Professor refutes claims of IT job growth

The debate between industry organizations and those with their feet on the street continues over whether or not H-1B visas cause unemployment in the high tech sector.

I received a very thoughtful response to the blog I posted on Tuesday, AEA study says high tech employment and salaries coming back to 2000 level, from Norm Matloff, UC Davis professor of computer science.

Since Matloff disagrees with most of the findings of the AEA [American Electronics Assoication], I thought it would be worthwhile to share with readers some of what he had to say, especially since as I stated at the end of that blog that the AEA, founded by David Packard, has over 2000 members all of whom are high tech employers and as such they support the idea of unlimited “skilled immigration.”

Let me preface Matloff’s comments by adding a bit of background to what he has to say. Matloff”s arguments are predicated on the belief, which is still debated by some but not by me, that U.S. workers are being treated unfairly.

See The H-1B Swindle, a blog I wrote back in October 05.

Matloff believes that foreign nationals are being paid at lower wage rates than U.S workers and this is the reason why companies want an increase in the H-1B visa cap. It has little to do with the non-availability of skill sets among U.S. workers.

From Norm Matloff:

“The study makes the usual errors in discussing the number of jobs in relation to the H-1B issue, and especially in relation to its impact on American programmers and engineers.

The study doesn’t break the number of jobs down according to the relevant categories. Note carefully that the numbers of jobs quoted were counts of positions in Software industry SECTOR, not software development jobs.

That industry sector has tons of jobs which do not involve software development, such as writers of software documentation, people who manage the releases of new versions of software, people who market or sell software, etc.

These are nontechnical jobs that H-1Bs are not hired for,and thus shouldn’t be counted in a study that argues that job growth numbers imply that we need more H-1Bs.

The jobs that count are software developers and system/data administrators. These are the ones taken by computer-related H-1Bs, and these are the ones computer science graduates are trained for, rather than for, say, software marketing.”

Here is one of Matloff’s strongest arguments when discussing H-1B caps and employment.

“…the H-1B cap limits the number of NEW visas issued each year. Since the visa is good for six years, one can get rough idea of the number of H-1Bs in the na-tion at any given time by multiplying the cap by 6.

The cap has been at 65,000 per year since late 2003, and between 2000 and 2003 the cap was 195,000 per year. So, we are talking about something like, say, 600,000 H-1B visa holders being in the U.S. right now, with about 300,000 of them in the computer field.

So you can see that any discussion of job growth is meaningless unless one discusses how many of those jobs are going to H-1Bs, L-1s etc.”

Finally, Matloff disputes the AEA claim that the unemployment rates for computer related jobs is very low. The AEA study pegged it at 1.9 percent for electrical engineers and 2.5 percent for computer scientists.

“Predictably, the AEA study cites low unemployment figures for programmers and engineers. These are meaningless, because the programmers and engineers who can’t find jobs in the field are forced to go into other occupations. They then count as EMPLOYED in those other occupations.

As Gene Nelson once put it so succinctly, the former programmer who is now working as a security guard is counted in government data as an employed security guard, not an unemployed programmer. (For a more formal statement of this see Carol Veneri, Can Occupa-tional Labor Shortages Be Identified Using Available Data?, Monthly Labor Re-view, March 1999, p.15.)”

I hope these excerpts from Norm Matloff help to balance the scales in this continuing debate.