Academia Falls Short in Competition for Foreign Worker Visas

By ESTHER SCHRADER

April 4, 2000 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

WASHINGTON —

When officials at the college of veterinary medicine at Cornell University set out last year to explore new frontiers in horse reproduction, they knew there was just one man for the job. Equine sex experts, after all, are not a dime a dozen.

Trouble was, the man they were convinced would make the research program a success, a specialist in animal embryo transfers, is from South Africa. And getting him a visa to work in the United States so far has proved impossible.

After six months of trying, the researcher is still in Pretoria, minus the house he sold and the prestigious position he resigned in response to Cornell’s promise of a job. And the Ivy League school’s ambitious plans to conduct cutting-edge research is on the rocks.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

For years, major research universities across the country have imported experts in everything from Middle Eastern anthropology to advanced plant breeding using a visa program that allows U.S. employers to hire highly specialized foreign workers for as much as six years at a time.

But the number of “H-1B” visas that the government grants for such professionals is limited. And with high-tech companies increasingly competing for the same visas for their own foreign job candidates, academia is feeling the squeeze.

Requests for H-1B visas are coming in at such a pace that the Immigration and Naturalization Service announced last month that it would accept no more applications this year.

That leaves academic institutions, with their slower, more bureaucratic hiring processes, in the lurch. They will not be able to hire new workers until new visas become available Oct. 1. And unless the law is changed, they will face an even greater squeeze under next year’s smaller visa cap.

“It is just incalculable, the loss for our school, for our field, every time this happens,” said Dr. Rob Gilbert, associate dean of the Cornell veterinary college.

“This is frustrating, particularly at a university like this, where our mission is to be the best in the world and to find the best candidates from around the world,” he said.

With the tightest labor market in 30 years severely limiting the number of home-grown candidates for jobs requiring highly trained workers, pressure is growing on Congress to raise the cap on H-1B visas for skilled foreign workers. Companies such as Microsoft Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. are lobbying hard for the increase, saying that they need overseas talent to grow.

Lost amid the clamor from the high-tech sector is the plight of universities from Harvard to UCLA, which count on bringing in more than 10,000 such foreign professionals each year. Although data are scarce on just how many academics are denied the visas because of the crunch, the College and University Personnel Assn., which lobbies on the issue, estimates that as many as 60% were turned down last year.

Some scholars eventually received visas, but only after long delays. In many cases, they are former graduate students who entered the United States on student visas and now are stranded in America while their H-1B visa requests are being processed, unable to work or leave the country.

“The most horrendous situations are the conditions of our researchers, typically post-doctoral researchers,” said Ted Goode, director of services for international students and scholars at UC Berkeley.

“We have four or five people every year for whom we have no avenue available but for them to stop their employment, stop their research activities and either leave the U.S. and wait or stay here because they are unable to go home,” he said.

Goode said that many are unable to support themselves and must draw down their savings. “We have struggled each year,” he said. “We have told people to apply early but the cap is coming earlier and earlier each year and the numbers that industry uses are going up astronomically.” The number of H-1B visas requested by colleges, universities and other research institutions pales in comparison to requests from the high-tech industry, which has relied heavily on skilled foreign workers to fuel its boom.

Since 1990, when the H-1B visa category was first established, high-tech companies have hired hundreds of thousands of workers from overseas, most of them computer engineers, computer support specialists, system analysts and database administrators essential in the new information economy.

The Computing Technology Industry Assn., a trade group, says that nearly 269,000 high-tech jobs are going unfilled already, costing U.S. businesses $4.5 billion in lost productivity this year. According to INS records, more than 30,000 applications for H-1B visas in the pipeline will not even be processed this year.

But universities and major research institutions like the Mayo Clinic also rely on the H-1B program to ensure that top scientists and experts in a range of academic fields can come to the U.S. to work.

Under U.S. immigration law, workers with H-1B visas can stay in the U.S. for up to six years. After that, they can apply for permanent resident status but cannot remain in the H-1B program unless they leave the United States for at least a year. The law provides that the foreign workers are to be paid salaries comparable to those of American workers in the same jobs.

Last month, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved legislation that would boost to 195,000 the number of H-1B visas available this year and for the following two years. The current limit is 115,000, and is set to fall to 107,500 on Oct. 1, and to 65,000 a year later.

The Senate legislation would solve academia’s quandary by exempting university professors and researchers from the cap altogether.

While eager to please the increasingly influential high-tech industry, lawmakers fear a backlash from workers concerned about competition from low-wage foreigners. As the use of the H-1B program spreads to other industries across the country, so do reports of abuse. In some instances, H-1B workers have received only a fraction of the salaries they were promised or have been tied to jobs they would rather leave.

Critics of the program oppose raising the caps on H-1B visas, which they say displace U.S. workers. They say that companies should retrain older U.S. workers and work with schools to produce better students, rather than hire from abroad.

The Clinton administration has said that it supports a “reasonable increase” in the number of visas issued to skilled foreign workers. But administration officials say that the increase must be accompanied by more money to fight fraud in the visa program.

None of the abuses cited by critics include the professionals hired by academic institutions. For such institutions, the H-1B program is a way to recruit the best talent in the world.

“Certainly I understand the concern about foreign scientists taking positions that Americans deserve, but that’s not the case for us,” said Deborah Spector, professor of biology at UC San Diego. “We do extensive searches to find just the right people and often the ones we need just aren’t from the U.S.”

With no more visas available this year, Spector is trying desperately to figure out a way to keep Chinese biologist Ming Ye in the lab. Ming, a post-doctoral fellow who received a student visa extension while he completed his graduate studies at the University of Iowa, needs an H-1B visa to stay in the country beyond August.

Ming, an expert on the herpes virus that is the major cause of viral birth defects in children, is trying to develop a vaccine that works against it.

“There is quite a lot at stake here,” Spector said. “His knowledge, particularly of a certain glycoprotein, is a very essential component in the development of this vaccine. And to interrupt the research at this point, well, it really requires a total retooling. You’re effectively losing a year of research. You cannot just pick up where you left off.”

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Skilled Foreign Workers In Demand

Responding to pressure from employers who can’t find enough Americans to fill jobs requiring specialized skills, Congress created the “H-1B” visa program for foreign workers trained in high technology and other advanced fields. The workers are allowed to remain the United States for up to six years.

H-1B Visas Issued (in thousands; fiscal years ending Sept. 30)

*under current law; pending legislation would boost cap to 195,000 per year for 2000-2002

Home Countries of H-1B Workers (1998-99 figures)

India: 46%

China: 10%

Canada: 4%

Philippines: 3%

Taiwan: 2%

Korea: 2%

Japan: 2%

United Kingdom: 2%

Pakistan: 2%