WBEZ | Immigration

Deportation protesters use ‘lockboxes,’ slam Durbin

Tue, 14 May 2013 18:25:00 -0500

Police sawed through plastic pipes on Tuesday to pry apart seven protesters at an immigration detention center near Chicago. The protesters, all in the United States without legal permission, demanded a halt to deportations as Congress considers allowing most of the country’s 11 million unauthorized immigrants to apply for legal status.

President Barack Obama’s administration has increased deportations to roughly 1,100 a day, a record pace. Removals have continued as the Senate Judiciary Committee works on a sweeping immigration bill drafted by a bipartisan group that includes Dick Durbin (D-Illinois). The protesters called on Durbin to push Obama to suspend the removals.

“We’ve had over a million families separated because of deportations,” said protester Stephanie Camba, 22, a Filipina who said her parents brought her to the United States when she was 11 years old. “This bill is not enough if it’s not going to stop deportations. It should be deportations being stopped first.”

The protesters, backed by about 100 supporters, held each other using chains and locks inside three-foot segments of polyvinyl chloride tubes — civil-disobedience setups knowns as “lockboxes.” The protesters sat down in a street to block vehicles from the center, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in suburban Broadview.

ICE holds immigrants awaiting deportation in the center before loading them into vans and buses that carry them to flights from Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.

A statement from Durbin’s office in response to the protest says the senator was “instrumental in pushing the administration” to allow many young unauthorized immigrants to apply for work papers and a deportation reprieve under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, an Obama policy initiated last year.

Durbin, the statement adds, is also working on the immigration bill as a member of the Senate panel. “The hope is that next month the full Senate will begin debate on this common-sense, compromise proposal that will provide millions of immigrants with an accountable path to citizenship,” the statement says.

After police cut through the pipes, Broadview officers arrested the protesters, charged them with disorderly conduct and released them.

Chip Mitchell is WBEZ’s West Side bureau reporter. Follow him on Twitter @ChipMitchell1 and @WBEZoutloud, and connect with him through Facebook and LinkedIn.

Proposed visa could tie more foreigners to abusive employers

Thu, 09 May 2013 17:13:00 -0500

Supporters of a proposed visa for low-skilled, nonseasonal laborers say it would break the mold for U.S. guest-worker programs. They point out that the visa, part of a sweeping immigration bill that a Senate committee took up Thursday, would allow foreigners to switch employers and would provide a path to citizenship.

But a WBEZ examination of the legislation suggests that the W Visa could, in practice, tether the foreigners to potentially abusive bosses and would not provide any guarantee of a future in the country.

The program, developed in talks between the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO, would set up a legal mechanism for bringing in as many as 200,000 foreigners a year to worksites that could range from meatpacking plants to nursing homes. Business groups behind the plan say it would help provide a “future flow” of legal workers into positions that Americans don’t want.

The AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest labor federation, agreed to help formulate the W Visa as part of the proposed immigration overhaul, which would provide legal status to millions of low-skilled workers who lack authorization to be in the country. The federation negotiated despite viewing guest-worker programs as a drag on wages.

For W Visa holders, the AFL-CIO managed to insert safeguards. The foreigners would have whistleblower protections and the employers would be subject to all labor laws. Theoretically the workers would get overtime pay, safety gear, lunch breaks and so on.

The practical question is whether the W Visa holders would have the freedom to speak up for such rights.

Saket Soni, executive director of the New Orleans-based National Guestworker Alliance, points out that existing guest-worker programs tie the foreigners to their employer. “If they complain about working conditions or organize, there is a readymade retaliation button,” Soni said. “Employers can simply terminate a worker and deport their problem because, once they’re fired, those workers are deportable.”

The groups behind the W Visa say the program would be different. They point to a “portability” provision that would allow the foreigners to switch employers. “Portability is, really, the foundation of all labor rights,” said Tamar Jacoby, president and CEO of a pro-business group called ImmigrationWorks USA. “If you want to ask for better wages or better conditions or better anything, your leverage comes from being able to say, ‘I’m leaving.’ ”

But there’s some fine print. The Senate bill, as it stands, would require unemployed W Visa holders to find a job within 60 days. And they could not apply just anywhere. They would have to work for another employer registered in the program.

The search for such an employer could be daunting. Few of the workers would speak English well and know their way around. “Sixty days to find a job these days is pretty challenging,” Soni said, even for workers born and raised in the United States.

