[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 26 (Thursday, March 12, 1998)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1820-S1821]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




           THE CASE FOR INCREASED ACCESS TO SKILLED PERSONNEL

  MR. ABRAHAM. Mr. President, I rise today to share with my colleagues 
an important article on the severe problems U.S. companies, 
particularly in the high technology sector, are facing with regards to 
skilled workers. In the March 9, 1998 edition of the Wall Street 
Journal, Dr. T.J. Rodgers the President and Chief Executive Officer of 
Cypress Semiconductor Corporation, clearly articulated why this country 
needs increased access to skilled professionals. The author is widely 
considered to be a leading authority on high-tech issues and recently 
offered his expertise on the H1-B visa issue in a Senate Judiciary 
Committee hearing on the shortage of high-tech workers in America. I 
urge my colleagues to read Dr. Rodger's educated summary of this 
serious problem and consider a bill I introduced last week with 
Senators Hatch, McCain, DeWine, Specter and Grams, S. 1723, the 
``American Competitiveness Act,'' which seeks to address the serious 
issues raised in Dr. Rodger's article.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Dr. Rodger's article be 
inserted into the Record.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

           Give Us Your Tired, Your Poor--and Your Engineers

       Last year, the U.S. Labor Department interrupted four key 
     projects at my company, Cypress Semiconductor: a memory chip 
     for Internet applications, a microcontroller chip for 
     personal computers, our chip-manufacturing control system and 
     our most advanced CMOS process technology, which permits the 
     design of very low-power integrated circuits.
       The reason? U.S. high-tech companies had hit the annual cap 
     of 65,000 H1-B visas, which allow highly skilled foreigners 
     to work in the U.S. As a result, we had to lay off highly 
     skilled technology workers who were waiting for their visas, 
     delaying the sale of millions of new chips and the creation 
     of hundreds of manufacturing jobs.
       We have 16 other projects backlogged due to engineering 
     shortages--and that's not surprising when the unemployment 
     rate in electrical engineering is a rock-bottom 0.4%. 
     Although we recruit on 27 college campuses and hire all the 
     immigrants we're allowed, Cypress cannot find enough 
     engineers to grow at its full potential. So it goes across 
     Silicon Valley: The information Technology Association of 
     America says there are $346,000 unfilled skilled positions 
     nationwide. In a survey, the association's members say this 
     engineering crunch is the No. 1 factor inhibiting the growth 
     of their companies.
       And yet Washington is sending immigrants home, including 
     many new graduates of American colleges. Half of technology 
     doctorates awarded by U.S. universities go to foreign 
     nationals. The president of Taiwan's Winbond Semiconductor, 
     just penalized by the International Trade Commission for 
     dumping in the U.S., has a doctorate from Princeton.
       The labor shortage is getting worse. Last year Washington 
     cut off H1-B immigration for one month. This year it will be 
     four months, unless Congress increases the H1-B quota. The 
     administration has opted for the immigration shutdown because 
     it wants to ``protect'' American workers from ``cheap'' 
     immigrant labor, a doubly incorrect position. In fact, 
     skilled immigrants create new jobs for native-born Americans, 
     and a Cato Institute study shows that long-term unemployment 
     is lower and wages higher in cities and states with higher 
     immigrant concentrations.
       Yet the Clinton-Gore administration, an off-and-on friend 
     of Silicon Valley, has turned its back on high-tech again, as 
     I recently told the Senate Judiciary Committee, where I was 
     joined by representatives of Intel, Microsoft, Sun 
     Microsystems and Texas Instruments. Commerce Secretary 
     William Daley has said that an increase in H1-B immigration 
     is ``not feasible''--Washington-speak for ``drop dead.'' But 
     Sen. Spencer Abraham (R., Mich.), for one, is listening. He 
     introduced legislation last week that would raise the H1-B 
     cap by a modest 25,000.
       The claim that skilled HI-B immigrants take jobs from 
     Americana is preposterous. Did Hungarian immigrant and Intel 
     CEO Andy Grove take some ``real'' American's job, or did he 
     help to create 50,000 high-quality jobs?
