Immigration Reform is very nicey-nice. Anyone who opposes it is an old meany.
Legal immigrants take the high-skilled jobs.
Illegal immigrants take the low-skilled jobs.
SAN FRANCISCO — As the Senate voted on a landmark immigration bill that would let Silicon Valley companies import more foreign engineers, some Americans remain locked in a deeply emotional argument over whether outsiders are taking jobs away from people like Joey Doernberg.
Mr. Doernberg worked in chip design, before that industry shrank, and then for a solar energy company, before that industry shrank, and has been unemployed since the middle of last year. By his own account, his skills are not ideal for the current job market. Nor does it help, he says, that at 53, he looks older than he is; youth is at a premium in his industry. So, too, is optimism.
Silicon Valley companies, warning of an acute labor shortage, say it is too costly to retrain older workers like Mr. Doernberg, and that the country is not producing enough younger Americans with the precise skills the industry needs. Their arguments have persuaded a majority of senators to give them what they want: a provision in the immigration bill to let in many more foreign professionals.
Already, the fight over high-skilled immigration has led to arguments and counterarguments on the Senate floor, with one side warning that jobs will go to workers from overseas and the other rallying for Americans first.
But Ardine Williams, the vice president for human resources at Intel, said that hiring Americans is not always practical. Asked about hiring unemployed engineers in this country, she said, “I encounter those folks as well. They are skilled and have expertise outside of an area where we need engineers. In some cases they haven’t kept their skills current.”
The debate over the effect of foreign engineers on American ones has obscured the critical issue of why more Americans are not going into the thriving technology sector. Students in the United States consistently rank low on global math and science tests, suggesting that relatively few are prepared to go into rigorous science and engineering programs.
In engineering programs at American universities, a little more than 40 percent of all graduate students were from abroad, according to data from the National Science Foundation. Even among Americans who do graduate with computer science or engineering degrees, a third pursue careers outside the tech sector.
Mr. Doernberg is keeping his fingers crossed. A resident of Woodside, Calif., an upscale town south of San Francisco, he spends his days scouring online job boards and attending networking sessions at diners and church halls across Silicon Valley. One of them is a Thursday morning group that meets in a church in Saratoga, a short drive from his home.
It was set up years ago by Hamid Saadat, an electrical engineer who came to this country from Iran as a graduate student in 1978, worked at a series of semiconductor companies in the area, became a United States citizen and went through the same rite of passage as Mr. Doernberg.
In 2001, just as the technology industry slumped, he lost his job. He was 47 and he soon learned one lesson. In Silicon Valley, it may not matter where you were born, but when.
“As much as we like to believe there’s no discrimination, being younger usually helps,” Mr. Saadat said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/28/technology/a-bill-allowing-more-foreign-workers-stirs-a-tech-debate.html?hp
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