The Immigrant Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent by Vivek Wadhwa & Alex Salkever

Author:Vivek Wadhwa & Alex Salkever
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781613630211
Publisher: Wharton Digital Press
Published: 2012-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

The Program Nobody Likes: Death Threats and H-1Bs

In September 2010, I gave the lunchtime keynote at an ImmigrationWorks conference in Seattle, Washington. ImmigrationWorks is a pro-immigration advocacy and research group. I have participated in several immigration conferences, but this was not a normal keynote or conference. The speakers for this event received letters telling them that if they attended “the biggest gathering of traitors of the century…they would do this at their own peril.” Attached to the letters were M1 bullets (a carbine used in semiautomatic weapons by government and paramilitary forces). Security at the event included Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, Seattle plainclothes police, and a big bouncer at the door. The FBI agents asked me not to mention the threats until after the conference. Several of the invited speakers, including a senator, chose not to attend as a result of the threat.

Over the years, I have grown accustomed to being a target and a virtual punching bag for a vocal community that despises immigrant labor in skilled professions. Needless to say, the H-1B program is extremely controversial. Economists, politicians, and advocates for the employee rights of US-born technology workers have claimed that these types of visas are used as another form of outsourcing by Indian and US technology companies. Those companies, critics claim, use H-1Bs to import cheaper labor. Claims of a shortage of US STEM employees are exaggerated, say the H-1B opponents, who cite slow salary increases among STEM workers as evidence that the market is saturated with candidates. In fact, these critics blame the H-1Bs for depressed wages for US-born workers in technical fields.

To bolster their argument, they point to research from labor economist George Borjas, who has reported that foreign workers in STEM fields “crowd out” native-born workers and depress salaries.34 Academic and H-1B critic Norman S. Matloff believes that the H-1B allows companies to hire technical talent in hot programming fields or sectors but avoid market premiums.35 The job classification system and salary index companies sponsoring for H-1Bs are required to only report broad sector averages and not subspecialty salary trends, Matloff said. This allows those companies to legally pay submarket wages by basing salaries to H-1Bs on broad indexes, which don’t reflect reality.

It’s easy to understand these concerns. Flouting employment discrimination laws, unethical body shops blatantly advertise in US publications for jobs that clearly target foreign nationals. A search for visa-related terms such as OPT, CPT, and F-1 on Dice.com, a leading technology recruiting site, turns up dozens of these listings. For example, an advertisement placed by AET Solutions, identified by a native workers’ rights advocacy organization Bright Future Jobs in the report “No Americans Need Apply,” has the title “Looking for fresh OPTs for training and placement in USA.”36 The Bright Future Jobs report correctly notes, “The ad only contains US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) abbreviations for visa workers but not one common Information Technology (IT) term. Americans about to graduate with the same technical degrees would likely never find this ad.

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