Does America need foreign workers?

The draconian nature of the proposed immigration bill and its impact on the Indian outsourcing industry is an active topic for discussion. The reforms are aimed at giving American workers their due in terms of job opportunities and wages and stop the abuse of the temporary specialist work visa by Indian companies. It seems that once the bill is enacted, millions of unemployed American IT professionals (if they exist) will find jobs and the menace of foreign workers snatching away jobs will stop.

However, the reality of the situation is far different. There are not many highly skilled technical workers in the US. Companies like IBM, Microsoft, Facebook have called for an increase in the H1B quota because they cannot find enough qualified tech workers to fill their open positions. While there are a group of senators that have pushed for raising the quota multifold, there are critics that H1B workers undercut US wages.

Data from Dice, the tech job board, CareerBuilder and staffing agency Kelly Services show thousands of open IT jobs across the U.S., with significant openings in application development, including mobile apps and HTML 5, IT infrastructure support, and for IT project managers.

Here's some hard data reported by Computerworld. CareerBuilder, the online job-search portal, had more than 290,000 job listings for application developers between December and February, and just over 20,000 active candidates in related fields. AT&T and IBM each had more than 3,400 app developer job postings during that three-month period; Microsoft and Computer Sciences each had more than 1,250 postings.

CareerBuilder listed more than 30,000 IT project management jobs during the same time period. There were about 5,500 active job seekers in that area. The gaps in demand and supply are pretty clear.

Even all the American tech workers that are available are not full employed. For one, there is a huge mismatch of skills. Then, there is the issue of people not willing to move locations. There is also the issue of people seeking much higher wages than what some of the positions offer.

Corporate America relies too heavily on foreign workers and companies for their technology services just as it depends on China and Far East for manufacturing. A sweeping immigration bill is akin to throwing the baby out with the bathwater.