For portability to be most meaningful, lawmakers would have to provide jobless W Visa holders protections against blacklisting, and would have to provide the registered employers incentives to hire unemployed W Visa holders instead of bringing in new foreigners for openings, Soni said. Jobless W Visa holders could also benefit from coordination and support programs.

Such proposals have not emerged from the Senate Judiciary Committee, the panel working on the immigration bill.

Another selling point for the W Visa program is that these foreigners, unlike most guest workers, could eventually become citizens.

“These workers have the possibility, at least, of getting a green card in the future,” said Robert Sakaniwa, an associate director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “In the past, when there was no hope for the immigrant to get a green card and stay in legal permanent status in the U.S., the opportunities for misuse and abuse abounded.”

But pursuing a green card could be dangerous for W Visa holders. The bill specifies only one path for them — a petition by the registered employer. That would deepen their dependence on potentially abusive bosses.

A W Visa holder could also self-petition for a green card, but that would mean competing with other foreigners in a new merit-based visa system created to give a leg up to highly skilled applicants. A “tier” of that system for low-skilled workers would award points for each year of lawful U.S. employment, but the size of the applicant pool could be huge. Holding a W Visa itself would provide no advantage.

Chip Mitchell is WBEZ’s West Side bureau reporter. Follow him on Twitter @ChipMitchell1 and @WBEZoutloud, and connect with him through Facebook and LinkedIn.

Sheriff warns Indian immigrants of scam

Wed, 08 May 2013 13:05:00 -0500

Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart is warning Indian immigrants about a phone scam that’s recently targeted several victims in unincorporated Des Plaines. Victims received calls in which they were told they owed money to the Internal Revenue Service or to a collections agency, and that failure to pay would result in arrest or deportation.

“The amounts actually vary from victim to victim in the reports that we’ve had, but in some cases it’s been in the thousands,” said Sophia Ansari, Press Secretary at the Cook County Sheriff’s Office. Ansari said the caller often instructed victims to pay with a replenishable debit card.

The perpetrator spoke to the victims in English, Hindi, Gujarati and other Indian dialects.

Ansari said anyone who receives a suspicious call from someone claiming to be from the IRS or from a collections agency should record the name and number of the caller, and to contact the agency that the caller purports to represent.

Odette Yousef is WBEZ’s North Side Bureau reporter. Follow her at @oyousef.

Immigrant organizers lobby local governments on national immigration bill

Wed, 08 May 2013 08:09:00 -0500

Chicago immigrant organizers are leading a national fight to preserve the so-called Diversity Visa program, and they’re starting at Chicago’s City Hall.

Alderman William Burns (4th) will introduce a non-binding resolution Wednesday to support keeping the endangered Diversity Visa program as part of the U.S. immigration system. The program is slated for elimination under the proposed immigration bill currently being debated in Congress.

“I think it’s really important that Congress pass comprehensive immigration reform,” said Burns, “but that we keep in elements of our current immigration system that have been helpful to making sure that we have diversity in the pool of people that immigrate to the United States.”

The Diversity Visa program issues 55,000 visas each year to countries that have sent few immigrants to the U.S. In recent years. It has accounted for half of all African immigration to the U.S. Burns crafted the resolution with the help of the United African Organization, based in Chicago.

“It’s all about relationships,” said Alie Kabba, Executive Director of the United African Organization, “and if we can generate the kind of support we already have here in the City Council, that will translate to support with the Congressional delegation, given the fact that we are all in this together.”

Kabba said he has corralled about 20 African organizations across the U.S. to come together as a network for the first time. The groups are focusing their energies on fighting the elimination of the Diversity Visa program. He said the resolution in Chicago will be the first to address this issue at the city level, and he expects organizations to replicate the effort in their respective locales.

Several members of the Congressional Black Caucus have also voiced concern about the elimination of Diversity Visas under the immigration bill.

Odette Yousef is WBEZ’s North Side Bureau reporter. Follow her @oyousef.

Immigrant job deaths up 14% in two years

Wed, 08 May 2013 07:48:00 -0500

The number of job fatalities among U.S. immigrants is increasing, a WBEZ analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data has found.

Foreign-born worker deaths rose 13.9 percent from 2009 to 2011, the most recent year for which data are available. Fatal injuries of U.S.-born workers during the period edged up just 1.0 percent.

Of the 843 immigrants who died from job injuries in 2011, Mexicans accounted for 349 (41.4 percent). The second largest group was Salvadoran, a nationality that accounted for 40 (4.7 percent) of the deaths. Next on the list were Guatemalan, Honduran and Indian immigrants — all with 24 (2.8 percent).

