The vanishing American computer programmer

Move to increase number of foreign worker visas fails in Senate, but that has not stopped what critics call a push for cheaper labor.

from the July 2, 2007 edition

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To a degree, the Internet has changed the balance of power in a dispute between employees and employers and thus, perhaps, changed the balance of power in Washington's political arena. That's particularly true when a group of sophisticated computer experts use their expertise in a public policy fight.

To Matloff, the H-1B dispute is an example of how ruthless some businesses have become in their effort to get what they want from Congress. The computer industry insists that it must be able to import highly skilled foreign workers to handle programming and other work. Without those workers, firms would have to move those jobs to India, China, or other countries where labor is cheap in order to remain competitive.

John Miano, who runs his own programming firm, says such offshoring is "the latest fad." He notes that nearly all the world's software was developed in the United States. American culture makes programmers here efficient and innovative, he says, and offshoring over the past decade hasn't saved US firms any money.

In addition, claims by high-tech firms that they pay prevailing wages to H-1Bworkers are false, Mr. Miano says. In fact, their pay is about $12,000 a year less than American citizens would get for the same job, according to a new study by Miano for the Center for Immigration Studies, in Washington, D.C.

Proponents of more H-1Bs also say there is a shortage of computer professionals in the US, reflected in an unemployment rate of a mere 2.4 percent. But Miano says wages in the computer industry have been stagnant after inflation for 10 years, hardly a sign of a labor shortage. Moreover, the low unemployment rate reflects the fact that programmers and others have left the industry in droves, unable to find work, often after training H-1B replacements. Several computer companies have laid off thousands of workers, while at the same time complaining of shortages.

A new study by the National Venture Capital Association finds that 1 in 4 US public firms backed by venture capital and created in the past 15 years were founded by immigrants. Most of those immigrants, however, were not in the country on H-1B visas, Matloff says. Many were among several American co-founders. Considering the high proportion of foreign-born Americans in the US today, the role of foreign founders is not disproportionately high, he notes.

While the H-1B issue remains on the legislative counter, the US is losing considerable computer capabilities, Matloff maintains. At his school, the number of computer-science students has fallen by 50 percent since its peak in the 1990s. American computer programmers are an endangered species in the US, he says, as similar situations exist at other universities.

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