Date: Thu, 8 Jan 2004 00:34:09 -0800
From: Norm Matloff <matloff@laura.cs.ucdavis.edu>
To: Norm Matloff <matloff@laura.cs.ucdavis.edu>
Subject: major change point for the U.S.

To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter

We are all waiting to see what the details of the Bush guest worker plan
will be.  But based on the broad outlines we've been told so far, it
appears to me that this legislation, if passed, would produce a sea
change in American society.  Allow me to make a few predictions:

1.  The jobs currently being done by "undocumented" workers will CONTINUE
to be done by them.  They are hired today because they are cheap labor.
The notion implicitly put forth by the Bush administration that the
employers in the agricultural, restaurant, construction etc. industries
will want to hire Bush's guest workers, complete with medical benefits,
Social Security taxes, Workman's Comp etc. is absolutely absurd.  In
other words, the bill would not even make a dent on the main problem
it's supposed to address.

2.  The visa program will not say "Only current or former illegal aliens
need apply, and only low-skilled jobs may be filled under this program."
Most of the people who use the program will be filling positions in the
mainstream job market.  As long as the foreign workers have good
English--and there are tons of people around the world with fluent
enough English--there is no reason they couldn't be hired as clerical
workers, insurance claims adjusters, airline ticket agents, teachers,
you name it.  The hotel industry, for instance, makes it sound like it
would use the program to hire maids, but there really isn't any job in
the whole damn hotel that couldn't be filled with a guest worker.
They'd love to come and work for wages at the entry level or below
entry-level for those occupations.  

And even the programmer and engineer jobs would be vulnerable.  Sure,
the program structure could include a provision saying something like,
"Not for jobs normally requiring a Bachelor's degree," but so what?  The
employers would suddenly decide that many programming and engineering
jobs don't need a Bachelor's.  If it weren't so sad, it would be comical
to watch, say, Sun Microsystems, use this new program to hire
sub-Bachelor's workers for the same jobs that Sun is now insisting
require a Bachelor's degree (the requirement for H-1B).

3.  Last year I myself proposed the idea of a jobs database, at which
Americans would get first crack with guest workers being eligible for
whatever can't be filled by Americans, in my H-1B reform proposal (see
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Summary.pdf).  But my proposal is
constructed as an integrated package in which all the parts depend on
each other.  Bush's guest worker program undoubtedly won't be like this.
It will simply say that if the employer can't fill the job with an
American, then he can hire a guest worker.  Well, all the employer will
have to do is set the wage low (even entry level would probably be
sufficiently low, especially since the large influx of workers would
have the effect of making the entry-level wage lower and lower), and
bingo!, there will be a "shortage" of American applicants.  And that
isn't even mentioning all the other tricks employers use today in
defining a position in such a manner that only a foreign worker would
qualify.

4.  Fortunately for the tech industry, most programmers and engineers
are wimps who won't fight the outrages going on with H-1B, but if as I
predicted above this program hits the general middle in a big way (note
that no one has mentioned a cap for the program), I can picture the
populace in a very ugly, riotous mood.

Norm