Drop in on Dilpreet Singh and his two roommates in their suburban Washington, D.C., apartment some Friday night and you might end up staying for a tasty and spicy supper. There could be butter chicken cooked with chili powder, or curried potatoes, or cauliflower with cumin, perhaps rice with yogurt. You could nibble shrimp tandoori and there certainly would be enough juice and water for everyone. There’s nothing wrong with American food, Abhijeet Shinde, a fellow Indian native and Singh’s apartment mate, says politely. It just doesn’t excite their palates. “If we have bland food during the day [for lunch], we like to spice it up at night.” After-dinner treats include movies on the VCR from “Bollywood” — slang for India’s prolific moviemaking capital of Bombay.
Home cooking doesn’t automatically translate into permanent residency, however. Both Singh and Shinde are in the United States on H-1B visas, which allow foreign nationals to work for a sponsoring company for as many as six years. U.S. companies sponsor H-1B visas by affirming that foreign nationals have essential skills that they can’t find locally. The 27-year-old Singh, for example, arrived last December from Pune, India. As a programmer-analyst for Information Management Consultants Inc. (IMC) in Tysons Corner, he performs such tasks as helping the National Institute of Mental Health streamline its grant-application process.

Refugee admissions are determined annually. They presently total about 120,000, with nearly half these numbers being assigned to nationals from the former Soviet Union and one-third to Southeast Asian refugees. The leading source countries for legal immigration are Mexico, with 91,000 persons emigrating to the United States every year, followed by Vietnam, with 78,000, the Philippines, with 59,000, and the republics of the former Soviet Union, with 44,000. Nearly three-fourths of all new immigrants intend to reside in six states: California, New York, Texas, Florida, New Jersey and Illinois. According to the American Immigration awyers Association, legal immigration to the United States totals approximately 800,000 per year, with employment-based immigrants annually totaling 140,000. These are primarily skilled professionals with “exceptional ability” and other priority workers immigrating to jobs for which the U.S. Department of Labor has certified that no qualified U.S. worker is available. Data: Virginia Business

Born Sikh, Singh may wear a turban and join Indian pals for cricket, but he is still typical of the internationally savvy, technologically sophisticated foreign nationals who for years now have been flocking to Virginia to find challenging work. Many are unmarried computer jockeys in their 20s who beef up their skills with a high-tech American company and then head back home. Some try to remain permanently. Whatever the arrangement, it usually is mutually beneficial: strapped businesses hire hard-to-find specialists, while the specialists work on projects that become resume highlights. The projects are completed on time and the experts’ market value increases, whether they stay stateside or not.

In Virginia, immigration of foreign-born high-tech workers and consultants appears a net benefit for an economy that increasingly relies more on information and its various applications for growth. Even during an economic downturn, businesses, especially in Northern Virginia, are able to address chronic shortages of homegrown experts who are highly trained and highly experienced, specifically in the information-technology sector.

Not all see the value of foreign workers, and the terrorist attacks by foreign nationals one year ago have fueled their cause. Anti-immigration groups contend too many foreign workers break U.S. laws and rack up big expenses that American taxpayers must pay. Bill Goldsborough, president of the nonpartisan lobby Americans for Immigration Control Inc., claims that illegal immigrants have cost taxpayers more then $68 billion a year and some 26 percent of those in federal prison are immigrants. The H-1B visa system, he says, allows greedy companies to keep jobs from worthy Americans. “When Boeing was laying off engineers in the mid-1990s, they said they’d retrain those engineers,” Goldsborough asserts. “But they didn’t fulfill this commitment. You now have former Boeing engineers driving taxi-cabs, but Boeing is using H-1Bs to hire foreign engineers at salaries that are from $20,000 to $30,000 less.”

Countering, the American Immigration Lawyers Association says that immigrants are serious wage earners, collectively earning $240 billion a year and paying $90 billion a year in taxes, while receiving only $5 billion in welfare. Besides having to prove they won’t be burdens before entering the U.S., immigrants are more likely to have jobs, save more and start their own small businesses than native-born Americans, the lawyers’ group says. And, even illegal foreigners play too big a role in the U.S. economy to ignore. Valerie Brodsky, a partner with Norfolk’s Vandeventer Black law firm and head of its Immigration Law Group, says that if somehow all of the 10 million illegal aliens in the U.S. were taken into custody, the result would be recession. “Illegal or legal, immigrants do the work that most American’s won’t or can’t,” she says.