Immigrants constituted 18.0 percent of the country’s 4,693 workers who suffered fatal job injuries in 2011. The annual percentage had increased each year going back to 2008, when foreign-born workers accounted for 16.0 percent of job fatalities.

Muzaffar Chishti, who directs the Migration Policy Institute office at New York University, says the immigrant fatality increase could be more than a statistical anomaly.

“As recession has taken hold, employers have tightened their belt,” Chishti said. “And many of the labor standards, especially related to safety, go out the window.”

Chishti also points to factors that inhibit immigrants from defending their workplace rights. Many foreign-born workers face language barriers. And many end up working for temporary agencies or other employers that can easily replace them.

The most vulnerable immigrants lack authorization to be in the United States — making them even less likely to speak up for their rights, Chishti said, because they fear their bosses will turn them over to immigration authorities.

Immigrant temporary workers who suffered a fatal job injury in 2011 included Chicago resident Carlos Centeno, 50, a Mexican native scalded by nearly boiling acid in a Bedford Park factory. A WBEZ and Center for Public Integrity investigation of Centeno’s case found that the federal government is not keeping close track of temp-worker injuries.

Immigrants in the country illegally are also more likely to work in dangerous industries, such as construction and meatpacking, Chishti said.

The AFL-CIO highlighted immigrant worker fatalities Tuesday in an annual safety report. “Fatalities among foreign-born or immigrant workers continue to be a serious problem,” the report said.

In Illinois, 38 immigrants died from job injuries in 2011. The state number had ranged from 23 to 42 since 2006.

Chip Mitchell is WBEZ’s West Side bureau reporter. Follow him on Twitter @ChipMitchell1 and @WBEZoutloud, and connect with him through Facebook and LinkedIn.

Shakespeare Theater brings conversation on sex trafficking to Chicago

Tue, 07 May 2013 05:00:00 -0500

The Chicago Shakespeare Theater's upcoming production of Roadkill promises to be an experience unlike any other. The website warns that the play will take place “off-site.” Theatregoers will board a bus with the actors to a run-down apartment, where the rest of the story takes place.

Director Cora Bissett wanted Roadkill to be immersive, as a way into the world of sex trafficking. Roadkill follows Mary, a girl from a poor family in Nigeria; as she searches for education in Chicago and the dream that America offers.

“She has no idea what she’s about to encounter," Bassett said. "In her case, desperation overruns knowledge. If people have no options and the chance that it might work out, they take an enormous gamble.”

Promised wealth by her caretaker, Mary becomes a victim of human trafficking, where women are used as captive prostitutes. She is told by her trafficker that if she runs away, no money will be sent back to her family. He tells Mary that she can’t go to the police. They will only abuse her and rape her.

“She can’t open a door to run because of the psychological bondage she’s under," Bassett said.

In bringing Roadkill to the Shakespeare Theater, Bassett highlights an international issue affecting women, but there’s another reason she set the play in Chicago. According to Rachel Durchslag, co-founder of the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, our city continues to be a “top destination for traffickers to bring their victims.”

Although the numbers vary, statistics from UIC’s Jane Addams Center estimate that “hundreds” of women and girls “are trafficked and held captive as sex slaves in Chicago.” The FBI rates Chicago as one of 15 domestic cities that are at risk for “High Intensity Child Prostitution.” Local Defense Attorney Sara Dill said that these numbers remind us “the problem is right in our backyard.”

Last Thursday, Dill hosted a panel with Durchslag at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater on ending sex trafficking. Also sitting in were CNN’s Leif Coorlim, Veronica Zeitlin of USAID and Ruth Lewa of Solidarity with Women in Distress in Kenya.

Teleconferencing in, Lewa told the audience that as a child growing up in Nairobi, she wasn’t allowed to go to the beach even though she could see the sand from her window. Only as an adult would she understand the high risk for child kidnapping in Kenya, where children can be sold for sex for as little as $1.50.

“That’s less than the price of a latte,” Dill stressed.

Often parents sell their children into sex trafficking. For as little as $100, Gill said you can buy a girl in Cambodia. According to Gill, the life expectancy after being sold into slavery is less than eight years. After they are no longer of use, the organs of sex captives are harvested and sold on the black market.

For Lewa, this highlights the underlying economic issue of human trafficking, where sex workers are particularly at risk.

“A lot of social push factors make people vulnerable, like poverty and unemployment,” Lewa said.

According to Coorlim, human rights workers aren’t out to “find bad guys.” Coorlim brought up chocolate factories where children are sold as forced labor to the cocoa farmers who produce chocolate for multinational corporations.

