Bill Gates vs Dana Rohrabacher: The H1-B Saga
I have been tracking the latest H1-B news lately and I found the transcript of Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates’ testimony before the members of the Congress on March, 12 at Capitol Hill.
In a separate blog post, I came across the transcript of the (mis-matched) dialog that took place after Gates’ testimony between him and Dana Rohrabacher, a California congressman who likes to think that global warming was caused by “dinosaur flatulence”.
Rohrabacher: If we bring in more people from the outside, realizing that we’re bringing the most talented people from other countries, will it not hurt those countries? And will it also not depress the wages in our own country that people like yourself would have to pay your employees in order to get quality people or in order to train people within our own society?
Gates: No, no. These top people are going to be hired. It’s just a question of what country they do their work in.
Rohrabacher: I’m really not talking about top people here. You know … there’s a lot of other people in society rather than just the top people. It’s the B and C students that fight for our country and kept it free so that people like yourself would have the opportunity that you’ve had. Those people, whether or not they get displaced by the top people from another country is not our goal. Our goal isn’t to replace the job of the B students with A students from India, because those B students deserve to have good jobs and high-paying jobs.
Gates: That’s right, and what I’ve said here is that when we bring in these world-class engineers, we create jobs around them. … The B and C students are the ones who get those jobs around these top engineers. And if these top engineers are forced to work, say, in India, we will hire the B and C students from India to work around them.
Rohrabacher: But according to BusinessWeek, almost 150,000 computer programmers have lost their job in this country since the year 2000. Now, my reading of all of this is that there are plenty of people out there to hire but people want to have the top quality people from India and China and elsewhere, and they’re willing to have these 150,000 American computer programmers just go unemployed.
Gates: Actually, BusinessWeek doesn’t do surveys. I think you’re referring to a quote in BusinessWeek from an Urban Institute study …
Rohrabacher: That’s what I said, according to BusinessWeek, yeah.
Gates: It’s not according to BusinessWeek. There was a study that a group at Urban Institute did that was deeply flawed in terms of how it defined what an engineer is. When we say that these jobs are going begging, we’re in business every day. We’re not kidding about it. These jobs are going begging, and the result is that in a competitive economy …
Rohrabacher: You’d have to raise wages.
Gates: No, wages are —
Rohrabacher: If a job’s going begging, you raise wages, now in a —
Gates: No, it’s not an issue of raising wages. These jobs are very, very, very high-paying jobs. And we are hiring as many of these people as we can.
Rohrabacher: Well, let me give you one example —
Thankfully, nobody had to endure Rohrabacher’s example because at that point, committee chairman Bart Gordon (D-Tennessee) announced that Rohrabacher’s time was up.
March 14th, 2008 at 4:29 pm
Anyone who has followed Gates and the H1B issue knows that because he is rich putting lot of lobby money on capital hill - Jack Abrahamoff was his biggest client - Gates is allowed to commit perjury freely at Congressional hearings. Irregardless of Rohrabacher’s view on global warming (BTW, SOME reputable scientists agree with him), he showed great courage to stand up to Gates as Gates lied about the effect of H1Bs. H1B is a cheap labor program that depresses wages and shortens the careers of native born American scientists and engineers: google the work of Dr. Norman Matloff and Dr. Ron Hira.
Gates muddled and incoherent testimony that US universities are not producing enough STEM graduate was pure perjury: studies by Rand, AP Soan, Urban Institute has shown that there is a glut of STEMs and no shortage. Gates testimony that he pays most of his H1Bs over $100K/year is also a lie: according the LCA database 85% of H1Bs employed by MS are paid
March 14th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
March 22nd, 2008 at 1:48 pm
@Linux Guru:
Welcome to Chai-Garam and thank you for sharing your thoughts.
You may have read somewhere in the transcript of Bill Gates’ testimony that innovation “is not a game played only in the US”. In order to compete with the best in the world, the US *needs* the best in the world. Period.
It is true that the H1B program has long been misused and requires to undergo rigorous reforms at the earliest. However, shutting the doors to the world’s brightest hardly qualifies as an immigration reform especially when these highly skilled immigrants have so much to contribute to the US economy [Immigrants in Silicon Valley fuel the entrepreneur culture — http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4176/is_20070105/ai_n17107434].
April 1st, 2008 at 12:35 pm
Vinci:
>> “is not a game played only in the US”.
Then why do they HAVE to come here? Do all the Olympic athletes from the various other countries spend their careers living and training in the US? Of course not! This is why Bill Gates analogy is so poor. MS has major operations in India, Asia and Europe. Wouldn’t it be better with they stayed in their home countries with their family and friends! I would!
>>In order to compete with the best in the world,
>> the US *needs* the best in the world. Period.
Unfortunately, most of the H1Bs being imported are not the “best and brightest” as based on their wages. For example, according to the LCA database, 85% of the H1Bs working at MS earn less than $50K/year - not the +$100K/year for the best and brightest with most of them NOT doing technical work. Many are for example are doing clerical work like legal, accounting and business stuff not math and science. [ I’ve hear a story that one H1B was operating a cookie dough mixing machine! LOL ;) ] Everyone wants to bring over the best and brightest; however, the H1B program right now is not doing that. It’s displacing native born workers so that our kids no longer want to go into math and science. That has to be changed! Google: Ron Hira or Norman Matloff for more info.
>> It is true that the H1B program has long been misused and requires to undergo rigorous
>> reforms at the earliest.
