Silicon Valley Seeks Help Abroad
The research and development department at Cypress Semiconductor employs engineers and experts from 25 countries, who speak 20 different languages.
Andy Taylor of Blegaudy, Scotland, supervises Huy Quang Le, who is from Vietnam, and a team of eight others working on a project to shrink transistors. Taylor came to the United States from his homeland on a H-1B visa that allows people with special skills to work here for three years.
"This is a very, very competitive place to be," said Taylor.
The industry is so competitive that Taylor gets two or three calls a week from headhunters trying to lure him away from Cypress. His boss, T.J. Rodgers said the problem is the same all over Silicon Valley: high demand for hot skills.
"Right now I have a backlog list of sixteen products, sixteen chips we'd like to make we know how to make, that we can't staff," said Rodgers, President of Cypress Semiconductor.
With unemployment in many hi-tech fields hovering around zero, companies have become increasingly dependent on foreign workers. H-1B visa applications have more than doubled in the past two years alone, and this year the number of visas approved is expected to hit the legal limit of 65,000 by June.
Companies like Netscape and Microsoft are lobbying Washington to raise the limit on H1-B visas in order to meet demand for skilled workers.
"I had heard it was such a promising job market, that it shouldn't take long at all. So I'm a little surprised it's taking this long," said Wayne Huzinkveld.
Ready, willing and born in the U.S.A., Huzinkveld is amply qualified to take one of those hi-tech jobs, as are hundreds like him who attended a job fair in Oakland, Calif. Huzinkveld has sent out over a hundred resumes in the past year, but still has no job.
"I think there are certainly enough homegrown talented people who would be able to answer any sort of labor shortage. And the gap might be in providing them with fairly simple training to get them fully up to speed," he said.
"It's all hype. I promise you the sky will not fall even if the program is ended altogether," Professor Norman Matloff of the University of California at Davis said.
Matloff is skeptical, saying that a true labor shortage would increase wages at a much higher rate. Matloff said employers would be forced to hire more than the two percent of applicants they typically hire now.
"They're only willing to hire certain groups of people. One, recent college graduates who are attractive because they make less money. Secondly, the foreign nationals who on average do get paid less," Matloff argued.
It's engineers like Wayne that the government believes could be tapped to ease the hi-tech labor shortage. But at 43, his resume won't get the same attention as a 22-year-old graduate—whether native or foreign-born.
"It could very well be that there aren't enough people, but yet I wonder if they are willing to invest ad make some reasonable investment in training, in finding people who are already out there with and who already have a good wealth of experience," Wayne said.
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