Alliance Fights Boost in Visas for Tech Workers

After a string of legislative victories that made it the envy of Washington, the powerful high-tech industry is facing its first significant opposition on Capitol Hill.

Black professional and civil rights groups are campaigning this summer against an industry measure that until now has seemed politically unassailable: visas for more foreign workers to fill the mushrooming number of U.S. high-tech jobs being created by the booming Internet economy.

The Urban League, the Coalition for Fair Employment in Silicon Valley and representatives of historically black colleges have told lawmakers that lucrative computer programming and network engineering jobs should be going to Americans. They say the industry isn’t doing enough to reach out to technically trained graduates of black colleges or older technical professionals.

The groups have written to more than 200 lawmakers and mounted an intensive advertising and lobbying campaign in an effort to head off an industry proposal to nearly double the number of visas for foreign workers to 200,000 a year.

“This bill is a very bad idea,” wrote John Templeton of the coalition, an Oakland group seeking to promote greater workplace diversity in Silicon Valley, in a letter to Congress. “A better idea would be to actively recruit and hire talent right here at home.”

Their activity has galvanized the bill’s traditional opponents--labor, the U.S. chapter of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and groups such as the Immigration Reform Coalition.

And those raising the issue think they are gaining traction in Congress, despite a multimillion-dollar effort by Silicon Valley to fill congressional campaign coffers.

“Groups like the Urban League and others have really raised legitimate issues” about discrimination, said Paul Kostek, past president of the U.S. chapter of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. “We really have a chance this time of getting some reforms.”

The dispute pits Silicon Valley’s economic success against the potentially explosive politics of racial discrimination, immigration policy and workplace protectionism. While the minority groups’ coalition has an uphill fight against a high-tech industry armed with lobbyists and millions of dollars, the groups have so far delayed congressional action on any increase in the ceiling on the special three-year visas for skilled foreign workers. And when Congress takes up the measure again, which could come as soon as next month, some observers think lawmakers could impose rules requiring high-tech companies to recruit and train more minorities.

“As long as we have unemployment in minority communities and people looking for jobs, there would be opposition and resistance to importing workers from other countries,” said Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles).

The law permitting up to 115,000 so-called H1B visas for skilled foreign workers is set to expire Oct. 1, so high-tech companies have been pushing hard for new legislation, arguing that it is necessary to alleviate labor shortages in their industry.

Industry officials say they are eager to hire Americans but that the number of U.S. workers with technical skills isn’t large enough to fill all the job vacancies.

“This is not about getting cheap labor for entry-level jobs,” said Chuck Malloy, a spokesman for computer chip maker Intel Corp. “This is not the kind of job shortage that can be solved by retraining somebody at Ford Motor Co. who will go off and design microprocessors with 25,000 transistors. These are jobs that require high skill sets.”

Countered John Williams of the Fair Employment Coalition: “The high-tech industry is making little or no effort to recruit minorities.” While other industries are having to retrain people and even recruit ex-prisoners to cope with a tight U.S. job market, “the high-tech industry is getting a pass,” he said.

The trigger for the high-tech jobs controversy is legislation introduced last winter by Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose) and David Dreier (R-San Dimas) with bipartisan backing from House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.) and Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas).

Besides raising immigration caps, the bill would institute reforms at the Immigration and Naturalization Service, to clear up the backlog of applications for permanent visas, and increase H1B visa fees to raise money for education and training of U.S. workers and students. A similar measure, sponsored by Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Spencer Abraham (R-Mich.), is pending in the Senate.

In an interview, Lofgren lamented the stiff opposition the legislation has faced this year, blaming the slow progress on “election year politics.” But she has seen no evidence to support critics’ contention that the high-tech community is discriminating or isn’t doing enough to recruit domestically to fill high-tech job openings.

“If there is an instance of discrimination, well, that’s wrong and something should be done about it,” Lofgren said. “But unemployment is under 2% in Silicon Valley. It’s hard to imagine there is some large group of people around that aren’t able to get [high-tech] jobs.”

Indeed, there is little dispute that a shortage of skilled tech workers exists.

While the number of U.S. college graduates with technical degrees is falling, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasts that the nation will need 1.7 million computer technicians during the decade ending in 2008. H1B visa requests have come at such a pace that by April the INS had already reached its visa limit and closed the application process for the year.

Still, many politicians argue that the nation should do more domestically to recruit and train workers.

Retired Gen. Colin Powell stressed the need for increased training of American students to meet the nation’s high-tech needs in his speech to the Republican National Convention this week. And Virginia gubernatorial candidate Mark Warner, a Democrat, has been championing a program he set up to put the state’s booming high-tech community in closer contact with students at Hampton University and Virginia’s four other historically black colleges.

Since 1997, the Virginia High Tech Partnership program has placed 140 black students at 75 high-tech firms, including America Online Inc., IBM Corp. and scores of smaller start-ups, says Scott Price, executive director of the program.

“I think the partnership is really having an impact [by] helping high-tech corporations identify a new work force pipeline,” said B. Keith Fulton, executive director of corporate relations for America Online.

But with the nation’s 105 historically black colleges concentrated in the South, critics charge that Silicon Valley makes little effort to recruit blacks and in some cases overtly discriminates against minority job applicants.

In October, the National Academy of Sciences is expected to announce the results of its study on the long-term employment needs of the high-tech sector. Advocates for more hiring of black Americans believe the study will show that the industry has been exaggerating the shortfall of workers, and will argue that any gaps can be overcome with more aggressive hiring at home.

In a statement sent to congressional leaders a few weeks ago, National Urban League President Hugh B. Price urged Congress to “hold off on another expansion of the H1B special visas program” until the report is made public.

Meanwhile, critics note that the Labor Department has already confirmed discrimination in hiring in Silicon Valley.

In an examination of Silicon Valley companies over the last three years, the Labor Department found that 13 of 85 high-tech firms discriminated against minorities or women. The study also found that two dozen of the companies, which as federal contractors must develop minority recruitment plans, had failed to do so. “Clearly there’s work to be done to ensure that African Americans have fair access to the lucrative high-tech labor market,” Price said.

One company, San Jose-based Diamond Multimedia Systems Inc. was ordered to pay $213,200 in back wages and other penalties after denying technical jobs to five Latino applicants whom the Labor Department determined were qualified for the positions.

A spokesman for S3 Inc., a Santa Clara-based company that bought Diamond last year, declined to comment on the case but said Diamond’s work force has been “greatly diversified and integrated” since being acquired by S3.

Still, critics have an uphill battle. Congress, which has approved a string of high-tech initiatives ranging from easing encryption export rules to protecting Silicon Valley against Y2K litigation, has been very receptive to high-tech’s H1B visa campaign. Two years ago, anti-immigration Republicans and unions stalled but failed to derail a measure that increased from 65,000 to 115,000 the number of temporary visas granted to foreign high-tech workers.

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Where the U.S. Is Getting

High-Tech Help

The United States high-tech industry relies heavily on foreign engineers, computer scientists and other highly trained technical workers from a variety of countries, mainly in Asia. U.S. firms want to double the number of work visas granted to foreigners, but minority groups are demanding corporations train more Americans for those jobs.

Percentage of U.S. immigrants with H1B visas from various nations

Canada: 4%

Britain: 2%

Russia: 2%

Japan: 2%

China: 10%

Taiwan: 2%

Philippines: 3%

India: 46%

Pakistan: 2%

Other countries: 27.8%

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics