Open Source: What we owe “temporary” visa workers
I’m Brian Gordon, tech reporter for The News & Observer, and this is Open Source, a weekly newsletter on business, labor and technology in North Carolina.
Increasing tech layoffs have left workers on H-1B visas scrambling to find new jobs within 60 days or risk having to leave the country. I spoke with a Cary resident in this situation, and the stress she’s feeling about her future was clear.
Framing her dilemma as a problem U.S. policymakers should broadly address (as my story arguably does) may raise a basic question though: If people are here on work visas and aren’t working, doesn’t it make sense that they should have to leave?
I think the necessary context comes down to how H-1B visas are used. H-1Bs are, in theory, supposed to be temporary work visas for companies to fill highly specialized positions. But in reality, there is often nothing temporary about them.
People can spend many years, if not more than a decade, working in the U.S. on these visas as they inch through a backlogged green card process. This is particular to Indian nationals who receive most H-1Bs. Beyond their professional accomplishments, they have also started families and set roots, in the Triangle and elsewhere.
Plenty have called for reforms to alleviate the backlog, to help highly educated people who want to stay in this country — and have been here a long time — remain.
At minimum, the woman I spoke with believes she and others like her should have more than 60 days to find another job.
A Duke union election on the horizon
Duke University doctoral students who work as teaching and research assistants plan to take a big step toward forming a federally recognized union, and an election is likely coming next.
If the union wins, Duke would join other elite private schools where grad students have recently unionized.
This year already, Ph.D. students at Yale and the University of Southern California approved their respective unions by more than 90%. Such support is surprising, says Jeff Hirsch, a labor law professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, pointing out a few historical obstacles to grad student organizing:
- There’s a unique power imbalance when it comes to grad students’ relationship with “management” — the professors and department chairs whose decisions can shape students’ future careers. Creating a potentially adverse relationship has given students pause.
- Grad students are only at the school for a limited number of years. This has made organizing, where long-term objectives can be motivating factors, more difficult.
I’ll be curious to see how hard Duke’s administration campaigns against the union. Management typically opposes unionization, and little doubt university leaders would prefer to see this union vote fail. But as Hirsch explained, public perception is paramount for any college, and other Duke students — both grad, undergrad and even prospective students — will pay attention to how the school’s leadership responds.
State responds to “creative” incentive
In last week’s Open Source, I wrote about how North Carolina economic leaders last summer had discussed a “creative” way to direct more incentive money to recruit Wolfspeed, a Durham-based chip manufacturer, to expand in Chatham County.
The crux of their discussion was whether North Carolina could offer Wolfspeed more money than the state’s internal economic model permitted. The answer was yes, a top economic official said, so long as the General Assembly appropriated the extra money in a way that did not specifically say Wolfspeed. Legislators ended up including $57.5 million in the state budget to reimburse an unnamed chip manufacturing project for its future site costs in Chatham County.
State officials hadn’t responded in time to make last week’s newsletter. Since then, they have.
In an email Tuesday, N.C. Department of Commerce spokesperson David Rhoades said, “Making sure North Carolina can offer company-ready sites is an important factor in our success.” He added that the state incentive packages, including job development investment grants, or JDIGs, have “strong protections for the public dollars.”
And while officials had floated funding the Wolfspeed project beyond the economic model, Rhoades pointed out that “in the end, however, every penny of state appropriated funds for Wolfspeed’s JDIG was accounted for in the Walden model.”
National Tech Happenings
- Shootings shut down Apple store in Charlotte, Bloomberg reports. Apple permanently closed a store at Charlotte’s Northlake Mall after the mall had at least three shootings in the past month.
- Don’t let tip presets overcharge you, a New York Times tech columnist writes.
- Twitter laid off around 200 employees last Saturday night. At least it wasn’t on a Friday…?
Thanks for reading!
This story was originally published March 3, 2023 at 8:57 AM.