There is such a reform bill authored by Senators Durbin and Grassely and supported by Rohrbacker called “The H1B and L3 Visa Fraud Prevention Act of 2007″. Unfortunately Compete American does not support it just confirming that tech business is just interested in cheap labor not pricey quality workers.
>> especially when these highly skilled immigrants have so much to contribute
>> to the US economy
Statements like this are misleading: H1Bs are not immigrants they are NIV(Non Immigrant Visa) holders. They are not the same thing; naturalized citizens do contribute but H1Bs don’t leave much of footprint. H1Bs are largely used as cheap labor to outsource jobs. The top nine users of H1B are Indian outsourcing companies that move jobs off-shore. These H1Bs are not starting fortune 500 companies. Currently there are estimated to be over 700K visa over stayers from China and India in the US who didn’t go home when their visa expired. The fastest growing group of illegal immigrants in the US are from India. We need to reform H1B and deport all these poor people before American innovation can start up again.
>> Immigrants in Silicon Valley fuel the entrepreneur culture
With regards to the specific article, it is true that many of the founding EMPLOYEES of “tech” companies were foreign born BUT none of the big fortune 500 tech companies were founded by H1Bs from China or India - that’s propaganda created by lobbyist to keep the cheap labor coming. The Washington political pimps are deliberately trying to confuse the issue by substituting the word immigrant for H1B in statements trying to make what is true for one class true for the other - when if fact it isn’t. Fortunately, the devastating consequences that H1B has had American innovation are coming out and cannot be ignored by the politicians anymore.
April 8th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
I agree with Bill Gates that H1B visas should be increased, but with very specific guidelines.
He rightly points out that we spend tons of taxpayer money on foreign graduate students in math, science, and engineering and then send them to other countries where their innovations benefit those foreign countries after their 12 months of OPT expires. Many of these foreign grad students use the OPT over the summer to do basic research. Even those who save their OPT, no company is willing to hire them with the huge attached risk they do not acquire an H1B visa in those 12 months.
So these Ph.D students (or research master’s) have spent 5-6 years (2-3) in the United States studying at our institutions (partially paid for with our tax dollars), perhaps having married in that time frame, having done research for the US for 5-6/2-3 years (partially paid for with our tax dollars), leave, not for their home country, but for Australia, Ireland, the UK, Dubai, Singapore, and Canada (countries which use a points based system taking into account education), taking along their knowledge, innovating in those countries, and paying taxes in those countries. There is a ton of talk about job displacement but when you look at the composition of electrical engineering, computer science, physics, math, chem engineering, etc… it’s overwhelmingly foreign students, because Americans do not even bother to apply to many of these programs. The GRE exam is not particularly overwhelming, it tests junior high school level math, high school level reading, and college level vocabulary (actually disfavors foreigners). These are the people who should receive H1B, not Wipro’s job stealing outsourcing workers.
What Congress should be doing: Reserve the H1B’s primarily for foreign students who have graduated from US University graduate research programs (2-3 year master’s, or 4-6 year Ph.D programs), and are already using their OPT time in a high paying job facing shortage of qualified workers, plus require a tax-deductible sponsorship fee of $10,000 per year per H1-B for the companies.
This prevents the abuse that is currently taking place in the H1-B system: right now the H1B system is used by Indian outsourcing companies such as Wipro to send over their India Institute of Technology trained graduates to the United States to learn an American’s job and then transfer the job back to India via the H1B user.
By linking H1B to the graduate school system we
1) ensure that we have H1B employees who are acclimated to US working environs, US cost of living, and US wages (e.g. understanding they have certain rights as employees since they’ve used some OPT time to work over summers, had the opportunity to see what’s available in the entire US industry (informational awareness), etc..), and who are likely to STAY in the United States.
2) Since OPT is now 29 months long, the student is already likely to be in their job for a certain number of months before their H1B application is reviewed, an earnings history has been established so immigration can see if their working as an a) a lowly paid administrative assistant or as b) a highly paid electrical engineer
3) If the job is indeed ~$100k+ a year, as Bill Gates claims, then the $10,000/year won’t be of consequence. If you’re hiring Wen Wen to do clerical work for $35k a year, the $10k becomes important. Most Ph.D’s in these high tech areas which are experiencing a shortage (comp sci, electrical engineering, biomedical engineering, chemical engineering) should be earning ~$100k after two years of work experience (24 months of OPT). Earnings history during OPT should catch H1B abusing companies, like WiPro, but this is an added deterrent.
April 8th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
Also, OPT for Ph.D’s (assuming they receive a Master’s or equivalent at the time of their General exam) is actually 41 months.
April 8th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
On job displacement: The internet has made high tech job tasking global, so indeed, for the high paying jobs they (Fortune 1000 companies) will go to wherever these US trained grads go, namely Australia, Ireland, Dubai, Singapore, and Canada.
What we need to do is attract the top global talent through our graduate educational institutions and then keep them in the United States. This will prevent or at least deter high tech companies from outsourcing the high-paying tech jobs, they physically can’t, since nearly all the best talent is stateside.
May 1st, 2008 at 10:39 pm
Eugene Franco:
They way you explain the H1B is not how it actually works. Its a cheap labor program used to outsource jobs outside the US. Contrary to what you are saying, the biggest users of H1B are the Indian outsourcing companies. Most H1Bs are not the superstars of CS, most have a BS and earn less thatn $50/K per year. We are all for importing the best and brightest. H1B can be reformed to bring in the best and brightest and exclude the cheap labor.
June 19th, 2008 at 3:51 am
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