Job-seekers in US say visa program takes away work
John Malloy trained the foreign programmer who replaced him in his own Boston office.
Partners HealthCare System Inc. was paying Malloy $72,000 a year to manage its hospitals' most important databases and largest servers. When three Indian programmers, brought to Boston on a foreign work visa called
H-1B, were contracted by Partners in the fall of 2000, he showed them the ropes. Malloy, 41, lost his job the following spring. Neither he nor Partners will say why. But when he left, Partners gave one of the Indians his job. Malloy has yet to find steady programming work, and he blames the visa program.
"It's not a racial issue and it's not a nationality issue," he said. "It's that we need to survive -- my career has to survive."
With unemployment among their ranks at its highest level ever, many American high-tech workers decry the foreign work visas that they say flood the market with nonresident programmers willing to work for less money.
But high-tech companies and some analysts say the
H-1B visa program's impact on the American work force has been minimal. The real culprits behind the brutal job market for software programmers are the Internet crash, the diminished demand for technology products, and the automation of manual labor, those analysts say. They contend that outsourcing poses a much greater threat.
Maria Schafer, an analyst who studies workplace issues for Meta Group Inc., a Stamford, Conn., research firm, called workers' anger toward the H-1B program misplaced. The visas were primarily used during the Internet boom to fill jobs as American companies finalized their outsourcing plans, she said.
"It was just a stopgap," she said.
Still, the hiring of foreign workers goes on despite the depression in tech employment. High-tech companies say they use H-1B workers to fill jobs for which they cannot find qualified Americans. Intel Corp., the semiconductor giant, says that as many as 5 percent, or nearly 4,000 of its 79,000 employees, were hired through the H-1B program.
"That small percentage is comprised of individuals possessing unique and difficult-to-find skills which can only be acquired through advanced, university-level education," Patrick J. Duffy, a human resources lawyer for Intel, testified in a September congressional hearing on
H-1B visas. Several unemployed workers have filed lawsuits against companies, including the computer maker Sun Microsystems Inc., for allegedly discriminating against some American employees by laying them off while keeping
H-1B workers. Sun rebuts the charge. The AFL-CIO, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers USA, and other trade groups have called for overhauls of the
H-1B and L1 visas, which allow companies to transfer workers from foreign subsidiaries to the United States. The Communications Workers of America, a communications and media union, says it will make H-1B visas and outsourcing an issue during the 2004 presidential campaign. The H-1B program was designed to address shortages in specialized fields, including technology,
medicine, even fashion-modeling. Congress capped the number of H-1Bs at 65,000 a year in 1990. But as the Internet bubble swelled, legislators raised the cap to 115,000 in 1999 and then to 195,000 in 2000 under heavy lobbying from the high-tech industry. But since the economy began slumping in 2000, applications for H-1B visas dropped with the Nasdaq. Federal approval of H-1B visas in computer-related professions plunged 61 percent, from 191,397 in 2001 to 75,114 in 2002, according to the federal Office of Immigration Statistics.
Legislators set the cap back to 65,000 on Oct. 1, and high-tech companies put up little fight.
A recent report by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, criticized immigration officials for not publishing clear rules on whether H-1B workers who lose their job can stay in the United States to look for work and for keeping such poor records that immigration officials were unable to say how many H-1B workers remain in the United States.
