Tech firm laments cutbacks in visas for foreign workers
By Evelyn Iritani
Los Angeles Times
For Rockwell Scientific Co., hiring the best talent is a matter of corporate survival.
Chief Executive Derek Cheung says he simply can't find enough professionals in the United States with the highly specialized skills to produce the sophisticated sensors and other high-technology products made by the Thousand Oaks, Calif.-based company.
And he says changes to a foreign worker visa program threaten the ability of Rockwell Scientific and other U.S. technology firms, schools and hospitals to bring in employees from abroad — just when they are needed most.
The H-1B visa program, designed to allow U.S. companies to hire foreign professionals on a temporary basis, was scaled back last year because of the sluggish U.S. technology job market and a political backlash in Washington, D.C., over the import of foreign labor. Now, with the economy healing, companies are scrambling to get foreign hires approved before this year's allocation of H-1B visas is exhausted.
Pulling up the welcome mat to foreign talent when corporate America is gearing up for a turnaround poses a threat to America's global competitiveness, Cheung and other executives said. They predicted that a shortage of H-1B visas would force them to pass over promising foreign-born scientists, leave critical jobs unfilled or delay projects that require special talents that can't be found in this country.
"These are the best minds in the world," said Cheung, an American citizen who grew up in Hong Kong and received two of his degrees from Purdue and Stanford universities.
"They are really helping this country."
Immigration attorneys predict that the cap on H-1Bs — set at 65,000 this year, down from 195,000 in 2003 — could be reached within the next few weeks. U.S. immigration authorities had approved 43,000 of the visas as of the end of December. Once the ceiling is reached, no visas will be given out until Oct. 1, the start of the next fiscal year.
"Come March, you're going to have companies feeling it very urgently," said Judith Golub, a senior director with the American Immigration Lawyers Association in Washington.
Russ Knocke, a spokesman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, confirmed that his agency was "on pace to reach the cap in the near future."
It isn't just Japanese electronics experts, Chinese physicists or Indian computer programmers who could get caught in the H-1B crunch but also African fashion models, European game designers, Pakistani doctors and Filipino occupational therapists.
Finding a sympathetic ear on Capitol Hill isn't easy. Signs of improvement in the overall economy are overshadowed by worries about the lack of job growth. The threat posed by the outsourcing of increasingly higher-skilled jobs to India and China has become a presidential campaign issue, with Democrats accusing the Bush administration of doing too little to protect American workers.
"The anti-immigrant mood and the anti-globalization mood inside Washington is as negative as I've seen it in my 25 years working in this field," said Harris Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of America, which is lobbying for less-restrictive immigration measures.
To apply for an H-1B visa, a U.S. company must demonstrate that it is unable to find a qualified American for the job and agree to pay the foreign worker a wage comparable to what a U.S. worker would earn, in addition to benefits. The visa is good for a maximum of six years.
Critics argue that companies are using the program to replace U.S. citizens with lower-cost foreign workers. Pete Bennett, who launched the Web site www.nomoreh1b.com, said he didn't oppose bringing in foreign workers with special talents when there was a genuine shortage.
But, he said, the program is being abused.
"There are plenty of qualified Americans who are dying to take these jobs," said Bennett, who opened a cabinetry shop in Danville, Calif., last fall after working more than 15 years as a computer programmer and Web site designer.
Employers say they try to fill jobs with U.S. citizens but can't always find qualified candidates, particularly in math and science. In engineering, for example, 43 percent of the master's degrees and 54 percent of the doctoral degrees awarded by U.S. universities go to foreign-born students.
