The Adea Group of Dallas, Texas may have gotten more than it bargained for in its campaign to snatch up unemployed H-1B visa workers.
The IT staffing firm put out a press release earlier this month calling on H-1Bs in particular to apply for 100 programming jobs at telecommunications clients. And thanks in part to ads purchased at a Hindi-language movie theater in Texas, the effort has succeeded.
About a dozen guest workers per day have contacted Adea since May 3. At one point some in the audience at the Dallas theater chanted "Adea, Adea," said company spokesman Howard LaMunion.
But the Adea Group's recruiting effort also has drawn fire from critics of the visa program, which allows as many as 195,000 skilled foreign workers to enter the country for up to six years.
The Programmer's Guild said it may file a discrimination complaint with the Department of Justice. More generally, H-1B foes say Adea's attempt to hire desperate guest workers highlights the way the visa program can exploit both foreign and U.S. workers.
"The H-1B visa program was created, ostensibly, to provide workers who supposedly didn't exist in the U.S.," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington think tank. "It's hard to make that claim when the tech slump has put a lot of people out of work."
What may irk critics of H-1B visas even more is Adea's apparent belief that foreign workers are better.
In its May 3 press release, Adea executive vice president Doug Ortega said, "We are currently focusing on professionals with H-1B visas because they most likely have the level of experience we need for mission-critical projects and a sense of urgency in securing new employment if they have been recently laid off."
The Adea Group is the brainchild of Abid Abedi, an Indian immigrant-turned-U.S. citizen. In four years, it has grown to 600 employees with a client list that includes Verizon, Sprint and Alcatel, and projects revenues this year of $100 million. The firm already has about 250 H-1B workers and two offices in India.
Just two to three domestic techies per day are applying, compared to the deluge of H-1Bs, LaMunion said. But he claims Adea's strategy is ultimately patriotic: If thousands of well-trained H-1Bs return to their home countries, they'd add to the drain of IT projects going offshore. "The worst thing would be to lose the work overseas," LaMunion said.
But critics say the H-1B program has helped speed the growth of IT shops in India, and that keeping guest workers at U.S. firms only makes matters worse. "There will be a point when the H-1Bs are far-better trained than the American engineers," said unemployed Phoenix programmer Rob Sanchez. "It's pretty scary."
Twice in the past two years or so, Sanchez has lost a job while the company retained an H-1B. His last employer said Sanchez, 45, lacked database skills. That's something of an irony, since he's devoted his free time to building an anti-H-1B visa website with a database of Labor Department statistics. According to Sanchez's site, Adea filed an application to pay software engineers last year as little as $40,000 -- a salary well below the 1999 Department of Labor estimate of an average $65,780 for application software engineers.
Adea officials declined to comment on company salaries, except to say they pay fair market wages. Ortega also said the company is not biased against domestic techies.
John Miano, one of the directors of the Programmer's Guild, is less sure. He questions Adea's H-1B focus given the cutbacks announced at a variety of tech firms, including JDS Uniphase, Intel and Cisco. "Aren't there Americans being laid off from the same places that the H-1Bs are being laid off?" he asked.
Miano emailed a copy to the Justice Department and says his organization may file a formal complaint.
John Trasvina, the Justice Department special counsel for immigration-related unfair employment practices, wouldn't comment on the Adea Group case. But he said his office is aware that attention to H-1Bs in hiring or layoffs could lead to discrimination against domestic techies: "We will very seriously take on the cases where we see any violation of the law."
