WASHINGTON: Supporters and opponents of the H1B visa program, which allows foreign workers in specialty occupations to come and work in America for a limited period, duked it out at a Congressional hearing on Thursday even as US immigration authorities on Friday began accepting applications for the 65,000 mandated H1B visas for 2012.
At the heart of a fierce debate is whether the H1B program is good or bad for the US economy. Opponents of the program say it only brings in cheap foreign labour with limited skills and depresses American wages, and it is being misused by some foreign (mainly Indian) companies. Supporters of the program, including US tech firms, industry groups, and some lawmakers, maintain that the program has helped American leadership in technology by bringing in fresh foreign talent, including founders of pioneering companies such as Yahoo and Google.
Both sides got to present their case at a hearing of the House Subcommittee on Immigration Policy and Enforcement a day after Indian industry groups lobbied the Hill to impress upon US lawmakers that they are "part of the solution and not part of the problem" and they are adding jobs to the US economy and hiring Americans in increasing numbers.
But Ronil Hira, a professor at the
Rochester Institute of Technology who has studied the H1B program and is a staunch critic of the current system, maintained that the program does more harm than good and is in need of an overhaul. "The principal goal of the H-1B visa program is to bring in foreign workers who complement the US workforce," Hira said. "Instead, loopholes in the program have made it too easy to bring in cheaper foreign workers, with ordinary skills, who directly substitute for, rather than complement, workers already in America."
By Hira's account, four of the five biggest users of the H1B program from 2007 to 2009 were Indian companies:
Infosys,
Wipro,
Mahindra Satyam and
Tata. Microsoft was the only US company among the top five users. The four Indian companies had sent 22,766 workers to the US on temporary visas during the two deepest years of the recession.
The narrative from the US workforce is that foreign workers are displacing Americans by working below market wages, even though proponents and defenders of the
H1B visa program point out that there are tough labour department rules to protect US workers. There are also charges that foreign workers are under-qualified or lack skills, and they are frequently needed to be trained by Americans, who are eventually displaced, or the jobs are shifted abroad.
The counter-narrative from supporters of the program is that the US in fact doesn't produce enough homegrown engineers and scientists, and a domestic lobby want to keep their salaries high through protectionist measures, which they say is tantamount to a trade barrier. Proponents are calling for an increase in the H1-B visa quota, which has been capped at 65,000 for several years now, with an additional 20,000 visas for foreign students graduating from US universities.
Key lawmakers, pressed by American tech companies and industry groups keen to keep US competitive, tried to strike a middle ground in the quest to retain good foreign talent while squeezing out cheap foreign labour. One idea is to reform the Green Card process to allow foreign graduates in US to get one quickly while whittling down the number of categories eligible for H1B visa.
"Foreign workers are receiving H-1B visas to work as fashion models, dancers and as chefs, photographers and social workers," Texas lawmaker Lamar Smith said, pointing to where the squeeze could be applied. "There is nothing wrong with those occupations, but I'm not sure that foreign fashion models and pastry chefs are as crucial to our success in the global economy as are computer scientists."
A more direct intervention would see foreign students who graduate from US university in key disciplines such as science and engineering "get a Green Card stapled to their degree," as some industry leaders are suggesting. This way, some lawmakers argued, the US could retain foreign science and math graduates (amid reports that many of them are returning to their home countries and depriving US of talent) while keeping out cheap labour.
In fact, a legislation introduced by
Arizona lawmaker
Jeff Flake, called the Staple Act, would offer permanent residency to any US university student who graduates with a PhD in science, technology, engineering or mathematics.
"Unless we want to see the next Google or
Intel created overseas, we've got to enact legal immigration reforms that allow foreign-born, US-educated students who have earned advanced degrees to remain and work in the country after they've graduated," Flake had said while introducing the legislation.
But even some of Flake's Republican colleagues, who argue there is also something called too much legal immigration, oppose it. "Too much legal immigration drives down wages," maintained Iowa Republican
Steve King
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