Bay Area residents view visas favorably
Many believe foreign work permits necessary, more should be allowed
Living and laboring among some of the brightest employees the world has to offer, Bay Area residents stand apart from the nation in their positive views toward the H-1B visa for highly skilled foreign workers, according to a new poll that is the first to probe the region’s views on the controversial work permit program.
The differences are stark: While 44 percent of U.S. voters believe H-1B workers take jobs from Americans, just 23 percent of residents in the Bay Area hold that view, according to a survey conducted for the Silicon Valley Leadership Group and this news organization.
Nearly four in 10 Bay Area residents said H-1B workers contribute critical skills that companies cannot find at home. Nationally, 30 percent of voters surveyed last year by Politico held that view.
“Tech companies in the valley cannot fill the job openings,” said Craig Christensen, of Palo Alto, a retired software engineer and family law mediator. If qualified
foreign workers can’t get work visas, he said, their skills get turned against American industry.
“The cream of the crop from other countries come here to go to the cream of the crop of our universities, and we don’t let them stay here,” said Christensen, a registered Independent. “We force them against their will to go back to their home countries to compete against us. Idiotic.”
But even in the largely liberal Bay Area, there are those who see the issue differently, such as Larry Grattan, a 61-year-old Republican from Campbell.
“I would prefer the jobs go to Americans rather than we import people from other countries,” the real estate broker said. “I still don’t think we have a shortage of people that will fill those jobs. I just think we have companies that want to pay less money.”
Christensen and Grattan’s views reflect the heated, partisan debate that has engulfed the H-1B visa program for years and has intensified in the furor over immigration since President Donald Trump’s election. While 38 percent of Bay Area voters think H-1B workers provide critical skills and 23 percent think they take jobs from Americans, 22 percent said they think they do both, and another 7 percent said neither.
The technology industry has lobbied, so far in vain, to get H-1B visa numbers increased, saying it needs the best talent in the world. But critics point to alleged abuses by outsourcing firms and charge that even major tech companies use the visa to get cheaper labor. The H-1B visa allows U.S. companies to temporarily employ foreign workers in jobs requiring specialized skills and for those to have a bachelor’s degree or higher.
There are no reliable estimates of the number of H-1B workers in the Bay Area, in part because many of the visas are obtained by outsourcing companies that place workers all over the nation. But nearly 71 percent of tech employees in the San Jose metro area and 50 percent in the San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward region are foreign-born, census data show.
The poll found relatively little hostility toward foreign workers locally: More than seven out of every 10 Bay Area voters believe highly-skilled immigrants, such as H-1B workers, have a positive impact on the region’s economy and its quality of life. Nearly half said those workers had a very positive impact on the economy, while just 4 percent said they had a very negative impact.
“The voters here are surrounded and immersed in the innovation economy,” said Peter Leroe-Muñoz, vice president of technology and innovation at the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, which has lobbied to increase the cap on H-1B visas on behalf of member companies. “They understand at a ground level what the need is in terms of filling some of these roles, and they recognize that there are simply not enough domestic workers to fill those roles in the innovation economy. They see H-1B holders as playing a vital role in filling the gaps.”
Although a majority of respondents believe highly skilled immigrants have a positive impact, a plurality — 43 percent — said the number of visas should remain the same. New H-1B visas are capped annually at 65,000 with another 20,000 reserved for those with advanced degrees. Just 22 percent said the number should be increased, while 28 percent favored a decrease.
Suggesting that familiarity with foreign workers breeds acceptance, the poll found that those connected to tech — current and former workers and their family members — were more likely to support an increase in H-1B visas. But among current tech workers, 18- to 49-year-old employees were twice as likely to support an increase as those 50 and older.
Oakland technical writer Esme Gaisford, who is training as a data analyst, said she has watched extremely capable foreign colleagues in research labs struggle to find jobs because of visa limitations.
“It seems like we’re kind of exporting one of our greatest resources,” said Gaisford, a 30-year-old Democrat. “It seems like a huge loss.”
For tech companies, access to a broad pool of skilled workers is vital in a fast-changing, globally competitive industry, Gaisford said. “That’s a big part of Silicon Valley, is that markets shift. We have jobs that didn’t exist five years ago,” she said.
Overall, those in Santa Clara and Contra Costa counties were more likely than those in other counties to believe H-1B workers were taking jobs from Americans. While overwhelmingly Democratic, both counties traditionally have had more registered Republicans than San Mateo, San Francisco and Alameda counties. And Republicans have more negative views toward H-1B visa-holders than Democrats or no-party-preference voters, the poll found.
James Demayo, a 58-yearold Republican network engineer, expressed concerns about immigrants’ impact. He said H-1B workers take jobs from Americans and would like to see the number of H-1B visas decreased.
“The problem is they don’t assimilate. There’s no reason to assimilate if they have their own language and they stay in their own little cliques,” said Demayo, who lives in Los Altos Hills.
He said the influx of immigrants worsens the Bay Area’s housing crunch, traffic and competition for space in schools.
“That whole quality of life,” he said, “it’s no longer there.”
But Luc Williams, 27, of Sunnyvale, who is about to graduate from San Francisco State University with a studio arts degree, worries that H-1B critics are scapegoating immigrants; pointing to the cases of alleged abuse of the H-1B system by outsourcing companies, including at UC San Francisco where American workers were reportedly forced to train their foreign replacements.
“Any time we start deciding that the problem is with letting people immigrate into this country, then we’ve lost some of the point of how this country is,” said Williams, a registered Independent who supports increasing H-1B visas and believes those workers provide critical skills. “It’s a huge benefit to any community to have new people that are coming here to live; having them around and getting to talk to them and see them and having them become part of the community is wonderful.”
Leadership Group CEO Carl Guardino said even though Bay Area residents have positive attitudes about H-1B workers, he doesn’t see a disconnect in the poll’s findings that voters largely favor keeping the number of visas the same. He thinks Bay Area residents would prefer to invest education and increase the domestic talent pool for highly skilled tech jobs.
“That’s an aspirational goal,” Guardino said. “All of us would like to see America’s education system produce more engineers born in the United States.”
The poll of 1834 registered voters in Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo, Santa Clara and San Francisco counties was conducted by Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz and Associates for the Silicon Valley Leadership Group and Bay Area News Group. The poll, conducted from May 5-14, has a margin of error of +/2.3 percentage points.
“I would prefer the jobs go to Americans rather than we import people from other countries. I still don't think we have a shortage of people that will fill those jobs. I just think we have companies that want to pay less money.” — Larry Grattan, a real estate broker