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Follow UsBANGALORE: In November 2002: Michael Emmons, an IT worker on contract at Siemens Information and Communication Networks, Lake Mary Fla, quit his job. He was due to be replaced next month by a TCS employee on an L1 visa. Irked at being replaced, and having to train his replacement to top that, Emmons set up a site called www.hannatroup.com.
Under a section called "Our Indian Replacements from Tata Consulting India", the site lists names of TCS employees, their telephone numbers, e-mail IDs and, in some cases, names of their children. "Americans trained these foreigners and then the Americans got laid off," it says. The agenda of hannatroup.com–to get people to sign a petition to stop H1B workers coming to the US.
January 2003: American consulates in Delhi and Mumbai are rumored to have stopped processing all H1B and L1 visas. While the rumors are never confirmed, what definitely happened instead was increased scrutiny of all visa applications and a whole lot of 221Gs given out to Indian software companies with blanket L1s. (221G is a clause that allows the consulate to ask for more information. It’s in some ways worse than a rejection because there is now way of figuring out when, if ever, a 221G will ever get a reply from the embassy).
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February 2003: The US Department of Labor begins an administrative law hearing on a case filed by Guy Santiglia, a former systems administrator at Sun Microsystems. His charge — Sun Micro laid him off and thousands of other employees even as it retained H1B workers and was applying for the ability to hire thousands more.
The company says Santiglia’s charges have no merit and that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Department of Justice had already dismissed his claims. However there are other H1B cases in the offing including Pete Bennett, an out-of-work Web programmer who filed a claim with the Department of Justice saying he had been refused a job with another company on the basis of national origin. Bennett co-runs the site www.nomoreh1b.com.
The road from San Jose to San Francisco is in many ways a trip across the heart of Silicon Valley. The exits on Interstate 280 tell the story of the late 20th century’s greatest revolutions — Saratoga, Redwood Shores, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Stanford University… The homes of some of IT’s greatest minds and greatest companies.
Some Telling Numbers... | |
H1B visas issued in 2001 | 163,600 |
H1B visa extensions in 2001 (not counted under cap) | 342,000 |
H1B visas issued in 2002 | 79,100 |
H1B applications pending from 2002 | 18,000 |
H1B extensions issued in 2002 (not counted under cap) | 215,000 |
H1B cap in 2002 | 195,000 |
H1B cap proposed in September 2003 | 65,000 |
Number of computer scientists unemployed in the US | 94,000 (5.1%)* |
India’s share | 1.5% (approx) |
Number of employees of Top 4 Indian IT services | 12,000 (approx) |
companies in the US | |
(*Source: George F McClure of IEEE’s Workforce Policy Committee, quoting US Bureau of Labor Statistics) | |
And yet, the valley is today going through a churn. The revolution is turning on its head. As the downturn cuts into jobs there is a certain panic in the air. And it’s looking for a scapegoat. Increasingly, Indian companies and immigrant H1B workers in the US are beginning to be the target of that angst. Apart from the intense lobbying on the H1B cap issue ( see Dataquest issue of January 15, 2003 ) there are signs all over the net:
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