 GUEST COMMENTARY – NOT THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN, BY GARY ENDELMAN
DISCLAIMER:
Gary Endelman practices immigration law at BP Amoco Corporation. The opinions expressed in this column are purely personal and do not represent the views or beliefs of BP Amoco Corporation in any way. This article is copyrighted by ILW.COM and is reprinted with permission. You can read other articles by Mr. Endelman and subscribe to future articles at www.ilw.com.
The secret of the American boom is not cheap labor, but productive labor. Where does it come from as our population ages, birthrates remain flat, and the failure of our educational system in mathematics and the hard sciences places our technological competitiveness at grave risk? Much of it comes from places like India and China who export brains as their most valuable commodity. These sending countries subsidize our way of life by educating the minds that sustain it. The lure of the American dream is a magnet drawing in the best and the brightest from around the globe. Will it always be so?
Recently, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder opened CeBIT 2000 in Berlin, the world's largest Internet and trade fair, by bemoaning the shortage of information technology workers in his country: "It's an undisputed fact that there exists a huge gap between the jobs and IT expertise available in Germany. I would like to help seal these gaps. I am thinking particularly of expertise from India and Eastern Europe." German industrialists are putting pressure on Schroeder to ease work restrictions on foreign IT experts and want his regime to issue 30,000 work permits to non-European Union workers, especially Indians! Bitkom's president Volker Jung urged prompt action: "We must quickly exploit the potential of this branch to create jobs for Germans too. These 30,000 jobs will further create 100,000 jobs." Germany realizes that the knowledge-based economies of the digital age are not anchored on geography but revolve around skill. The Centre for Management and Information Technology (CMIT), a part of the Hyderabad-based Indira Gandhi Educational Society, last month signed agreements with German universities at Karlsruhe, Ludwigshfen, Nuertingen and Flensberg to offer student exchange programs on the graduate level in management and information technology with special emphasis on electronic commerce. CMIT has already received German university students from Ludgwishafen, Stralsund and Nuertingen and gave them hands-on IT training at leading Hyderabad companies.
Interest in India as the IT revolution marches on is not limited to Germany. God Chok Tong, the Prime Minister of Singapore, spoke at the official opening of the International Tech Park (ITP), a tripartite partnership between Tata Industries, the Karnataka Industrial Area Development Board and the Singapore consortium led by JTC International. "The Tech Park," he observed "is a good symbol of co-operation between India and Singapore and should set the stage for furthering it between the two countries." Mr. S.M. Krishna, the chief minister of Karnataka, said that the experience gained from the ITP initiative would be used to create an IT corridor for Bangalore from Whitefield to Electronics City. Stephen Byers, the British Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, only last week asked corporate India to invest in the United Kingdom and use that market as a gateway to Europe. A high-ranking Swiss delegation, led by Federal Councilor Pascal Couchepin, the Swiss economics chief, and Andres Leuenberger, president of the Swiss Federation of Commerce and Industry, visited New Delhi, Mumbai and Hyderabad from February 15-18 to hold talks with Prime Minister Vaypayee and leading Indian industrialists. The Swiss are particularly keen on developing closer IT ties with India.
For their part, the Indians seem intent on getting ready for all of their new guests. Over 15 successful IT entrepreneurs from the United States recently met with Prime Minister Vaypayee who promised to make India into a replica of Silicon Valley. As reported in the January 14, 2000 edition of The Times of India, Vaypayee assured them that India wanted to make the digital experience its very own: "The entire government--indeed, the entire country-- has now adopted promotion of IT as its strategic goal. We heartily welcome your participation in this endeavor." Sheila Dikshit, chief minister of the Industry Department, announced plans to build a 100-acre "Hi-Tech City" in the northern part of Delhi modeled on the International Technology Park in Bangalore and Hi-Tech City in Hyderabad. This was part of a larger scheme to remake the Indian capitol into a wholly computerized metropolis. Pramod Mahajan, Minister of Information Technology, intends to export billion in software by 2008 and India wants to use Taiwan as a model to bring its best minds down to rebuild Silicon Valley in Bangalore. They can do it too. Right now, Indian and Chinese entrepreneurs run 30% of Silicon Valley and, by themselves, Indians operate 774 businesses in the hi-tech corridor generating .64 billion in annual sales. India's 120 technology stocks have fully 30% of the capitalization for the entire Bombay stock exchange. In Bangalore, signs on the streets advertise computer courses. Business Week predicts that, starting from what amounts to ground zero in 1998, over billion in foreign venture capital will pour into the Indian IT industry over the next six months.
