Matloff's ambitious quest started simply enough: as a professor concerned about his students. In 1993, Silicon Valley hadn't yet climbed out of a recession, and computer science grads from UC-Davis experienced the tough times firsthand.

"We had graduates working in downtown San Francisco, at Macy's as salesclerks," Matloff recalls.

The fact that Congress was making it harder on his students by importing tech talent from abroad was especially maddening to Matloff. Washington had created the H-1B program in 1990.

The program works like this: Skilled foreign workers -- typically those with a bachelor's degree or higher -- are allowed into the United States for a period of up to six years. The latest statistics from the Immigration and Naturalization Service show that 47 percent of those who enter are systems analysts or programmers and an additional 5 percent are electrical or electronics engineers.

The program started off with an annual cap of 65,000. But with the high-tech industry lobbying for more workers, the limit was raised in 1998 to 115,000 for this year. The recent legislation will raise the annual ceiling to 195,000 until 2003. Other features of the new law include giving H-1B workers greater job mobility and using a $500 application fee per guest worker to provide more than 60,000 college scholarships for U.S. students in tech-related fields. Industry leaders point out that H-1B visas have run out each year since 1997. The most recent study on the issue, released by the Information Technology Association of America, concluded that 1.6 million new information technology jobs would be created this year, and half would go unfilled.

But the tech industry hasn't relied just on its reports to win over Congress. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the computer equipment and services industry has contributed $12 million to Democrats and $10 million to Republicans since 1999. The total more than doubles the amount donated by the industry in 1997 and 1998.

"Congress has been bought off equally," Matloff says. "Neither party dares to cross the industry."

That may sound like extreme rhetoric, but the evidence on his side does make the 96-1 Senate vote rather puzzling.

One of the most impressive documents in Matloff's arsenal is a September report by the U.S. General Accounting Office. Titled "H-1B Foreign Workers: Better Controls Needed to Help Employers and Protect Workers," the report concluded that existing labor market studies "do not permit a conclusion as to the extent of any IT skill shortage." The report said the labor market studies had flaws including a lack of data on whether companies considered jobs filled by contractors as vacancies.

Then there's Matloff own research challenging the notion of a "shortage" of IT workers. By studying a database of college graduate surveys, he found that only 19 percent of computer science grads are still in that field 20 years later -- compared with 52 percent of civil engineers. To him, the low unemployment rate for programmers masks what he sees as a pattern of older techies getting left out in the cold in the middle of a red-hot economy.

Research by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers supports Matloff's claim that veteran coders are being driven out of the field. In a 1998 report, the institute discovered that unemployed members typically require three additional weeks to find a new job for each year of age over 45.

"Many employers find H-1B [pre-green card] programmers and engineers attractive because they will accept lower salaries and poor working conditions," Matloff wrote in a paper titled "Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage."

This document might be called the Matloff bible. Originally his testimony to Congress in 1998, he last updated it on Saturday. One section of the paper describes Matloff's research into companies' alleged severe need for workers. He checked with a total of 25 high-tech firms and found that they typically offer jobs to just 2 percent of applicants and a quarter of interviewees.

Matloff also notes out that tech wages haven't skyrocketed as one might expect in a labor shortage. One of his recent e-mails cites an Oct. 2 Newsweek chart showing that the starting salaries for computer science graduates rose only 20 percent from 1995 to 1999, a smaller increase than in the fields of business administration, accounting and sales/marketing.

Despite the current tech boom, Matloff's own students are having trouble finding good work. Fewer than half of UC-Davis computer science graduates get programming jobs.

"They put in all this work," says Matloff, "then they're given a job in customer service," he says. "They're not using what they've learned."

Matloff also has become a one-man information clearinghouse for veteran programmers angry with the H-1B program. The vast majority of the people on Matloff's e-mail list are techies, who each day feed Matloff 20 to 30 e-mails with articles on the H-1B program and tales from the trenches. Matloff can give reporters the names of dozens of programmers who've gone months or years without work.

One techie connected to Matloff is 45-year-old programmer Rob Sanchez. A Phoenix resident with eight and a half years in military electronics, Sanchez lost his job about a year and a half ago, on the very day his company brought on an H-1B worker to do software programming.

Sanchez then spent 18 months looking in vain for tech work. He finally landed a job as a programmer for a communications company two months ago. But he blames age discrimination, exacerbated by the H-1B program, for his difficulties.

"Your professional career is being undermined by our own government and rich corporate lobbyists," he proclaims on his Web site.

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