Job Cutbacks Fueling Anger at Immigrant Workers
Singh, a foreign-born computer programmer, lives and works in Silicon Valley. He felt the chill earlier this year when a former colleague sent him an e-mail message.
“He told me foreigners should go home,” said Singh, who requested that only his middle name be used. “I am a U.S. citizen.”
Patrick McQuown, chief executive of the Washington-based Web design firm Proteus Inc., had a brush with the same phenomenon last month, after an article chronicled his company’s troubles in securing an employment permit for a video designer, a Korean citizen. A batch of e-mail arrived, many professing the same sentiment.
The messages said the company was taking work away from white people, McQuown said.
As layoffs continue to batter U.S. technology workers, forcing them to hunt aggressively for jobs after a decade-long boom, some are striking out at those who came to America as skilled laborers under the H-1B visa program.
Some of the attacks rankle their targets as evidence of racism. Others believe they stem from economic fears. Opponents of the H-1B visa system contend that importing cheaper overseas labor depresses wages for all technology workers and deprives minority and older Americans of a chance to enter and advance in the field.
“Even during the time where there were claims of a tremendous [employee] shortage, there were lots of people being left out,” said Norman Matloff, a professor at UC Davis and a vocal H-1B critic.
As businesses grew exponentially and demanded more well-trained employees in the 1990s, Congress hiked the number of foreigners who could work in the country. A Georgetown University study last year pegged the number of H-1B holders at 420,000--and estimated it would grow to 710,000 by 2002.
The rising tide of overseas workers during uncertain economic times has contributed to a deep and growing anger toward the H-1B program, said John Miano, a veteran New Jersey programmer and an official in the Programmers Guild, a group that fights increases in employment-based immigration. Miano said that for the most part, U.S. workers and their foreign-born counterparts are tolerant of each other.
“How long this tolerance is going to last, I don’t know,” he said.
Participants in the H-1B program typically must leave the country after six years if they are not sponsored by an employer for permanent residency. They must depart sooner if they lose their jobs and cannot find another.
“We are feeling terribly insecure,” said Amar Veda of the Immigrants Support Network, a coalition of H-1B permit holders.
With the fear of deportation in mind, Veda said, how such employees are treated by their peers is a less important issue to many of them, although still troubling.
McQuown of Proteus thinks so. Among the messages was one that told him to stop whining.
“Try hiring an American. Stop trying to pay slave shop wage. I hope your company flops very soon like a lot of the dot-coms,” said the e-mail.
“It’s shortsighted, blind, zealot rage,” McQuown said.
Matloff said that in the years he has been bird-dogging the issue, he has rarely come across the kinds of racist sentiments McQuown describes.
Singh, the California programmer, said, “I think the program is out of control. I find myself disadvantaged by other H-1Bs.”
Singh came to the United States a decade ago on an H-1B permit. Since then, he has grown skeptical of companies’ reliance on the program.
He said he has been fired twice for economic reasons while cheaper foreign workers remained on the payroll. It took him three months to find his current job, which is in jeopardy because of his company’s efforts to reduce costs.
“There is a place for H-1B workers, but there are too many here with the downturn,” he said.
One difference between Singh and many of today’s H-1B employees--the majority of whom come from India and China, according to Immigration and Naturalization Service data--is that it is far less probable they will be able to remain in the country permanently.
In the early part of the 1990s, about half of the H-1B workers became residents, according to an April 2000 report by Georgetown’s Institute for the Study of International Migration. The study, which used INS data, predicted less than a quarter of current workers would win green-card sponsors.
Susan Martin, director of the Georgetown institute, noted in an interview that immigration policy routinely lags behind the economic times.
“If this experience holds, it’s likely that Congress will lower the numbers just as a recovery occurs in the high-tech economy,” Martin said.
