I'm Still Confused

As I said yesterday, the people writing aboput H1B visas have never worked in tech, and they're getting basic things wrong. They start, for example, with this assumption:

The H-1B visa is a non-immigrant visa that allows U.S. employers to hire foreign workers in specialty occupations requiring specialized knowledge and a bachelor’s degree or higher. These occupations often include fields like IT, engineering, mathematics, and medicine.

But this glosses over important distinctions. In medicine, I'm assuming they want MDs or PhDs. In engineering or mathematics, they might want BSEEs, MS, or PhDs. But IT is a very different field. The people who work directly on the keyboard, programmers, operators, system engineers, webmasters, network specialists, program librarians, and the llke, often don't have any type of four-year or even two-year degree.

So I keep asking the question, why do we claim to be scouring the world for the best and the brightest when the US-born workers we hire for these same jobs don't even need a four-year degree? I've worked in IT departments with H1B visa colleagues from India, the Philippines, Israel, Russia, and probably elsewhere who worked interchangeably in jobs with US citizens without bachelors' degrees. (And the US workers all spoke understandable English.) One question in my mind is whether the H1B people even actually had bachelors' degrees, which goes to Elon Musk's admission over the weekend that the system as it exists is "broken", which is at least a step in the right direction.

But here is Roger L Simon, with degrees from Dartmouth and Yale, a detective novelist and political commentator with approximately zero tech experience -- I'm not even sure if he's ever worked in a cubicle environent -- weighing in on the subject:

The H1-B has been misused by a number—we don’t know exactly how many but we should—in order to clerk at the likes of 7-Elevens rather than perform complex scientific tasks for which domestic personnel were not available.

Further, companies have been using this as a source of cheap labor.

I have, however, heard this last contradicted by my own daughter who works in hiring for a major tech company that will be nameless for family protection. (I guarantee you would recognize it.) Her job is to recommend H1-B candidates from across the globe. She assures me her company saves no money from this (the ancillary costs are high) and only does it after exhausting domestic possibilities.

His daughter (Did she go to Skidmore? Wellesley? What was her major?) works for human resources, not IT, and she's full of the purest moonshine. She would never admit complicity in a system that even Musk now acknowledges is broken and corrupt, and indeed, human resources departments are among the chief culprits who've put us where we are -- don't the company DEI coordinators work just down the hall from his daughter? But unperturbed, he continues,

Writing this all down has convinced me this is indeed nothing but a kerfuffle of the most minor sort that has been taken up by the media ad nauseam in recent days.

We just need to make a few tweaks and it'll be fine. After all, Tesla, Wernher von Braun, Fermi, blah blah blah!

But far more importantly, do something about our educational system. That’s the sputtering dragonfly in the ointment. Then we will have plenty of qualified people domestically. The H1-B program at that point might even be phased out.

But isn't he missing another important point here? The US born workers who are filling the critical IT jobs don't have four-year degrees, they do just fine without them. The HR departments where his daughter works, on the other hand, are more picky about who gets promoted to higher-level jobs. Yeah, they probably still need four-year degrees like the people in HR have (what do you suppose their majors were, by the way?).

And why do we see story after story about four-year college enrollment declining? For instanace, in The Guardian earlier this month:

College enrollment is dropping at a “concerning” rate, according to new data.

Data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center shows enrollment of 18-year-old freshmen has dropped by 5% this fall semester. The data reflects enrollments reported for 1.4 million 18-year-old freshmen as of 31 October 2024.

The decline is most significant at both public and private, non-profit four-year colleges, which have seen a more than 6% decline in enrollment. For 46 states, Inside Higher Ed noted, the average drop was almost 7%.

The answer seems to be that people aren't seeing the value in a four-year degree. So why are we seeking out people from India,the Philippines, Russia, wherever, who supposedly have them, to do the same jobs that US workers without them do just fine? If they can't find enough US workers without four-year degrees to do jobs that don't need them, maybe, er, they could pay the US workers more and give them better conditions. I'm confused.