In the 18th century, the epistolary novel was all the rage in France and England. Now, it seems, the tit-for-tat style of opposing letters has become a preferred method of dialogue between Iowa Senator Charles Grassley and Microsoft.
Grassley: Not thrilled with Microsoft's H-1B policy
In late February, Grassley urged Microsoft to rethink the use of "H-1B or other work visa program employees over qualified American workers." Grassley issued his letter after Microsoft announced its first across-the-board layoffs.
"I encourage Microsoft to ensure that Americans are given priority in job retention. Microsoft has a moral obligation to protect these American workers by putting them first during these difficult economic times," Grassley wrote.
Microsoft responded with an anodyne statement at the time but declined to engage the Senator.
Until now.
In a detailed response, the company's general counsel, Brad Smith, said there would not be a "significant change in the proportion" of employees working at Microsoft with H-1B visas.
Here are the key excerpts from Smith's letter to Grassley:
H-1B employees have always accounted for less than 15 percent of Microsoft's U.S. workforce, the level that is used in immigration law to determine whether a company is "H-1B dependent." Nonetheless, the ability to tap into the world's best minds has long been essential to our success. Although they are a small percentage of our workforce, H-1B workers have long made crucial contributions to Microsoft's innovation successes and to our ability to help create jobs in this country. We are confident this will continue to be true in the future.
We focus our recruiting for core technology jobs at U.S. universities, which continue to be among the best in the world for computer science and engineering graduates. However, as one recent study found, in 2005 temporary residents earned more than 40 percent of the engineering and computer science degrees at U.S. higher education institutions. For doctoral degrees, that number was even higher, as temporary residents accounted for 59 percent of the degrees awarded in these fields that year.
The substantial majority of H-1B petitions filed by Microsoft are for core technology positions, and technology and engineering positions account for about 90 percent of Microsoft's H-1B workforce. Many of these H-1B employees have been seeking permanent resident status for many years and would no longer be dependent on their H-1B visas but for multi-year delays in the green card process.
With these factors taken together, we do not expect to see a significant change in the proportion of H-1B employees in our workforce following the job reductions.
Microsoft declined to comment beyond the text of the letter.
Update:
After publication, Grassley's office sent me the following statement from the senator.
"I appreciate Microsoft's response and while I'm happy to learn of the company's efforts to boost science and technology initiatives in both American secondary and post-secondary schools, I'm still left without much information about how Microsoft is ensuring American workers are being protected or specifics of its H-1B hiring practices. I'm interested in learning more details."
The Black Monday announcement of more than 71,000 jobs lost is a stunner. Today it was Texas Instruments and Sprint Nextel adding their names to the listof tech companies handing out pink slips. Tomorrow? Anybody's guess.
In uncertain times, the only sure bet is that Congress is going to come under renewed pressure to revisit its practice of granting temporary visas to foreign workers. Already, Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) is pressing Microsoft to give Americans priority over foreigners working in this country with H-1Bs.
"My point is that during a layoff, companies should not be retaining H-1B or other work visa program employees over qualified American workers," Grassley wrote on Friday after Microsoft announced its first across-the-board layoffs. "Our immigration policy is not intended to harm the American work force. I encourage Microsoft to ensure that Americans are given priority in job retention. Microsoft has a moral obligation to protect these American workers by putting them first during these difficult economic times."
Microsoft said Monday it had no plans to change its position on H-1Bs.
Last year, when Bill Gates appeared before Congress, BusinessWeek reported that Microsoft had received 959 visa petition approvals, roughly "one fifth as many as Infosys (Technologies, the top participant), while Intel got 369."
When it reported its quarterly earnings last week, Microsoft announced plans to fire about 5,000 employees. A spokesman said that some of the employees let go held H-1B visas but declined to get more specific.
Intel, which last week announced plans to close two plants in the U.S., similarly said that layoffs resulting from the economic slowdown would not factor into the company's H-1B plans.
The Intel layoffs will affect between 2,000 and 3,000 people, but "those aren't the kind of people who will be at risk of losing their jobs," a spokesman said.
The U.S H-1B program offers temporary work visas to foreign nationals who are considered by the U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services to be qualified for a "specialty occupation." Companies argue that they need access to foreign-born college graduates with coveted technical skills. However, granting visas to foreign workers often is a controversial step. The argument gets even louder when the ranks of American jobless start swelling.
