A workforce development expert told the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest Thursday that the STEM industry’s claims of a worker shortage over the past year are “questionable at best” and “by themselves seem implausible.”
“These are claims from an industry that fires more people in a year than it hires from the federally provided H-1B guest worker labor pool,” Hal Salzman, Ph.D., told the subcommittee. Salzman is a professor at the E.J. Bloustein School of Planning & Public Policy and J.J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.
Since the last hearing on the impact of high-skilled immigration on U.S. workers last March, Salzman said a sufficient number of U.S. STEM workers, those in science, technology, engineering and math fields, continue to enter the job market. Colleges, he explained, are already graduating double the number of STEM students that are able to find work in that field every year.
In addition, a report by outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas found that tech industry layoffs have made up about 13 percent of all layoffs in the past decade, more than four times the amount of its share of overall employment.
Salzman said the industry has been able to take up “the lion’s share of guest worker hiring” through congressionally provided subsidies, like those in Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s I-Squared or SKILLS Act, which enable the IT industry to hire a greater number of foreign national guest workers than the total number of new technology jobs available.
The Rutgers professor also addressed how laws that allow foreign nationals to enter the U.S. and work affect wage stagnation, and cited data from the Treasury Department.
He noted that some IT workforces are “not just majority, but … 70, 80, often over 90 percent” are comprised of one demographic group. “In a country that strives for diversity, with great difficulty, but nonetheless embraces it as a goal and codifies it in law, it is curious indeed that so many of our legislators are supporting policies and programs that lead to exclusionary employment practices to such extremes and at multiple levels,” he said.
Hiring guest workers have caused IT worker wages for U.S. workers and guest workers alike to remain stagnant over the past two decades, running parallel in cost to salaries from employees in the late 1990s when President Bill Clinton was in office.
Salzman said the ultimate effect it has had on the country is displacing American workers. He cited industry-wide layoffs at Disney, Southern Cal Edison, Toys ‘R’ Us and Qualcomm that have replaced them with offshore workers and guest workers.
Former decade-long Disney IT worker Leo Perrero also testified Wednesday, and said he and hundreds of others were forced out of the company last spring. Perrero recalled being told he and his departing colleagues would spend the next 90 days training their foreign replacements and if they did not cooperate, they would not receive severance pay.
“If our own pool of IT professionals were so incompetent then why would companies like Disney and many others have us train our replacements, spend months teaching them and also why would such a low ratio of STEM graduates from college land a STEM job? This situation at Disney is not an anomaly. This same abuse of the H1B program is happening nationwide,” Perrero said.
Salzman’s closing statement similarly questioned the rationale behind the system set into action by Congress.
“If truly a tight labor market, with widespread, high demand for IT workers, a free labor market would exhibit increasing wages,” Salzman concluded.
