As the wrangling over immigration reform intensifies in the US
Congress, the tech industry is lobbying hard to raise the limit on H-1B
visas, which allow non-US citizens with advanced skills and degrees in
"specialty occupations" to work in the country for up to six years.
Demand
is so great that the annual cap of 65,000 was hit last week, just days
after the application period opened. Technology companies support
raising the H-1B quota almost five-fold, to 3,00,000, arguing
universities are just not turning out enough American math and science
graduates and they need to cast their net abroad to stay competitive.
Yet
some US tech workers and academics say that the shortage of talent is
exaggerated, that many of the jobs could go to out-of-work computer
professionals in the United States, and that the programme serves mainly
as a source of cheap labour.
The
2,00,000-member US chapter of the Institute of Electrical and
Electronics Engineers rejects the claim of a broad shortage of tech
workers and opposes more H-1Bs.
"What these
companies are doing is to replace Americans with lower-cost foreign
workers," says Russ Harrison, senior legislative representative at the
IEEE.
Rather than more H-1B visas, the group
favours giving foreign workers permanent residency, which Harrison said
would help boost wages and increase job mobility for newcomers.
In
Silicon Valley, stories of ferocious competition for engineering workers and a lack of qualified job-seekers abound.
Tech
companies point to an unemployment rate of around 3.5 percent for those
with advanced computer and math experience, less than half the national
rate, though in line with other professional occupations.
But
wages in the tech industry are rising more slowly than those in the
economy as a whole. For example, pay for applications software
developers, a specialty in high demand, have risen just 8.9 percent in
the five years through mid-2012, compared with a 12.5 percent increase
for all occupations in the US economy.
"It is
extraordinarily unlikely for a severe shortage to happen in a way that
doesn't result in very large wage increases," said Kirk Doran, an
economist at the University of Notre Dame who studies immigration and
labour.
"We know what a labour shortage looks
like: there should be both much lower unemployment than other
professions and much higher wage growth. If either of these are not
present, then I don't buy the shortage hypothesis."
Others
say that when industries grow fast, wage growth can be stifled because
of an influx of relatively inexperienced and lower-paid workers.
"Even
if you look at data from one year to the next, it may not tell you what
you think," said Stuart Anderson, executive director of the National
Foundation for American Policy, a think tank backed by the
pro-entrepreneurship Kauffman Foundation and others. He says
sub-industries sometimes move from one category to another one, and that
industries are growing more specialised, complicating the data.