“Many of these farmers are barely above subsistence level themselves,” Coorlim said. “They’re on the bottom of the supply chain. They get so little money that they have to find ways to cut corners.”

To make change on the issue of human trafficking, we have to change the supply chain.

Coorlim discussed social media campaigns working to raise awareness on the issue and hold companies responsible for their production practices. A new phone app allows consumers to map their Slavery Footprint and see how many slaves work for them, based on what they buy.

“If customers boycotted Coke or Nestle, they would switch like that,” Coorlim said. “Nothing talks like money. It’s a matter of people standing up."

Durchslag agreed that the same is true for sex trafficking.

“It’s a demand-driven issue,” Durchslag said, “and it’s essential that we do demand reduction work.”

Durchslag told the audience that when she was a grad student, she could find studies on prostitution but almost nothing on people who buy sex.

Durchslag said discourse on prostitution emblematic of a culture that is “not focused on prevention. We teach women not to get raped, not boys not to rape. We don’t teach about consent.”

She stressed that it’s important we look at both sides of the issue.

Zeitlin argued that we need a “global, coordinated movement to end sex trafficking,” one that recognizes that many women “get into sex work by choice.”

Dill asked, “Why are we only arresting the prostitutes?” and highlighted that in Sweden, sex trafficking plummeted after the country decriminalized prostitution.

Lewa said that she and other organizers are working with countries across the globe to enact policies and making sex trafficking an issue with tourism officials who often turn a blind eye. Coorlim said that a public “fishbowl brothel” operates in the Paris Hotel from 9 p.m. to 2 a.m. When you go, colored buttons identify the women by country: Red for Vietnam and Blue for Cambodia.

Despite the high risk for trafficking, the Hotel operates without much investigation or regulation. You can even find the hotel’s brothel on Trip Advisor. Why is this allowed? Sex trafficking is a $9.5 billion industry worldwide. There’s money to be made.

Coorlim said that many of the Philippines’ high end restaurants act as hotspots for sex trafficking, although guards keep it on the down low.

“They don’t care about prostitution," Coorlim said. "They just don’t want people to see it.”

Coorlim says this issue doesn’t get the attention it needs because of the economic incentive for allowance and the common lack of empathy toward sex workers, even youth.

“People look at these kids as throwaway children,” Coorlim argued. “The pimps are the only ones who show them any attention.”

As the Editorial Director for CNN’s Freedom Project, Coorlim believes its the role of media to challenge this thinking and make sex trafficking an issue. “If you haven’t heard about this, it’s a failure on the part of the media,” Coorlim said.

Bissett hopes that the play can be a tool of empathy, move past intellectualizing the problem and help start a real discussion.

“What theatre can do is personalize the story," Bissett said. "We connect with a story because we see ourselves in that situation. We can engage on an emotional level.”

By falling in love with Mary, Bissett hopes that Roadkill audience members will see their own story. She wants them to ask, “What if that was someone I knew? What if that was me?”

In working on this play, Bissett said she was called to action by the women she spent time with, who shared their haunting experiences with her. “When a young girl is in your flat, it becomes a different thing,” Bissett said. She wants to give the audience the same opportunity: “When something gets under your skin, you care. You can't ignore it."

Nico Lang writes about LGBTQ issues in Chicago. You can find Nico on Facebook, Tumblr or Twitter.

March: Photo of the Day - May 2, 2013

Thu, 02 May 2013 12:50:00 -0500

Chicago march, rally to target immigration changes

Wed, 01 May 2013 12:10:00 -0500

About a thousand people marched through Chicago's streets and attended a rally Wednesday in what has become an annual cry for changing the nation's immigration laws.

Demonstrators demanded an overhaul of immigration laws in an annual, nationwide ritual that carried a special sense of urgency as Congress considers sweeping legislation that would bring many of the estimated 11 million people living in the U.S. illegally out of the shadows.

Chicago's marchers gathered at a near West Side park before marching to a rally at Federal Plaza downtown featuring Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin.

About 2,000 activists marched in Chicago last year — far fewer than the half a million people who converged on the city in 2006 to demand immigration reform.

Thousands joined May Day rallies in cities from Tampa, Fla., to Bozeman, Mont., with participants braving the cold and snow to deliver their message in some places.

In Salem, Ore., Gov. John Kitzhaber was cheered by about 2,000 people on the Capitol steps as he signed a bill to allow people living in Oregon without proof of legal status to obtain drivers licenses.

