At the outset of an election year, Americans have re-discovered a touchier word than offshoring. The I-word, as I like to call it, is inflaming passions and polarizing liberals, conservatives and corporate management.
In all likelihood, the hysteria has not yet peaked. Fortunately, most of the controversy is focused on outrageous ideas such as militarizing our border with Mexico or mass deportations of undocumented workers, rather than the perennially controversial guest worker programs. How long will it be before CNN’s Lou Dobbs starts to broadcast the number of guest workers at blue-chip corporations?
While H-1B visas require at least a bachelor’s degree and some specialization, the broader concept of guest workers isn’t primarily for the fields of information technology, science or medicine. It also applies to farm and domestic labor and other services (especially in hospitality), that few other workers choose to embrace. Unfortunately, the more that these two concepts of skilled and unskilled labor are blended together, the more political (and thus harder) it becomes to have a rational debate. Did I mention that this is an election year?
Consider this statement by Senator Jeff Sessions, a Republican from Alabama who said, “Fences don’t make bad neighbors.” He’s right in one sense: Fences don’t, politicians do. The fence — let’s just call it a wall — is an apt metaphor for what’s happening in America. The wall is appealing to those liberal and conservative politicians who fail to grasp America’s role in the global economy.
One can’t help but connect the dots between opponents of offshore outsourcing and extremists in the U.S. immigration debate who favor imposing increasingly harsher restrictions upon foreign labor and citizenship. Some may find it confusing that there are politicians who embrace one of these initiatives but not the other. A related point: A majority of Congress favors H-1B visas, but also wants to block the easy entry of undocumented or “illegal” immigrants. And the pro-business U.S. Senate voted several times in the past eight months to raise the annual cap on the number of H-1B visas, but this as yet unapproved measure is not a part of the immigration bills under consideration by Congress. In this overheated atmosphere, the separation of these policies is a good thing for proponents of higher H-1B quotas.
Sixty-five thousand H-1Bs are granted each year — it’s a program so popular the government is expected to stop accepting applications in June, three months after the launch. In March, a U.S. Senate committee voted to raise the cap to 115,000 visas in 2007, but the measure failed to win support in the House of Representatives (it failed last fall as well). The bid to expand the program is highly unlikely to succeed in this election year.
Should the H-1B visa program be managed for the purpose of protecting American jobs? Oddly, that is one of the most difficult policy questions to answer. If the tech companies that lobby for guest workers are truly to be believed, then their competitiveness would be harmed if they are unable to import foreign talent.
Still, some critics contend that H-1Bs are all about replacing American talent with foreign workers willing to accept lower wages. Corporations that use the program contend that they are unable to find American workers with similar skills. I think it is vitally important that government agencies monitor the program closely to preserve its integrity and expose abuse. California Senator Diane Feinstein, a Democrat, favors expanding the H-1B program but complains that the U.S. Department of Labor doesn’t check on whether applicant companies have made an adequate effort to recruit U.S. workers before looking beyond our borders.
Ultimately, there is a basic distinction between the dueling metaphors of building walls or bridges. Can you guess which one is the healthier approach?
