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H-1B visa lures experts to U.S.
Science, business benefit, but labor feels threatened

	By Dave Darnell Dr. Baolin Zhang, a biochemist educated at Peking University in Beijing, China, does cancer research at UT-Memphis.

By Mark Watson
The Commercial Appeal

Cures for cancer and other catastrophic diseases are being delayed by Congress's inaction on a bill to increase the number of highly educated people who can come to work in the United States on what are known as "H-1B" visas.

That's the upshot from officials of Memphis's St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and the University of Tennessee Health Science Center.

H-1B visas are obtained by people with university degrees to work in various high-tech fields experiencing labor shortages. "H-1B" refers to the section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that describes the terms of the visa.

But the same bill that would bring in more people to help cure diseases would also bring in more computer programmers, who are displacing American workers, said John Miano, chairman of the Programmer's Guild, from his office near Summit, N.J.

A company can outsource its information technology operations to another company and then lay off its own IT workers, Miano said. Then, the second company can bring in programmers with H-1B visas to do the work, he said. This is happening with Miano's current employer, whom he refused to name.

Congress is considering, basically, two versions of bills on this subject. A bill sponsored by U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah,) would eliminate the H-1B cap for people planning to work for institutions of higher learning and nonprofit research centers. It would also increase the quota for the current fiscal year by 80,000 and add 87,500 in 2001 and 130,000 in 2002.

A bill sponsored by U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) would raise the cap but would also impose higher costs on employers, said Greg Siskind, a Memphis-based attorney in the firm of Siskind, Susser, Haas and Devine. Most interested employers favor the Hatch version, he said.

The impact of this issue on Memphis is hard to determine statistically. The Immigration and Naturalization Service does not release information about the location of H-1B visa recipients on a state-by-state basis.

"It does have a big impact on Memphis as a whole, in addition to the tech companies," Siskind said. "It will become more and more of an issue, especially as Memphis attracts more and more Internet companies."

Mary Hartmann, spokesman for FedEx, Memphis's largest private employer, said the company does not release the number of people it employs on an H-1B visa but it does employ such folks.

"In today's increasingly competitive global environment, we seek to hire the best qualified and experienced employees for a job, regardless of nationality," she said.

FedEx recently confirmed it is planning to eliminate about 200 information technology jobs.

UT-Memphis employs 53 people with H-1B visas, and St. Jude Children's Research Hospital employs 98.

At UT-Memphis, Baolin Zhang, who earned a PhD in biochemistry at Peking University in Beijing, studies the mutation of a protein involved in the transformation of healthy cells to cancerous cells.

"When I decided to join the laboratory here, for a foreigner, my work is in research, and most people think the U.S. has the most advanced technology, so it's a very good chance for us to learn something here," he said. "Most people are the same. When you get an invitation from an American academy, they come here for the learning."

The INS issued notice that it had filled its 115,000-person quota of H-1B visa recipients in March. Connie Burk, who works with H-1B visa employees at UT-Memphis, said her institution has several petitions waiting for the Oct. 1 start of the next fiscal year, so the people can start research here.

Syed Mazher Husain is a postdoctoral research associate at St. Jude, studying a way to use mice in understanding the development of Kaposi's Sarcoma Herpesvirus and the Epstein Barr Virus, which are both linked to various types of cancers. Husain earned his doctorate in biochemistry at Osmania University, Hyderabad, India.

In explaining why he decided to come to St. Jude, Husain said he came for the "excellent opportunities" to do basic and applied research in an environment of efficiency and quality.

Jim Carson, St. Jude's associate director of international research scholars and faculty, said his organization seeks the best person for the job, regardless of nationality. Pay is not a factor because the U.S. Labor Department ensures H-1B recipients receive the same pay any American would in the same job.

But Miano disagreed.

"The employer gets to determine what the prevailing wage is," he said. "If the government comes back in and does an audit, you may be in trouble, but the worst that can happen is you may have to pay back wages and get a $3,000 fine."

For example, a San Francisco-area computer consulting firm claimed the prevailing wage for programmers there was $42,000, which was about half the prevailing wage for that job in San Francisco, Miano said.

And Dan Stein, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said, "If St. Jude needs to get research done, they need to pay the money to bring in the labor to do it."

The labor shortage "presents new opportunities to people who have not been in the labor force in a long time," he said from his office in Washington.

"This is what a free market is all about in this country, but H-1B displaces American workers and discourages them from entering these fields," Stein said.

Rehim Babaoglu, a Memphis attorney in the firm of Thomason, Hendrix, Harvey, Johnson and Mitchell, disagreed.

"There's no end to the demand by employers," he said. "They'll take as many as they can get. At the University of Memphis, they've got standing orders for graduates in these fields. . . . The situation is so good that even H-1B employees are wooed away from one company to another."

Without access to H-1B visa recipients, iXL might take more operations outside the United States, said Jodi Littlestone, senior vice president of worldwide human resources for iXL Enterprises Inc.

IXL was founded by former Memphian U. Bertram Ellis Jr., and it maintains an office with about 65 people here. One of them has an H-1B visa.

"We probably would not be able to accept as much work," Littlestone said.

Regina Freeman, iXL spokesman, said her company refuses to release the number of H-1B visa recipients it employs nationwide.

None of the staffs of the elected representatives contacted for this article would predict whether H-1B visa legislation might pass this election year, but it has bipartisan support.