Immigration Reform: Americans First?

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The Durbin draft summary says that companies would have to pay workers the highest salary as determined by three different measures, including the local prevailing wage and the median wage for all workers in the particular occupation, according to one person who has seen the draft. That, in turn, would raise wages in many cases.

Durbin may also put more teeth into the enforcement of work visa standards. Today, companies that use the program are rarely, if ever, contacted by the Labor Dept. Durbin is considering giving the department the ability to conduct random audits of any company that uses the H-1B program and requiring it to conduct annual audits of companies with more than 100 employees that have 15% or more of those workers on H-1Bs. H-1B workers may also have a confidential complaint line and stronger whistleblower protections.

"Not Either Or"

In contrast, the Flake-Gutiérrez bill is aimed primarily at increasing the number of H-1B workers who can come into the U.S. rather than at tightening the criteria. It calls for boosting the cap on H-1B visas to 115,000, from 65,000. The cap also would increase over time, and certain workers would be exempt from the cap altogether.

American companies have been pushing hard for such an increase. They've been limited in their ability to bring foreign workers to the U.S. because of the cap. "We want to make sure that our immigration laws are consistent with our economic needs," says Robert Hoffman, vice-president for government and public affairs at Oracle (ORCL) and spokesman for Compete America, a trade group advocating for more visas. Compete America's other members include Intel (INTC), Motorola (MOT), and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ).

Hoffman says that a requirement for U.S. companies to try to hire American workers first doesn't make sense. "To focus on that is missing the whole point of the program," he says. Hoffman says that tech companies face a shortage of skilled workers so they should have the latitude to hire talented employees, wherever they're from. "It's not either or," he says. "We will need both [American and foreign workers]."

A requirement to hire Americans first would present particular problems for Indian outsourcing companies that operate in the U.S. Wipro (WIT) and Infosys Technologies (INFY) are among the most active users of H-1B visas, typically to bring Indian employees to work in their U.S. operations. "That kind of proposal may not work," says Sridhar Ramasubbu, chief financial officer for the Americas and Europe at Wipro. "Companies need to go and get talent wherever it is available."

Slim Middle Ground

The issue of how to treat high-skilled workers has broad ramifications for the U.S. economy. On Mar. 7, William Gates III, co-founder and chairman of Microsoft (MSFT), told a Senate committee, "America should be doing all it can to attract the world's best and brightest. Instead, we are shutting them out and discouraging those already here from staying and contributing to our economic prosperity" (see BusinessWeek.com, 3/8/07, "Gates to Senate: More Visas").

But many U.S. workers are upset at the idea that people from abroad should be able to come into the country and compete for jobs. They fear that foreign workers will take high-paying jobs and drive down wages, while discouraging young people from pursuing college courses in key disciplines. "I can't imagine why a person going into college would want to study engineering or computer science if they have to compete with workers who take jobs through outsourcing and coming to this country," says Tim Jurgensen, a Unix systems administrator in the tech group at a manufacturing company in the Northwest. Jurgensen identified his company in an interview, but asked that it not be named in this story because the company did not approve his remarks.

He's bothered that the leaders of major American companies, including Gates, are calling for the government to let in more workers from other countries, particularly if the standards for admittance are not made tougher. "My personal opinion," says Jurgensen, "is that big business has way too much power on Capitol Hill."

Elstrom is news director at BusinessWeek.com.