The March 6 issue of Business Week captures the new wave in a story entitled "India Wired." Anyone who thinks that the flow of high-tech talent will forever run only in the American direction had better read this article and he or she will soon think twice. Within 8 years, predicts a recent study by McKinsey & Co. and India's National Association of Software & Service Companies (Nasscom), India's annual IT exports will reach billion or some 33% of total exports. What does this mean for India? Domestic IT revenues near billion and over 2 million new jobs- jobs that would be filled by Indians who will not be coming here. "If so," observes Business Week, "India may chart a new course for development among emerging markets. Since the 1950's, Asia's dynamos have focused on manufacturing exports. India may be the first to rely on brain power-led growth." Already, US Ambassador Richard Celeste admits that "IT has become the driver for our bilateral relations" and you can bet that IT issues will be high on President Clinton's agenda when he visits India on March 20. It is not surprising that a BJP-led government is pushing IT so hard, seeing in it a way to unify a country that has resisted all previous attempts at integration. On the state level, IT champions such as Chandrababu Naidu of Andhra Pradesh, dream that fundamental political change, not just economic growth, is the ultimate prize that IT may teach India how to win.
India has what the United States needs, brains. Indian universities product 120,000 engineering graduates every year; of the 21 companies worldwide that have earned the Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute's highest ranking, 12 are Indian, including a Motorola subsidiary in Bangalore. Over the long haul, India is more than a promising market for Silicon Valley, it is a strategic alternative. Just as economic prosperity in the 20th century required investment and raw materials, competitive dominance in the information age of the new millennium will depend, in no small measure, on who can prevail in the global hunt for the best technological talent. Those who want to protect US jobs by closing down the Indian pipeline are having precisely the opposite effect. By making it more difficult to work and remain in the United States, such policies will either enable the Indian IT industrial complex to reach critical mass much earlier than would have otherwise been the case or give our chief competitors in Europe and Japan a badly needed infusion of talent. Beyond that, IT wages in India will either fall or slowly rise since the supply of qualified workers will grow. This means, in turn, the US companies, under enormous cost pressures, will be unable to resist the obvious solution of sending IT jobs to India or simply establishing Indian subsidiary operations in the first place. Wages are transnational, not domestic, and what is a prevailing wage cannot be defined in only, or even primarily, a domestic context and make sense since the economic systems in which people work are increasingly global without much interest in, or respect for, national boundaries. Skill not geography counts. Immigration is an economic force not a political problem and must be dealt with as any other economic issue. In the long run, American jobs will hemorrhage if wages are kept artificially high when world markets offer attractive alternatives at high quality but much lower cost. If you think this serves US national interest, ask the thousands upon thousands of steel workers in Ohio and Pennsylvania whose jobs are now being done in Korea.
We need to rationalize our immigration policy while there is still time. There are some easy things to do. First, allow unused visa numbers from the many countries that do not send immigrants to the United States to be used by nations, like India and China, who do. Second, since many Indian and Chinese students start work in the United States as temporary H-1B workers, create a streamlined or Blanket H-1B application process for large H-1B employers similar to the Blanket L system under which work visa applications can be presented directly to US Consulates abroad, thus bypassing the need for individual H applications with the INS. Third, allow large H-1B employers to enter into centralized application arrangements with US Consulates in connection with the Blanket H-1B similar to what the INS now offers many corporate employers so that economies of speed, efficiency, and informed adjudication can be achieved on a consistent basis. Fourth, remove the six-year maximum imposed by the Immigration Act of 1990 and transform the H-1B visa into what it really is, namely a "pre-immigrant" instead of a "non-immigrant" visa that it is not now and never has been. After a sufficient period in H-1B status allow the person to apply for adjustment of status to lawful permanent resident. Such an application is judged independently of a specific job opportunity that can never change or is restricted to one city. Business never recruits for a fixed job and constantly moves people around. If the green card applicant earns a sufficient points by satisfying criteria on age, English language fluency, education, and marketable skills that can be shown to benefit the US economy, they should be allowed to stay permanently. Fifth, end the ban on spousal employment for H-4s that cruelly and unnecessarily puts the promising careers of countless professional spouses into the deep freeze. Sixth, no longer insist on current priority dates as a precondition to adjustment of status applications. Allow the H-1B to apply after the period of apprenticeship has been served, but insist on visa availability before it can merit final approval. This way, the terror of running out of H-1B time is banished and, during the eternal waiting process, both the H-1B principal and the H-4 spouse can work.
There are those who say that all of this is simply the alarmist wailings of an immigration apologist. Nothing need be done. This is America. They will always come. Perhaps so, as an American, I pray that they are right and I am wrong. Yet, there is nagging doubt, perhaps sparked by dim memory of other great civilizations, just as proud, just as dominant, just as sure as we that their day in the sun would never end. In Ancient Rome, the Senate would turn out the whole city in triumph to greet a returning conqueror fresh from the frontier wars in faraway lands. Right behind the great man in the lead chariot stood a slave who, as his master drank in the plaudits of the adoring multitudes, could be heard to whisper the tender note of caution that all glory was fleeting. We are, it seems, no longer the only game in town.
|
