Brian4Liberty
07-20-2016, 11:56 AM
Tech industry's persistent claim of worker shortage may be phony (http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-20150802-column.html)
By Michael Hiltzik
Alice Tornquist, a Washington lobbyist for the high-tech firm Qualcomm, took the stage at a recent Qualcomm-underwritten conference to remind her audience that companies like hers face a dire shortage of university graduates in engineering. The urgent remedy she advocated was to raise the cap on visas for foreign-born engineers.
"Although our industry and other high-tech industries have grown exponentially," Tornquist said, "our immigration system has failed to keep pace." The nation's outdated limits and "convoluted green-card process," she said, had left firms like hers "hampered in hiring the talent that they need."
What Tornquist didn't mention was that Qualcomm may then have had more engineers than it needed: Only a few weeks after her June 2 talk, the San Diego company announced that it would cut its workforce, of whom two-thirds are engineers, by 15%, or nearly 5,000 people.
The mismatch between Qualcomm's plea to import more high-tech workers and its efforts to downsize its existing payroll hints at the phoniness of the high-tech sector's persistent claim of a "shortage" of U.S. graduates in the "STEM" disciplines — science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
...
Yet many studies suggest that the STEM shortage is a myth. In computer science and engineering, says Hal Salzman, an expert on technology education at Rutgers, "the supply of graduates is substantially larger than the demand for them in industry." Qualcomm is not the only high-tech company to be aggressively downsizing. The computer industry, led by Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, cut nearly 60,000 jobs last year, according to the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The electronics industry pared an additional 20,000 positions.
Nevertheless, high-tech employers such as Qualcomm, Google, Microsoft and Facebook lobby hard for more latitude in employing workers on H-1B visas.
...
"If you can make the case that our security and prosperity is under threat, it's an easy sell in Congress and the media," says Michael Teitelbaum, a demographer at Harvard Law School and author of the 2014 book "Falling Behind? Boom, Bust, and the Global Race for Scientific Talent," which challenges claims of a STEM shortage in the U.S.
...
Teitelbaum and others observe that the tech industry's lobbying to hire more foreign engineers is at cross purposes with its call to encourage more U.S. students to acquire STEM degrees. After all, why should students labor for four or six years to enter industries in which they can be suddenly replaced in an outsourcing campaign?
The industry's push for more visas glosses over other issues. As we've reported, the majority of H-1B visas go not to marquee high-tech companies such as Google and Microsoft, but to outsourcing firms including the India-based giants Infosys and Tata. They're not recruiting elite STEM graduates with unique skills, but contract workers to replace American technical employees — who often are required to train their foreign-born replacement as a condition of receiving their severance.
...
For such companies, raising the visa limit is about exploiting a loophole in immigration law to save money — workers on these temporary visas are typically paid less than U.S. employees doing the same work, and more complaisant with American bosses because they'll be deported if they lose their jobs.
...
It's unlikely that such hard numbers will silence the drumbeat for more high-tech immigration, Teitelbaum says, as long as big tech companies have Congress' attention. "The lobbying opposition is weak," he says. "There's no interest group that's as well organized and financed to say that this is an emperor with no clothes on."
...
More: http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-20150802-column.html
By Michael Hiltzik
Alice Tornquist, a Washington lobbyist for the high-tech firm Qualcomm, took the stage at a recent Qualcomm-underwritten conference to remind her audience that companies like hers face a dire shortage of university graduates in engineering. The urgent remedy she advocated was to raise the cap on visas for foreign-born engineers.
"Although our industry and other high-tech industries have grown exponentially," Tornquist said, "our immigration system has failed to keep pace." The nation's outdated limits and "convoluted green-card process," she said, had left firms like hers "hampered in hiring the talent that they need."
What Tornquist didn't mention was that Qualcomm may then have had more engineers than it needed: Only a few weeks after her June 2 talk, the San Diego company announced that it would cut its workforce, of whom two-thirds are engineers, by 15%, or nearly 5,000 people.
The mismatch between Qualcomm's plea to import more high-tech workers and its efforts to downsize its existing payroll hints at the phoniness of the high-tech sector's persistent claim of a "shortage" of U.S. graduates in the "STEM" disciplines — science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
...
Yet many studies suggest that the STEM shortage is a myth. In computer science and engineering, says Hal Salzman, an expert on technology education at Rutgers, "the supply of graduates is substantially larger than the demand for them in industry." Qualcomm is not the only high-tech company to be aggressively downsizing. The computer industry, led by Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, cut nearly 60,000 jobs last year, according to the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The electronics industry pared an additional 20,000 positions.
Nevertheless, high-tech employers such as Qualcomm, Google, Microsoft and Facebook lobby hard for more latitude in employing workers on H-1B visas.
...
"If you can make the case that our security and prosperity is under threat, it's an easy sell in Congress and the media," says Michael Teitelbaum, a demographer at Harvard Law School and author of the 2014 book "Falling Behind? Boom, Bust, and the Global Race for Scientific Talent," which challenges claims of a STEM shortage in the U.S.
...
Teitelbaum and others observe that the tech industry's lobbying to hire more foreign engineers is at cross purposes with its call to encourage more U.S. students to acquire STEM degrees. After all, why should students labor for four or six years to enter industries in which they can be suddenly replaced in an outsourcing campaign?
The industry's push for more visas glosses over other issues. As we've reported, the majority of H-1B visas go not to marquee high-tech companies such as Google and Microsoft, but to outsourcing firms including the India-based giants Infosys and Tata. They're not recruiting elite STEM graduates with unique skills, but contract workers to replace American technical employees — who often are required to train their foreign-born replacement as a condition of receiving their severance.
...
For such companies, raising the visa limit is about exploiting a loophole in immigration law to save money — workers on these temporary visas are typically paid less than U.S. employees doing the same work, and more complaisant with American bosses because they'll be deported if they lose their jobs.
...
It's unlikely that such hard numbers will silence the drumbeat for more high-tech immigration, Teitelbaum says, as long as big tech companies have Congress' attention. "The lobbying opposition is weak," he says. "There's no interest group that's as well organized and financed to say that this is an emperor with no clothes on."
...
More: http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-20150802-column.html