H-1B is her No. 1 battle

Date: Tuesday, September 19, 2006 2:58 PM

<<<<< JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER No. 1558 -- 09/19/2006 >>>>>

Great article, but the reporter really shouldn't have let the shills at the
ITAA get away with this one:

"There are an estimated 10 million people in the domestic IT
work force," said Jeff Lande, senior vice president of the
Information Technology Association of America. "So maybe 30,000
of those come from H-1B. It's a drop in the bucket."

Lande must have used a random number generator for that 30,000 figure. Just
this year alone over 85,000 H-1B visas were granted. In total, there are at
least 800,000 H-1Bs working in the U.S. and that doesn't include those that
are here on L-1 or TN visas. With all of those visas combined, I estimate
that there are at least 1.5 million foreign workers in the U.S. if the
numbers of H-1B, L-1, and TN are combined.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

http://www.nj.com/business/times/index.ssf?/base/business-1/1158638951246080.xml&coll=5

H-1B is her No. 1 battle

Sona Shah has leaped head-first into fight over controversial work-visa
regulations
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
BY PHILIP READ
Times Staff
Sona Shah didn't need flow charts or fancy diagrams to make her point
during a U.S. Senate subcommittee briefing earlier this year.

She just needed her cell phone.

First, she dialed the number listed in a "Help Wanted" ad for a computer
programmer. Then she let everyone listen to the ensuing conversation.

"I said, 'Hi. I'm an American citizen. I'm looking for a job,'" Shah
recalled. "They said, 'No, that job's been set aside for an H-1B
employee.'"

The staffers at the legislative briefing were stunned. "There were audible
gasps," Shah said.

Those are the kind of tactics the 34-year-old Montclair woman has used in
her crusade to reform the H-1B visa classification, which she says U.S.
employers have used to turn Indian immigrants into underpaid indentured
servants -- and to deny American citizens jobs.

"You have to stand up for the rights of both sets of workers as long as
there's this degradation," said Shah, who was born in India but raised in
the United States. "We love India. We want to see India prosper, but we
don't want it to see it happen at the expense of the American middle
class."

Supporters of the visa program say it is people like Shah who stand in the
way of progress, denying American universities, high-tech companies and
others the best brains needed to keep the U.S. economy humming.

H-1B is reserved for temporary workers who come into the country to fill
specialty occupations at the request of a U.S. employer, with about half of
the 65,000 visas issued annually going to people in the computer industry.

"There are an estimated 10 million people in the domestic IT work force,"
said Jeff Lande, senior vice president of the Information Technology
Association of America. "So maybe 30,000 of those come from H-1B. It's a
drop in the bucket."

Shah is not alone in her criticism, however, and has joined what has become
a key battle in the nation's immigration wars over the past decade.

U.S. Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. (D-8th Dist.), who has authored legislation
titled "Defend the American Dream" to reform the H-1B program, sides with
Shah.

Pascrell's bill would require companies hiring H-1B workers to give
Americans a first shot at those jobs. It would establish mandatory
wage-auditing to make sure guest workers were being fairly compensated. And
it would increase the fee a company pays for an H-1B visa to $4,500, from
$1,500, and decrease the length of the stay the visa allows from six years
to three.

It would also allow workers to sue their employers for everything from
sexual harassment to unsafe working conditions.

The debate over highly skilled foreign workers exploded in the 1990s, with
big business successfully lobbying Congress to increase the number of visas
granted each year to a high of 195,000. The increases fueled the rapid
growth of information technology, but the numbers crept back down after the
high-tech bubble burst in 2000.

The computer industry has argued it desperately needs to import workers to
keep pace with other countries challenging its dominance of high-tech
industries.

But critics say the flood of foreign workers drives down salaries, turns
foreign workers into indentured servants and puts Americans out of work.
Pascrell said many of his congressional colleagues have ignored his calls
for reform, and he has a hunch why.

"Follow the money," Pascrell said. "They're going to wheel and deal. And
who's going to get hurt? The American worker."

Shah says she was one of them -- a well-educated American citizen whose job
was outsourced to a foreign worker here on a visa.

She said she had been hired as a "token American" data programmer at Wilco
Systems, a subsidiary of Roseland-based Automatic Data Processing, or ADP.
Wilco sold financial software and provided pay-as-you-go programmers to
install it.

Early in 1996, she said she witnessed an influx of foreign workers, largely
from India, her native country. Shah left Wilco in 1998 and became the
chief litigant in a lawsuit against the company on behalf of American and
foreign workers alike.

"A vice president at Wilco once said, 'If Immigration were to see what
we've got here, they'd shut us down,'" Shah, now 34, said in congressional
testimony in 2004. "He was wrong. Immigration didn't care. To this day,
there has been no investigation."

Wilco Systems' defense attorney in the lawsuit, filed in New York Supreme
Court eight years ago, declined to respond to Shah's allegations.

"At this time, the company does not wish to make any comment," said
Jonathan Meyers, an attorney with Grotta, Glassman & Hoffman in Roseland.

Shah, meanwhile, has taken her case to Capitol Hill, where she has become a
one-woman show. She carries a hefty legal folder, its accordion-like sides
fully extended to fit a stack of documents, and a collection of business
cards she's collected from legislative staffers as she makes the rounds,
telling her story to anyone who will listen.

Shah's employment record has been spotty, at best, since she left Wilco.
Despite her credentials --she has a mechanical engineering degree from
Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken -- she has lost her job to
corporate outsourcing more than once, she said.

"It's done to line the profits of the corporate boards of these companies,"
Shah said.

Lande, of the Information Technology Association, said her case sounds
unfortunate but, in all likelihood, is unrelated to immigrant workers.

"Any time a displaced worker loses a job, that is a serious occurrence," he
said. "But you have to look at all the factors. Did the person keep their
skill sets current? Is the company pursuing new market strategies? When you
drill down, immigrants are factors in very few cases."

Philip Read covers West Essex. He may be reached at pread@starledger.com or
(973) 392-1851.

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