long time here on FR. The H1B program is riddled with fraud.
Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/705954/posts
Posted by FormerLurker
On General/Chat 06/25/2002 6:14:36 PM PDT · 61 replies · 2,221+ views
Testimony to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Immigration ^ | April 21, 1998 | Dr. Norman Matloff
Yes, the obvious solution to more than one problem is to recognize the value of American citizenship. For example, public flag burning is called "free speech," but what does that "speech" mean? I see no reason why Congress couldn't define the meaning of that gesture to be that the demonstrator wants to sell his citizenship to a foreigner, and emigrate to another country on the proceeds of that sale. Of course that would require a hearing, and if the demonstrator denied that intent in the hearing, then that denial would have to be broadcast on TV just as long and prominently as the original demonstration was broadcast.I think that would put flag burning in perspective; few would go so far as to sell their American citizenship birthright.
There is a famous saying coined by some writer “You can take a person out of India, but you cant take India out of a person.” People like you must be some wierd soul-less freaks who hate their own culture.
Even nth generation white americans have certain cultural ties to their ancestral european lands, Cajun celebrate their French heritage, Italians and Irish and Germans their own heritage.. but you dont hear an Irish ancestry American use such negativity while referring to his culture of origin that you do here, provoking non-existent stereotypes.
Good for you that you made a lot of money, have a LOT of education and you also claim to be assimilated completely into American culture.
But if you are so assimilated, why even bother posting on INDIAN issues on FR ? Why dont you try to lighten your skin and pretend to be Italian or Spanish like some of your inferiority complex minded north Indians do ? Some idiots I met are just like you, who claim to be the basturd offsprings of Alexander’s army so that they can claim GREEK heritage....
Just remember that being conservative also implies ensuring family ties are strong, your approach of cultural dissociation only ends up alienating yourself from your own family.
And whats up with this anti-Indian propaganda that Indians dislike foreigners ?
Last time I checked, India was the only country that provided asylum to Dalai Llama risking confrontation with China and gave refuge to scores of persecuted people from around the world. Especially the Parsees from Iran, who have been the richest community in India for a while.. without the mildest trace of persecution.
And surely you must’ve missed all those Bollywood movies and dozens of songs that romanticize the concept of PARDESI.. you know what that word means... its in your mother tongue, not mine, BTW.
Surely, US is a great place to live and work, but that doesnt mean you have to trash your homeland and falsely present facts about it, just to seek the approval of the white majority. Its an utterly dishonest way to assimilate, as if you are anxious to be their slave or something. Grow some balls man.. If they can be proud of their Irish or Italian origin, you have the right to be proud of your Indian or African or Chinese origin.
You are smart and sane.
But the people who are against H1-Bs are also partly right. Their case refers to the misuse of H1-Bs by some software companies.
But they generalize too much and jump to conclusions quickly.
Then again, if you got brains and as long as Nazis/commies/malaysian style racists are not ruling the country, you dont need a H1-B visa or entry into USA to succeed.
What matters most is you should work in a field that interests you.
I know of a Mexican PhD who was so brilliant that Intel hired him, even though he was on student exchange VISA and there is no legal way he could work in US. But then, he was too good in physics.
US will never let go of intelligent people as long as they are useful to them. But then again, which country would not love to have them ? Even big Indian companies are hunting for talented Russian and Chinese programmers. This trend will go on.
When US granted citizenship to a despicable excuse of a human being like SHIRO ISHII and scores of Nazi scientists, just because their research was far too valuable to punish them, it seems pretty mild to grant citizenship to soft spoken, intelligent foreign PhDs who are a major impetus in development.
Under those conditions, we would never have given Albert Einstein permission to come here as the Nazis would not have cooperated. Nor would we have been able to allow anyone fleeing Communist countries from entering. Would the East German Volkspolizei send us a background check and fingerprints of anyone coming over the Berlin Wall?
“Highly skilled young people” from non-Western cultures are not an asset to America, IMO, because they take jobs away from “highly skilled young people” already here.
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