I arrived in Chicago yesterday morning just ahead of the 400,000 people who were marching in favor of immigration rights; I read in this morning’s paper that the crowds were even larger in Los Angeles, and also pretty big in New York and Denver. It seems like the debate is heating up, and it’s not clear what kind of resolution (if any) we’ll see from Congress this year. Like almost everyone else, I have some strong opinions about the issue; but since this blog focuses primarily on computer-related issues, I’ll limit my comments to the computer-related aspects of immigration reform.

I’ve been intrigued by President Bush’s repeated comments that immigrants are needed to perform work that “Americans won’t do.” Even if that’s an accurate assessment (there would probably be even more jobs that American’s “won’t do” if companies reduce their salaries to zero!), it tends to focus all of the debate on low-paid jobs for unskilled labor. So the human-interest stories that we keep reading about in the paper are about immigants, both legal and illegal, who are working in meat-packing plants, or cleaning hotel rooms, or washing dishes in restaurants; or they’re taking care of your baby, or mowing your lawn, or washing your car.

Meanwhile, what about the computer programmers and software engineers? What about the physicists, bio-chemists, electrical engineers, and doctors? For that matter, what about the teachers and nurses? We need them, too, and in several parts of the country, they’re in short supply. It was only a few years ago that the software industry bemoaned the phenomenon of “cheap” Indian programmers arriving in this country with H-1B visas, taking away the jobs of well-paid American programmers. There’s less concern about that now, because the software industry is growing again, and jobs are more plentiful; however, a recent article (”You vs. Outsourcing,” in the April 24th issue of Information Week) says there’s still a lot of concern and insecurity out there in IT-land.

But more interesting, in my opinion, is the fact that the immigration numbers for these kinds of high-tech jobs are so much smaller than the unskilled-labor numbers that we’re debating nationally. There are estimated to be 11 million illegal immigrants in this country today, and I’ve read estimates that as many as 10 thousand new immigrants are crossing the border each day; that last number may well be exaggerated, but nobody seems to question the fact that it’s a veritable stampede across the Mexican border. Meanwhile, Congress has granted a total of 65,000 H-1B visas for high-tech workers, for each year beginning October 1st. But as Lezlee Westine and Sun Microsystem’s Scott McNealy point out in an April 25th USA Today editorial (”Stingy immigration policy stifles U.S. innovation“), the quota for the year beginning October 1, 2005 had already been spoken for two months earlier; so there will be no additional visas granted for a 14-month period, ending October 1, 2006.

Seems to me that that’s a much more important issue than whether we’re allowing enough people into the country to work at Perdue Chicken and Tyson’s meat-packing plants.