       Engineers create jobs. Cypress employs 470 engineers our of 
     2,771 employees. Each engineer thus creates five additional 
     jobs to make, administer and sell the products he develops. A 
     disproportionate number of our research-and-development 
     engineers-37%-are immigrants, typical for Silicon Valley. Had 
     we been prevented from hiring those 172 immigrant engineers, 
     we couldn't have created about 860 other jobs, 70% of which 
     are in the U.S.
       Cypress now employs 2,011 U.S. citizens, an accomplishment 
     unachievable without immigrants. Four of our 10 vice 
     presidents are immigrants. Lothar Maler, our vice president 
     of manufacturing, emigrated from Germany as a child. He 
     joined us with an engineering degree and a stint at Intel 
     under his belt, and now manages 1,067 workers in six plants. 
     John Torode, our chief technology officer, came to the U.S. 
     after World War II with his father, a British sailor. After 
     obtaining his doctorate and a computer science professorship 
     at the University of California, Berkeley, John started our 
     computer products division, which makes the clock chips used 
     to synchronize 20 million personal computers a year.
       Emmanuel Hernandez, our chief financial officer, was an 
     all-star employee at National Semiconductor, Silicon Valley's 
     second-largest chip company, which transferred him to the 
     U.S. from the Philippines. Tony Alvarez, our vice president 
     of R&D, fled Castro-controlled Cuba, in 1961 and now directs 
     the 113 engineers who develop our most advanced technologies. 
     Tony's chief scientist, Jose Arreola, emigrated from Mexico 
     to get his doctorate and now manages an elite group of 30 
     engineers, 24 of whom have postgraduate degrees and 20 of 
     whom are legal immigrants. Pat Buchanan derided immigrants 
     during his 1996 presidential campaign, calling them ``Jose.'' 
     Our Jose his made Cypress's 2,011 American employees better 
     off.
       Pierre Lamond, our chairman, received an advanced degree in 
     France, and was then recruited to work at Fairchild 
     Semiconductor, which he left to become a founder of National 
     Semiconductor. Today Pierre's venture-capital fund, Sequoia 
     Partners, has provided capital to 200 Silicon Valley 
     companies (including Apple and Genentech) with a total market 
     value of $175 billion and more than 150,000 employees. Eric 
     Benhamou, another Cypress director, fled with his parents to 
     France during the 1960 Algerian civil war. After his Stanford 
     education, he became CEO of 3Com Corp., the leading Internet 
     infrastructure supplier with 100 million customers and 13,200 
     employees.
       The conclusion is clear: Our immigrant executives, 
     directors and engineers have created thousands of new 
     American jobs. The competition for workers is so intense in 
     Silicon Valley that cypress's average San Jose employee--
     excluding the executive staff and me--now earns $81,860 
     annually, including benefits. The immigrant executives I have 
     cited all earn six-figure incomes. Whose pay

[[Page S1821]]

     are they holding down? With 0.4% unemployment in this field, 
     and record-low unemployment in the broader U.S. economy, 
     where are the out-of-work Americans displaced by foreign 
     talent?
       America's loss is our foreign competition's gain. Our need 
     for engineers has driven us to start R&D centers anywhere we 
     can find engineers--currently, in England, Ireland and India. 
     We're forced offshore to fill the jobs that we cannot fill 
     here--a fine way to ``protect'' American jobs.
       Legal immigrants currently constitute 8.5% of the U.S. 
     population, well below the 13%-plus levels maintained from 
     1860 to 1939. Immigrants add less than 0.4% to the population 
     yearly. If this administration ignores Silicon Valley's need 
     for 25,000 to 35,000 more immigrant engineers--a mere 3% or 
     so of the million-plus yearly legal immigrants--the only 
     result will be to drive high-tech hiring offshore. And it 
     will have added the H1-B visa issue--along with litigation 
     reform, encryption export and Internet regulation--to its 
     list of Silicon Valley snubs.
       Raising quotas by only 3%, specifically to bring in 
     critical engineers and scientists, would be an obvious 
     benefit to all Americans. Why are we sending the first-round 
     draft choices of the high-tech world to play on other 
     country's teams?

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