Designer Immigrants and the CED

3/22/2001

The Mercury News article below discusses a report released yesterday (somewhat out of the blue, I think) which may have quite a bit of influence in DC in the future.

I have a number of comments:
     The committee, a New York-based group made up of business leaders and
     university presidents...

The makeup of the committee is what I think may make this report influential. The makeup is also the reason for the report's highly biased nature. (Business leaders have an obvious incentive to declare a labor shortage and bring in cheap labor; for the huge incentives that university presidents have for siding with business on this issue, see Section 2.2 of my "Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage" paper.)

To be sure, the report's list of CED Immigration Subcommittee members includes several people who have been critics (mostly public) of the H-1B program. Yet, sad to say, they have, either out of timidity or ignorance, allowed the report to repeat the standard misstatements of the industry lobbyists. (The report actually includes an appendix titled "Memorandum of Comment, Reservation or Dissent," but none of the H-1B critics chose to use it.) They have unfortunately accepted a whole series of false industry claims (too many to list here, but suffice it to say that I found examples of them on nearly every page, many of them major).

The report's long bibliography makes no references to the publications written by critics of the industry's claim of a high-tech labor shortage. The report claims a shortage of programmers and engineers, and thus a "need" for importing workers, but makes no references to research showing the fact that employers are not even using the people we already have, especially the ones over age 40. The report makes no mention of the fact that employers would rather hire the younger foreign workers rather than hire older U.S. citizens and permanent residents.

As you can see from this article, concerning high-tech labor issues, the report's basic theme is that the H-1B visa is by its very nature a distortionary agent in the marketplace, and if we only give green cards instead of work visas, everything will be fine. This of course is similar to the Paul Donnelly viewpoint, and an article in yesterday's Seattle Times on the CED report did refer to Paul's group. Again, I fundamentally disagree, because I contend that we don't need the imported programmers and engineers in the first place, no matter whether they are brought here as guest workers or as immigrants.

Now, here is something that neither the Mercury article nor the one in the Seattle Times highlights: Although the CED press release mentions the H-1B program in order to get people's attention, the report's main thrust is actually on something much broader, and which ultimately may attract wider attention: A drastic change in the mix of our immigrant pool.

I have been calling this "Designer Immigration"--changing the mix of our immigrant pool to place more priority on immigrants with good job skills, higher education and better English. (The readers of the article may wonder at my reference to this; the article ends suddenly, probably due to editing.) This idea has been gaining a lot of currency in DC and think-tank circles in the last two to three years. 

As long-time members of this e-mail list may recall, I am opposed to Designer Immigration. First of all it is counter to our American tradition of a non-elitist society. We revel in the rags-to-riches immigrant stories, and rightly so. (I might add that my own father was also a penniless immigrant. He didn't achieve any particular success, but it does shape my views here.)

Second, Designer Immigration would not achieve its stated goal: Supplying a high-tech work force. The current H-1Bs are hired by employers for very highly specific skills; the employers do not hire "just any old programmer or engineer" as an H-1B. So for example, under Designer Immigration the employers would be no more likely to hire a 40-year-old Ukrainian engineer coming here under family reunification than they would to hire a 40-year-old American-native engineer.

I predicted back in 1995 (in congressional testimony) that the notion of Designer Immigration would be proposed and gather serious support a few years later, which did occur. I also warned that this movement would be a thinly-veiled cover for latent anti-Latino sentiment. Well, sure enough, this CED report singles out the Mexican immigrants as "undesirable" and a factor indicating "need" for Designer Immigration. I'm very disappointed to see this.

By the way, there are a few differences between CED's version of Designer Immigration and those discussed during the last couple of years:

• CED advocates increasing overall immigration levels.
• CED advocates retaining family-based immigration, including the always-controversial Fourth Preference for adult siblings. 
• However, CED says that the siblings must have a college degree.

The third item is especially remarkable, as I believe it is politically a nonstarter. Asian-American organizations have made retention of the Fourth Preference a top lobbying priority. CED may think that those organizations wouldn't mind the restriction of having a college degree, but CED doesn't realize that those organizations consider their main constituency to be the blue-collar portions of their communities.

Nevertheless, my guess is that the CED proposals will be widely-cited, and will be widely-read in the Bush administration.

The article follows below. By the way, you can obtain the full CED report at http://www.ced.org/.

Dr. Norm Matloff

Posted at 7:39 p.m. PST Wednesday, March 21, 2001

Panel urges boost in high-tech visas

BY HEATHER FLEMING PHILLIPS

WASHINGTON -- Even as Silicon Valley companies lay off thousands of employees amid an economic slowdown, a report issued Wednesday by the Committee for Economic Development calls for doubling the number of highly skilled permanent foreign workers admitted to the United States each year.

The committee, a New York-based group made up of business leaders and university presidents, says that U.S. jobs for skilled workers will continue to exceed supply because the number of people 65 and over will significantly increase over the next 20 years. The aging population will exacerbate the labor shortage as industry demands an increasingly skilled labor force, they say.

The report came a day after the Immigration and Naturalization Service released figures suggesting that demand for H-1B visas, special temporary visas set aside for highly skilled foreign workers, may be waning. The agency reported only half as many filings for H-1B visas in February compared with a year ago.

Less than six months ago, Congress passed a law nearly doubling the number of H-1B workers admitted to the country. The high-tech industry had been clamoring for the increase, saying they desperately needed additional engineers and software programmers. CED says the problems with the immigration system for permanent worker visas are placing burdens on the H-1B system for temporary visas.

The group says inefficiencies and mismanagement of the INS are the key problems with the current system. CED suggested that INS be split in two -- one unit for the enforcement branch and the other to process immigration requests.

``The immigration policy of the U.S. does not reflect what the American business community is requiring,'' said Shelly Jones, co-author of the report and managing director of the executive search firm Korn/Ferry International.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, and the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee's immigration subcommittee, said she doubted that dividing INS's responsibilities would solve the problem.

``We could end up with two dysfunctional agencies instead of one,'' she said.

The report also calls for placing greater emphasis on immigrants with higher levels of education and skills by increasing the number of skill-based visas relative to other visa categories, and requiring relatives of immigrants to have special skills. While industry groups continue to push for more foreign workers, groups representing U.S. engineers and computer scientists say the companies are interested in recruiting workers overseas to keep wages artificially low for skilled U.S. citizens.

``The report merely repeats the errors and myths of the various pro-industry reports . . . which falsely claim a `need' for importing programmers and engineers from abroad,'' said Norm Matloff, a computer science professor at University of California-Davis who has written extensively on immigration issues. He also blasted efforts to create a ``designer immigration'' system.