Among the charges is the claim that technology companies are less keen on hiring hard-to-fill spots than on creating a cyber lumpenproletariat willing to work for cheaper wages. The critics have also seized on instances where U.S. firms fired Americans while continuing to employ foreigners who held H-1B visas.
With the new political constellation in Washington, it's unclear what, if anything, will happen to the program. But Les French, the director of the tech labor group WashTech, said he hoped Grassley's move was a harbinger.
"We can only hope the general public is outraged that companies continue to apply for visas while Americans get laid off," said French. "We're going to try and get a grassroots effort going on our part to target senators who haven't been friendly on this question to step up and correct the problem. It's not only Microsoft. It's a growing list. My guess is that it's going to be business as usual and that the visas will be gone in the first few months of the fiscal year."
OK, so I'm not going to win a popularity contest. Most--though not all--of the feedback to my post suggesting that it was time to rethink the current annual limits on the H-1B non-immigrant visa was uniformly unimpressed. The responses ranged from depicting me as a clueless stooge for corporate interests to, well, just clueless.
Here's a sampling:
"Obviously you just don't get it. I am an American contract software engineer, graduated now 10 years ago, with a plan to start and run my own software company. The problem; since so many foreign workers are coming into the country, wages for my work have diminished, and I can not earn the necessary capital to start my own company, much less sustain it...and you spout off that we need more. Worthless."
Another one:
"There is no shortage of tech workers in the U.S. There is, however, a shortage of tech workers willing to accept slave wages. You needn't go farther than the classifieds section of any newspaper to verify this. The good news is that most Americans are starting to see right through the lies put forth by corporate lapdogs such as yourself whose only interests are cheap foreign labor and the bottom line."
Or my personal favorite:
"And you are still a jackass..."
I expected something like this. We're in the midst of a deepening recession and people are understandably mad and afraid and they are going to vent. So it is that the H-1B program serves as a convenient scapegoat. But the argument that top notch foreign-born computer scientists-especially those graduating from American universities each year-qualifies as a high-tech lumpenproletariat is flawed.
I'm not talking about someone fitting boards at a computer assembly line or an IT support staffer. Those folks all play important roles in the economy. But they won't be the people who staff up the coming push in green energy. Nor will they be the ones snapped up by Google or Microsoft to do basic computer science research.
Unfortunately, U.S. universities aren't graduating the same numbers of engineers as they did a couple of decades ago. So what to do? I'm with John Doerr on this one. Part of the solution is to double the annual number of engineers coming out of American universities to 60,000. At the same time, he wants to supplement that number by finding ways to keep smart foreigners who study engineering in the U.S. in this country.
Here's what he had to say at held last month.
"What we do is bring foreign nationals to the world's greatest universities. We train them, invest in them and make them go home," he said. "What kind of national strategy is that? So I would staple a green card to the diploma." If you have a better idea, let's hear it.
(Here's a video of his appearance)
What with pink slips being handed out all over this country, now is probably the worst time for any political leader to urge a rethinking of our H-1B policy to lift the 65,000 annual limits on foreign guest workers in specialty occupations. It's not the sort of political stance that will play well in Peoria - or in many other places in the U.S. these days.
But it must be said: Maintaining the status quo on H-1B is the best news that China, India, Russia or any other would-be economic superpower could ever want to hear. The reverse brain drain returns smart people with advanced degrees to their countries of origin. And in the increasingly hot, flat and crowded world that the New York Times' Tom Friedman describes in his latest book, these are the sorts of folks every country will covet.
What we're not talking about here are rank-and-file jobs that come and go, depending upon the whims of the business cycle. This is the next generation of superstar engineers and entrepreneurs, who clearly will leave their mark. The only question is where.
"The current rules are nuts," adds Bob Muglia, a senior executive at Microsoft.
In particular, he pointed to the process in which foreigners, who get educated in the U.S., wind up getting exported back to their home countries. "It's crazy," he said, drawing a distinction between "highly-trained people and migrant farm workers."
His is a common refrain among tech types. This was the second consecutive year in which the federal government got swamped by applications well in excess of the annual 65,000 limit for H-1B visas within days of opening the visa window.
Barack Obama surely must be getting an earful about this from trusted tech advisors, like Google's Eric Schmidt and Xerox's Anne Mulcahy. What's more, computer industry executives, who have long chafed at numerical ceilings on the H-1B, are likely to take a more assertive tone after the new administration takes office next January.
That's the only way to get the ball moving. They haven't been happy with the situation for quite some time and in conversations, it's clear that their frustration is at the boiling point.
