Beware the plot to increase the H-1B visa program

Tech unemployment is still murderously high, so it’s no surprise that it took a nearly 10 months to hand out 65,000 H-1B petitions for 2011. That’s the longest wait to fill the quota in about seven years, but that hasn’t stopped anti-employee forces from hatching a scheme to allow an additional 55,000 graduates to stay in the country and push even more U.S. workers out the door.

What’s more, a new survey of CFOs by accounting and consulting firm BDO USA points to a renewed wave of mergers and acquisitions in the software industry, a trend that always results in heavy job losses as workforces and information systems are consolidated.

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I don’t blame the foreign-born techies and graduate students who want to work here; after all, everyone dreams of a better life for themselves and their families. But the corporados and right-wing politicians behind the move to open the doors even wider aren’t interested in the welfare of the deserving foreign-born.

Ultimately, they want to drive down everyone’s pay and make the workforce even more docile and fearful than it is today. Indeed, it’s well-known that many H-1B holders wind up working for wages that are significantly lower than those paid to American workers.

H-1B is riddled with flaws At a time when some politicians want to build a Berlin-style wall across the border with Mexico, you’d think that at the very least, there would be a reasonably accurate system to account for the hundreds of thousands of H-1B visa holders still in the United States. Think again.

According to a recent report by the independent Government Accountability Office, the government doesn’t know how many H-1B workers are in the country or how many stay after their visas expire. That’s astonishing.

I certainly don’t think those H-1B holders are here to harm anyone, but if the feds can’t track the number of visas issued, there’s a huge opportunity for abuse. “We are deeply troubled that DHS [Dept. of Homeland Security] has no idea how many H-1B visa holders are working in the United States at a time when millions of Americans are unemployed,” said senators Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

That hasn’t stopped antiworker forces from trying to raise the cap. Last year Congress considered a bill that would have created a new visa and expand the H-1B program. That bill died when the term of the previous Congress ended, but House Oversight Committee chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) has introduced a bill that would pave the way for as many as 55,000 foreign graduate students at American universities to obtain a green card. Those students could stay here once they’ve found employment “in the sciences or medicine.”

Remember, that’s in addition to the 65,000 H-1B visa holders, making a total of 120,000 workers entering the job market every year. The San Francisco Bay Area alone lost more than 16,000 tech jobs in 2009. At that rate, all too many IT pros will be donning paper caps and asking, “Want fries with that?”

Issa, by the way, has introduced similar bills before, but now that the Republicans control the House, there’s a better chance of passage.

Tech workers won’t share in the recovery It’s likely that we’ve bounced off the bottom of the recession. There’s a general feeling there will be some increase in tech spending, but additions to the tech labor force “will be modest,” says Aftab Jamil, a partner at BDO, the firm that commissioned the CFO study.

How infuriating — companies across the economy, including tech giants like Apple and Intel, have been posting record earnings and are awash with cash. According to the BDO survey, tech companies expect revenue to jump by about 10 percent this year. How will they use all those dollars? More than three-quarters of the CFOs surveyed said they expect M&A spending to increase significantly this year, with software in the lead. And 68 percent expect an increase in IPO activity.

Tech mergers are almost always followed by layoffs; the bigger the companies involved, the more jobs get the axe. IPOs, on the other hand, often create jobs as capital is raised, but whether the boost to employment will be at all significant is far from clear.

The bottom line: There’s plenty of money to throw around, but don’t expect to see much of it heading your way in the form of increased employment opportunities or raises.

There’s no easy answer to ending the unemployment crisis in technology, but there’s an easy way to make it worse: maintaining and even expanding programs like H-1B. Smart foreign workers have made real contributions to our country, but until we’re back to something resembling full employment, they need to wait their turn. Let’s suspend H-1B this year.

I welcome your comments, tips, and suggestions. Post them here so that all our readers can share them, or reach me at bill.snyder@sbcglobal.net. Follow me on Twitter at BSnyderSF.

This article, “Beware the plot to increase the H-1B visa program,” was originally published by InfoWorld.com. Read more of Bill Snyder’s Tech’s Bottom Line blog and follow the latest technology business developments at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.