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Jonette Christian of Holden is the founder of Mainers For Sensible Immigration Policy.
Technology is changing our future, creating unimaginable wealth, employing more than 12 million workers, and adding 200,000 good-paying jobs a year. But who gets the job and who doesn’t?
According to The Seattle Times, 71 percent of tech workers in Silicon Valley are foreign-born, while 40 percent are in Seattle. Many are here on congressionally mandated guest worker visas. And the number has steadily increased.
And who doesn’t get the job? According to a recent NAACP report, “The State of Tech Diversity: The Black Tech Ecosystem,” Blacks and Latinos in America are not getting tech jobs. Black talent makes up 13 percent of the U.S. workforce and 8.6 percent of STEM graduates, while technical workers make up just 3.6 percent, concludes Ivory Tolson, director of innovation and research strategy at the NAACP: “Technological disparity is a modern civil rights issue. And we cannot be indifferent to the unstable statistics that appear in this report.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the technological miracle that created much of California’s wealth in the past decade “is open to blacks and Latinos.”
Enterprise-wide initiatives are not the answer. Take Google for example. In the year In 2014, 1.9 percent of their workforce was black. After eight years and a $150 million diversity initiative, that rate has grown to 3.7 percent by 2020.
Tech employers often say it’s a “plumbing problem.” But in the year In 2016, 8.6 percent of STEM graduates in the U.S. were black and 10 percent were Latino, according to a Los Angeles Times article. And if foreign countries are producing better-educated workers than American schools, tech companies should lobby Congress for better schools, not more foreign workers.
Obviously, there are many obstacles. STEM education in K-12 and postsecondary education for minority students needs improvement. But according to one industry expert quoted by the Times who focuses on bias in the tech industry, the problem is not primarily about education, but about “access and support.” The tech industry perpetuates a network system based on personal connections that disadvantages black workers and entrepreneurs.
Companies “must do the hard work of examining everything from hiring and investment practices, to who runs the human resources department, to rooting out practices that alienate and marginalize underrepresented groups,” says Freda Kapor Klein, founding partner of the firm Kapor Capital. He told The Times.
In this case, companies should examine their over-reliance on foreign guest workers. Studies show that H-1B visa workers are marketed as the “best and brightest” in occupations that differ little from their domestic counterparts, but are paid significantly less. According to a review by the Economic Policy Institute, 60 percent are paid below market wages, and like indentured servitude, employers can revoke their visas if they complain.
Big tech companies regularly raise the annual limit, and petition Congress to increase their provision. one more time.
And when Big Tech speaks, Congress listens. The first versions of both the America’s Competitors Act and the Build Back Better Act included significant expansion of foreign workers.
It’s not just the availability of cheap foreign labor that black tech workers face. But if Congress says “no” to Big Tech’s donors, it could be resolved quickly.
If we’re going to tackle racial wealth gaps with something more muscular than discriminatory training and public shaming, we need to take work seriously and stop giving our best. More well-paying jobs for black and Latino Americans are critical to national healing, broadening the tax base, reducing our debt and reducing income inequality. For the country, there are no downsides to tightening the labor market.
The technology industry is our national treasure, our pride and joy. It’s also over-hyped by Congress, and needs some tough love. Congress should ignore the incessant clamor for more foreign workers and introduce tighter labor markets that deliberately force employers to recruit, mentor, and hire vulnerable Americans.
Tech titans need a reminder: we’re all in this together. Breathe an amazing opportunity.
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