"It's the most ridiculous thing that I've ever seen," says Seagate CEO, Bill Watkins and the vice chairman of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group. "We train them and then don't let them stay here? Come on. More than half the companies in the (Silicon) Valley were formed by immigrants. You don't see that happening in the last three years."
Nobody's going to win a popularity contest by advocating we let more foreigners receive U.S. jobs. But now let's think about the long-term. For Watkins, a strong proponent of "getting "American companies to identify with America," the deadlock on over H-1Bs is yet more proof of rules and regulations which ultimately work against the country's economic self interest.
Seagate CEO Bill Watkins
"I've been moving operations offshore because that's where my grads are," he said. "It's a ridiculous situation that we're in."
Last spring, the SVLG traveled to Washington D.C. to make its case. Unfortunately for SVLG, its timing wasn't the best. Congress was then more concerned about illegal immigration and the fairness of bringing "cheaper" H-1B candidates into the country. The upshot: Nothing got done. f
For what it's worth, here's what they were asking for.
• Raise the H-1B cap and allow it to fluctuate to reflect market demand and unemployment rates
• Exempt US advanced degree graduates from the H-1B cap
• Apply existing 20,000 H-1B set-aside to foreign university advanced degree STEM graduates (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics)
• Increase the employment-based Green Card cap to reduce and prevent future backlogs
• Exempt US advanced degree graduates, as well as foreign advanced degree STEM with US work experience from the Green Card Cap
• Exempt from the green card cap those spouses and children of green card recipients
Once again, their timing is bad. The most recent employment report was abysmal the news isn't likely going to get much better anytime soon. I think an H-1B rethink is a good idea but try selling that one when unemployment is nearing double digits. When it comes to long-term thinking, most of us usually fall in with the short termers.
PALO ALTO, Calif.--Anne Mulcahy and Jonathan Schwartz became the latest technology CEOs to call on the government to let more foreign-born computer engineers into the United States.
Anne Mulcahy and Jon Schwartz
(Credit: Charles Cooper/CNET News.com)"You have to raise the quotas," said Mulcahy, CEO at Xerox. Schwartz, who runs Sun Microsystems, struck the same theme.
The message went down well with an audience of Silicon Valley elites gathering at Stanford Friday for a daylong conference on political economy. Then again, they were facing a free-trade crowd of true believers, including headliners like eBay's Meg Whitman and former U.S. Secretary of State George Schultz, as well as guys representing big investment houses, venture capitalists, and money managers.
I doubt their pitch would go down as well in places like Ohio or Michigan. So far, however, the H-1B debate hasn't turned into a divisive presidential campaign issue. Neither the Clinton nor Obama camps have taken up the question. Ditto for John McCain. High-tech companies like Xerox and Sun want Congress to raise the cap on employee-sponsored green cards and offer quota exemptions to foreigners with serious math or technology chops. SIA President George Scalise, who is sitting 10 feet away from me, wants to give green cards to talented foreign students.
"It gets worse each year because our needs are greater," Mulcahy added. But if I'm reading her correctly, Xerox's boss doesn't have any confidence that legislators are going to move quickly.
"We have just been stuck on inaction in this country. It's not pros or cons. It's inaction, it's the political polarization in this country that has made for extraordinary problems.
"Having access to international talent is a big part of what's fueled our technology industry," she said. "The statistics about new companies that have started up the last ten years and the number of founders who came from outside this country...I mean, this is just dumb."
"So you put a limit here, we'll go hire there," Schwartz added. "We're not dumb."
Former U.S. Secretary of State George Schultz
(Credit: Charles Cooper/CNET News.com)So why can't tech's power elite get Washington to blow in its direction?
"Damned if I knew," he said. "We've all tried. We've all done the perpetual flights to Washington to talk with them...there's an element of, "Does that drive my election?" It'll help this room. This room doesn't represent a lot of voters. It represents a lot of money."
That got a good laugh out of the swells, but I think Mulcahy nailed it with her answer.
"There's a perception that global trade and big business is leading to losses in the economy and (politicians) don't want to get on the wrong side of that argument."
That's the way things work in Washington but Schultz said the tenor of the battle over H-1Bs may take on a different look after the November election.
"A year or so ago, an effort to get comprehensive reform in immigration was tried with the (backing) of the President and Senators McCain and Kennedy. In the end, it didn't fly. But that was the right track. All the people who were running against that idea (in the primaries)--have since lost. So that's progress and let's hope that it continues."
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