By WARD CARSON
I appreciated the most recent politics column (“Pause before celebrating immigration news,” by Carla Kiiskila, Dec. 3). Ms. Kiiskila was critical of our president’s latest move to ease the immigrants’ problems. I am too, but for different reasons.
Ms. Kiiskila advocates for a more permanent fix of our “broken system.” But then, she is an immigration lawyer, so you might expect her to argue in favor of permanent relief for all clients that are (in her words) lying low, in the shadows and under the radar of our Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. But then, there is another point of view.
I am an American citizen, one of 300 million or so, hoping that our president and Congress will consider our best interest in this so-called comprehensive immigration reform. It is our country after all. One would think our perspective should be given some weight as well.
It’s an emotional and complicated issue to be sure, but much of it revolves around jobs, taxes and social services, including the education of children in our schools. Let’s look first at some of the jobs — those that have been known to exist both under and above the radar.
Some jobs under the radar might include landscaping, construction labor, house cleaning and other odd jobs. Those above the radar might include positions in medical services (doctors and nurses) and STEM workers — those well-paid scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians that are needed by the likes of Google, Microsoft and other tech companies, large and small. All jobs that, we must assume, Ms. Kiiskila would expect us citizens to share with the immigrants in a post-comprehensive-immigration-reform world.
Of course, arguments often claim that Americans don’t want or wouldn’t take these “under-the-radar” jobs. It’s a common claim made by those looking to lower their labor costs, but frankly, I seldom hear the argument advanced on Vashon Island by citizens, young or old, looking for a summer job or a good, steady income working in construction or landscaping our gardens. But I’ll leave those claims and counter-claims to be advanced by others. I’d like to look over the radar at the STEM jobs, an issue that I have experienced more directly.
I’m retired now, but much of my working life was spent in academia or companies aligned with STEM-related disciplines. These disciplines, including those taught in the colleges of business or engineering, are considered by ICE to be professions. A foreign student who graduates from such a college (and there are many these days, as we know) is entitled automatically to legal Visa status if they can gain employment somewhere in this country. And believe me, there is generally no shortage of STEM-worker employers — like Microsoft — ready to snap up these willing and able students.
I have seen over the years, and more in recent times, foreign students hired into STEM jobs while equally well-qualified American graduates who compete for the same jobs have been left to look elsewhere, particularly in periods such as we have experienced in the last six years. But then, I assume that many Americans have, in this period of out- and in-sourcing, experienced this attraction that our corporations have toward savings from cutting their labor costs.
More specifically, I’ve read that the latest “comprehensive immigration reform bill,” as it passed the Senate last year, increased the allotment of STEM-worker Visas (known as the H1-B Visa) from 65,000 to over 300,000 per year. We’re told, by both our president and Congress, that this is in response to a need expressed by the likes of Microsoft and their lobbyists — not necessarily the needs of working Americans, but the needs of those corporations to compete in this global environment with, we must assume, the “equally well-qualified” but less expensive help of foreign STEM workers. Or so we are told by some advocates.
Then again, it’s all a matter of your point of view.
— Ward Carson is a retired research engineer.
