Consulting firm settles H-1B discrimination case

their services once they are in the United States. Many wind up working in the computer departments of large end-user firms such as Wall Street brokers or insurance companies, he added. The workers are typically paid about 20 percent less than their local counterparts, he claimed. “For the last few years the U.S. has imported more H-1B than it has grown new engineering jobs,” said Miano. “This program is out of control,” he said.

The H-1B program has lived in a swirl of controversy. Big high tech companies and industry groups want to expand the program and other immigration initiatives because they say they can not find enough technical talent. The U.S. education system is not graduating enough students with the technical skills they need, they add. Others claim the United States needs to clamp down on such programs which they claim companies use to hire lower cost workers. They claim the United States has an adequate supply of technology specialists. Last fall, the IEEE-USA and the Semiconductor Industry Association jointly lobbied Congress to create a new foreign student visa category. It would allow science and technology specialists with a bachelor’s or higher to get permanent residency status and a green card on an expedited basis. The group’s claimed 51 percent of master’s and 71 percent of Ph.D. graduates in electrical and electronic engineering from U.S. universities today are foreign nationals. These graduates often wait five to ten years to get a green card, they said.

The Programmers Guild opposed the plan in a separate letter to Congress. “Once obtaining a BS degree becomes a path to U.S. citizenship, U.S. universities and subsequently the U.S. tech professions will be overrun by foreign-born workers seeking any means to enter the U.S. to escape the low living standards that pervade most of the world,” the group said in a letter to Congress. “This deluge will continue regardless of whether a labor shortage exists in the United States,” the group added. Norman Matloff, who helps run the Center for Immigration Studies and is a vocal opponent of the H-1B program, published a study this month concluding that H1-B visa holders do not hold exceptional technology skills compared to U.S. citizens. “Most foreign tech workers, particularly those from Asia, are in fact not ‘the best and the brightest,’” wrote Matloff, who is also a professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis. “This is true both overall and in the key tech occupations, and most importantly, in the firms most stridently demanding that Congress admit more foreign workers. “Expansion of the guest worker programs — both H-1B visas and green cards — is unwarranted,” he concluded.