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What's the connection between immigrant workers and high-tech employment? It’s a question getting a lot of attention these days, including within the walls and halls of Congress.
For the last several years, most reports about high-tech employment have emphasized the abundance of opportunities and the shortage of qualified workers. A corresponding issue has been the relatively high salaries paid to engineers and computer scientists.
Now, however, other voices are being heard. Some, like UC Davis computer science professor Norm Matloff, have noted that the salary increases allotted to technical workers do not seem to support the industry's complaint of a severe labor shortage. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the salaries of computer programmers, for instance, rose by 7 percent over the past year, a healthy jump but not one that is indicative of employer desperation. More than one member of Congress has speculated that hiring of immigrant workers is a key underlying factor, keeping wages from spiraling upward by hiring immigrants at lower wages than their American counterparts would accept.
Sandra Cordoza, a human resources consultant working with NCR, is quick to confirm that her company needs to hire immigrant workers. "I just put together a lab infrastructure for a Wisconsin site. Sixty to 70 percent of the hires were foreign." In this case, Cordoza points out, "everyone had a Ph.D." Further, since these hires are among the highest-paid engineers at NCR, the company hardly could be accused of keeping salaries down. Cordoza sees the issue as a relatively simple one. "There aren’t enough people in high-tech education programs to fill these positions — 3,000 to 5,000 open jobs in San Diego alone. We do not have enough people. Period."
My own experience at UCSD would tend to confirm that. In my office, we see record numbers of high-tech employers recruiting our current grads. We literally have more recruiters than available grads and the number of high-tech job listings multiplies our pool of qualified grads many times over. This sure looks like a shortage. And our salary figures tend to support that claim.
Technical grads in their first jobs in 1994 earned average salaries below $30,000. That didn’t seem low then since it was well above the average salaries associated with all other disciplines. However, we are now collecting the employment data from our June 1997 grads and the high-tech group has jumped to an average of almost $45,000. Immigrant employment may or may not be a valid issue, but it sure does not seem to be negatively affecting the job opportunities or salaries of recent graduates.
Another factor that has received little or no attention in the immigrant/high-tech issue is the fact that many high-tech employers are government contractors and thus, quite limited in their capacity to hire immigrants. At Carlsbad's Viasat, for example, 90 percent of the firm's business involves government contracting. Very few of the company’s employees don’t have citizenship. For Viasat, it is simply easier to hire citizens and once they are hired, they are able to be more adaptive, switching back and forth between the company’s government and commercial work in a way immigrants could not.
Stephanie Steers, Viasat's recruiting manager, dispels the notion that the company’s few immigrant workers are keeping salaries low. At Viasat, technical salaries have risen, but not as much as they have at larger and better-known companies.
"We have very high integrity with internal comp," says Steers, underscoring the company’s commitment to keep the salaries of new employees commensurate with those of their more veteran technical workers.
Nancy Rose, human resources director for another defense contractor, Orincon, hires foreign nationals but only at great cost and trouble since the firm has to assist the new employees with the citizenship process. "We don’t seek them, but they respond when we have a vacancy. Since we are involved with artificial intelligence, we look for skills that are hard to find."
Jesse Jackson's recent suggestion that we train the unemployed to fill such positions doesn’t hold much promise as a short-term solution whatever its long-term merits. Perhaps because her firm often finds its pool of available talent dominated by foreign nationals, Rose finds it ironic that it is difficult to hire them. "Our country is spending a lot of money to educate foreign nationals."
The main message: This is a complicated and multi-faceted issue deserving careful analysis rather than immigrant-bashing histrionics and political posturing.
Neil Murray is director of career services at UCSD.
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