More than 1,000 people assembled on the Montpelier, Vt., Statehouse lawn. In New York, paper rats on sticks bobbed along Sixth Avenue as about 200 protesters set off from Bryant Park, chanting: "What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now!" The rats were intended to symbolize abused migrant workers.

Many rallies featured speakers with a personal stake in the debate. In Concord, N.H., Kristela Hernandez, 21, said she feared separating from her U.S.-born children if her work visa expires.

"I came here for better opportunities for me and now my children," Hernandez told about 100 people outside the Statehouse. "I'm here to work and to get an education."

Naykary Silva, a 26-year-old Mexican woman in the country illegally, joined about 200 people who marched in Denver's spring snow, hoping for legislation that would ensure medical care for her 3-year-old autistic son.

"If you want to do something, you do it no matter what," Silva said. "There's still more work to do."

The crowds did not approach the massive demonstrations of 2006 and 2007, during the last serious attempt to introduce major changes to the U.S. immigration system. Despite the large turnouts six years ago, many advocates of looser immigration laws felt they were outmaneuvered by opponents who flooded congressional offices with phone calls and faxes at the behest of conservative talk-radio hosts.

Now, immigrant advocacy groups are focusing heavily on calling and writing members of Congress, using social media and other technology to target specific lawmakers. Reform Immigration for America, a network of groups, claims more than 1.2 million subscribers, including recipients of text messages and Facebook followers.

Gabriel Villalobos, a Spanish-language talk radio host in Phoenix, said many of his callers believe it is the wrong time for marches, fearful that that any unrest could sour public opinion on immigration reform. Those callers advocate instead for a low-key approach of calling members of Congress.

"The mood is much calmer," said Villalobos, who thinks the marches are still an important show of political force.

May Day rallies began in the United States in 2000 during a labor dispute with a restaurant in Los Angeles that drew several hundred demonstrators, said Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, which organized what was expected to be Wednesday's largest rally. Crowds grew each year until the House of Representatives passed a tough bill against illegal immigration, sparking a wave of enormous, angry protests from coast to coast in 2006.

The rallies, which coincide with Labor Day in many countries outside the U.S., often have big showings from labor leaders and elected officials.

Demonstrators marched in countries around the world, with fury in Europe over austerity measures and rage in Asia over relentlessly low pay, the rising cost of living and hideous working conditions that have left hundreds dead in recent months alone.

The New York crowd was a varied bunch of labor groups, immigrant activists and demonstrators unaffiliated with any specific cause. Among them was 26-year-old Becky Wartell, who was carrying a tall puppet of the Statue of Liberty.

"Every May Day, more groups that have historically considered themselves separate from one another come together," she said.

Berwyn relaxes towing policy that hit immigrants especially hard

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 17:10:00 -0500

A suburb west of Chicago is relaxing a tough car-towing policy because of its effects on immigrants.

An order signed by Berwyn Police Chief James D. Ritz says the “towing, impounding and seizing of a vehicle” operated by an unlicensed driver “may be decided by the use of officer discretion unless the vehicle is uninsured.”

Berwyn officials say the order softens enforcement of a 2007 ordinance that allows the city to charge the unlicensed motorists $500, not including towing and storage costs, to recover impounded vehicles.

Berwyn was among several heavily immigrant Chicago suburbs that enacted strict towing measures before proposals to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws stalled in Congress in 2007. The ordinances hurt immigrants who, because of their unlawful presence in the country, didn’t qualify for an Illinois license.

“We still don’t condone people [breaking] the law and driving without a license,” said Michael Cimaglia, a Berwyn police commander who met with immigrant advocates to hammer out a policy. “However, we’ve modified the policy so it’s not as hard on some of the residents.”

Berwyn now allows unlicensed motorists to turn over the car to a licensed driver or park it.

Immigrant advocates said Berwyn officials heard a message from Latino residents. “We’re here to stay,” said Julie O’Reilly Castillo of the Interfaith Leadership Project, which pressed for the policy. “Respect us and be a little bit flexible because there are things beyond our control that leave people vulnerable.”

Under an agreement with the advocates, Berwyn is also putting its entire police department — nearly 200 employees — through a three-hour training session focused on ethnic sensitivity. Cimaglia says the goal is more compassion for the city’s immigrants.

About 60 percent of Berwyn’s 56,657 residents are Latino, according to U.S. census figures. That population includes thousands — the exact number is unknown — who lack authorization to be in the United States.

The state of Illinois, meanwhile, is planning to begin issuing temporary driver’s licenses to unauthorized immigrants this fall.

