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Friday, Nov 27, 2009
Tech industry leaders don't call Matloff a Luddite, but neither do they consider him to be helping their cause -- or correct in his reasoning.
Matloff's proclamations about abuse in the guest worker program only "perpetuate the myths surrounding the H-1B visa program," wrote George Scalise, president of the Semiconductor Industry Association, in a September letter to the editor of the Washington Post.
Harris Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of America, says Matloff's 1998 predictions of gloom and doom for domestic workers haven't panned out. Just look at unemployment, says Miller. In 1999, 2.3 percent of programmers were unemployed, well below the nationwide unemployment rate of 4.2 percent -- itself an extremely small figure historically.
"He's obviously a very good computer science professor," Miller says. "But on this issue he's just flat wrong."
Matloff has evidence suggesting that unemployment figures don't capture older techies who've been forced out of the field. But being asked to address Miller's charge elicits more than just the facts. During an interview at a Chinese restaurant in Oakland, Calif., Matloff's voice rises when he considers Miller and other industry spokesmen.
"Lobbyists are paid to be sharks," he says.
It's a rare angry moment during the dim sum lunch. For the most part, Matloff is soft-spoken as he speaks with me and orders dishes in fluent Chinese. His mild-mannered temperament, along with his small, wiry frame and thick glasses, fits the stereotype of a computer nerd perfectly.
Only there's a big difference between him and most coders, he says.
"Programmers tend to be reserved people," observes Matloff, "not types who would write to their representatives, let alone carry a picket sign."
Matloff's activism on the H-1B issue is part of a broader social justice streak. He's long been interested in ethnic minority issues, and served a stint as head of UC-Davis' affirmative action program. Matloff married a Chinese woman who eventually became a U.S. citizen, and he used his e-mail network to spread awareness of the Wen Ho Lee case.
Matloff's concern for the underdog comes packaged with a hungry, disciplined mind. He taught himself both Cantonese and Mandarin as an adult by listening to the radio and bugging friends for help. He also taught himself how to program computers. His Ph.D. from UCLA is in theoretical math.
It's not surprising, then, that Matloff has developed an impressive lay expertise on the subjects of age discrimination and the H-1B visa. One sign of the volume of his knowledge: The testimony he gave to Congress and that he continually updates has grown to 110 pages.
Labor unions, engineer associations and other critics have opposed the H-1B program. But Matloff has been central, says Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a nonpartisan Washington think tank.
And although the H-1B expansion passed overwhelmingly, Matloff's efforts kept the measure from being worse, Krikorian says. In particular, Matloff's credibility and activism helped kill an exemption for foreign graduate students at U.S. universities -- a feature that could have allowed an additional 100,000 or more H-1B workers annually, Krikorian says.
"He can't be pigeonholed as a gadfly," Krikorian says. "He knows more about this than just about anybody. He's intimately familiar with the personal, professional and academic aspects of the issue. And you can't write him off as a nut."