Chip Mitchell is WBEZ’s West Side bureau reporter. Follow him on Twitter @ChipMitchell1 and @WBEZoutloud, and connect with him through Facebook and LinkedIn.

Study finds ample U.S. graduates to fill STEM jobs

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 16:16:00 -0500

As Congress considers a makeover of the country’s immigration policies, they’ll discuss an expansion of the H-1B temporary visa program for high-skilled foreign nationals. The H-1B program is popular among employers, including several in Illinois, who have long asserted that U.S. colleges and universities are not producing enough graduates in the science and technology fields.

But a new study from the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington-based non-profit which receives about 30 percent of its funding from labor unions, finds that there are more domestic graduates in those fields than the market can accommodate. The study looks over time at domestic graduates in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (or STEM), as well as temporary guest worker inflows on the H-1B, L-1, and Optional Practical Training visas, where large shares of visa holders work in IT jobs.

“There are, as we found before, a large supply of STEM graduates,” said Hal Salzman, a professor at Rutgers University and one of the authors of the report. “We just can’t see in the numbers a failure of U.S. colleges and universities to produce sufficient supply,” he said. Salzman co-authored the paper with professors Daniel Kuehn of American University and B. Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown University.

H-1B workers account for thousands of jobs in Greater Chicago, which historically has been one of the top five hubs in the nation for workers on that visa. In federal fiscal year 2011 more than 11,000 skilled workers came to Chicago on H-1B visas, with India-based IT consulting company Infosys employing nearly one in ten of them as computer programmers. Suburban Hoffman Estates and Schaumburg also accounted for an additional 4,300 H-1B workers. Average wages for H-1B workers in these cities ranged between $63,000 and $69,000.

The study finds that the domestic supply of students in STEM fields responded to industry demand as expected during the 1990s and into the early 2000s, but that a shift occurred in 2004 when companies began shifting their search for talent overseas.

“If you look at what happened in the lead up to the dot-com bubble to the peak, you can see that wages rose steeply, unemployment was fairly low, right up until the 2001 peak, and the result was that the number of students pursuing computer science overall doubled,” said Salzman, “it seems that students are very responsive to market signals.”

The authors find, however, that after the recovery from the dot-com recession, employment in the IT sector began picking up, but wage growth did not resume. They attribute this to an increasing reliance on foreign workers for those jobs. “The guest worker supply, understandably, coming from low-wage countries, is very plentiful, (and) will continue almost despite whatever wage levels are here because they’re still better than what (they) would be in their home country,” said Salzman.

One result of the divergence between demand and wages for IT workers, said Salzman, is that many American STEM graduates are opting to work in other fields. The study finds that one-third of computer science graduates and nearly half of engineering students fail to go into jobs related to their degrees because they couldn’t find jobs, or because they felt they had better career prospects in other fields.

“It’s basic Econ 101,” said Salzman. “If you bring in a lot and flood the market, it depresses wages (and) lowers job quality. And we’ve certainly seen that in interviews we’ve done over the years, where people think what used to be good jobs, particularly in IT, are no longer high-quality jobs. They think they’re unstable, wages have not gone up and they counsel their kids to go elsewhere.”

The STEM report comes as Congress picks over a proposed new immigration overhaul. The legislation by the so-called Gang of Eight would dramatically expand employers’ access to skilled, temporary foreign workers, while also imposing additional controls. The H-1B visa program, currently capped at 85,000 visas annually for highly-educated foreign nationals, would over time grow to 180,000 visas. It would also prohibit large companies from staffing more than half of their workforce with H-1B visa holders, and would require companies to pay higher wages to those workers.

Very few legislators in Washington question the assumption that U.S. companies have been unable to locate qualified, STEM-educated American workers. Two separate bills proposed in the Senate in recent months have both looked at increasing the H-1B cap. Large companies such as Microsoft have been particularly vocal about the need to change immigration policies to allow for more temporary, skilled workers.

“I don’t think the argument here is that foreign workers aren’t good or they aren’t productive,” said Lowell. “I think the argument is yeah, I think we want foreign workers we want employers to have access to, but the question really is, in what amount, and is more better?”

Lowell and the other study authors said the devil will be in the details of any changes to immigration policies. They point out that while the immigration bill does propose higher wages for H-1B workers, it would still allow these workers to be paid 20 percent less than the average wage for those industries.

Odette Yousef is WBEZ’s North Side Bureau reporter. Follow her at @oyousef and @WBEZoutloud.