Whatever the view on foreign nationals, last year’s terrorist attacks are taking their toll on recent foreign visitors and immigrants. The U.S. government is tightening up visas after Islamic radicals associated with al-Qaida trained as airplane pilots in the U.S., hijacked commercial jetliners and crashed them into the Pentagon and World Trade Center last Sept. 11. Congress is now poised to dramatically cut the number of H-1B visas by two thirds over the next two years, from the current level of 195,000 to 65,000 in 2004. Doing so may appease security concerns, but it also saps the troubled high-tech sector which is in a slump. In mid-August, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service reported that during the first three quarters of fiscal year 2002, less than half as many people received H-1B visas than during the similar, previous, period.

In Virginia, the precise numbers of immigrants working in technology or other professional fields are hard to come by. U.S. Census Bureau figures state that of the roughly 7.2 million residents in the state last year, those of Asian descent accounted for less than 4 percent of the state’s population. Hispanics were less than 5 percent. The figures don’t differentiate between U.S. citizens of a specific ethnic origin or if they are foreign nationals living and working in Virginia. Nor are good figures available for how many foreign nationals work in specific economic sectors in the state. By one account as many as 100,000 people not born in the U.S. could be working in Virginia in technology-related fields at any given time.

Virginia executives in high technology believe that foreign nationals are playing critically important, if not essential, roles in the Virginia economy as it globalizes. In Northern Virginia, Indian-led companies, up to 150, are working on a number of public- and private-sector contracts, according to Sudhakar Shenoy, Information Management Consultants (IMC) founder, chairman and CEO.

Their success led several Indian-born executives, including Shenoy, to create the Indian High Tech CEO Council in 1999, and its membership is now approaching 1,000. Many of the most far-reaching high-tech deals in the state are put together at Indian High Tech Council confabs in Northern Virginia conference halls, where the cuisine goes heavy on naan and clove and sour cream.

Perhaps the most successful Indian-born executive in the state is Rajendra Singh. Born in Kairoo, a village without telephones, Singh and his wife Neera have become billionaires by coming up with technologies that allow cell phones to operate by alleviating signal interference. After earning a doctorate in electrical engineering at Southern Methodist University in Texas, Singh moved to Northern Virginia and set up several highly successful businesses that helped drive the region’s high-tech boom in the 1990s. By the late 1990s, the Singhs, who live in Mount Vernon and have an estimated net worth of about $1.5 billion, were among the top 10 richest and most influential Virginians, according to this magazine’s annual survey.

Nor are the immigrants limited to South Asian nations such as India or Pakistan, which benefited from a tradition of rigorous schooling put in place by British colonizers. According to Hispanic Business Magazine, which publishes a list of the nation’s top 50 technology firms, 10 Hispanic-owned firms are in Virginia. The highest on the list, in fifth place, is Manassas computer-services company Government Micro Resources Inc. All are involved in one way or another with federal-government contracting.

In Newport News, visa-bearing Russians, Armenians and Western Europeans are working on physics research and applied physics projects, including advanced medical diagnostics equipment. Elsewhere, Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese and Thai workers staff some of the state’s multitude of large and small information-services, biotech and applied-technology companies. “In Virginia we see a high number of immigrant entrepreneurs who are Indian, Hispanic and European,” says Laura Reiff, co-chair of the Northern Virginia Technology Council’s Workforce Committee and partner in charge of business immigration for law firm Greenberg Traurig in Tysons Corner. “A lot of it has to do with the number and kind of universities we have here. A lot of kids who are foreign-born get degrees and then are hired locally. They’re already here.”

Getting here from there was likely on the minds of many attendees in early August, as Gov. Mark Warner hosted a reception for Indian-born Virginia professionals and entrepreneurs at the Governor’s Mansion. Many had actively supported and voted for Warner, and the governor was warmly received as he addressed his guests in the mansion’s central hall. The hundred-plus attendees rubbed elbows and snacked on chilled jumbo shrimp, crab casserole, breaded chicken tenders, fresh fruit and other delicacies, pausing to hear Warner’s pleas for passage of education and transportation bonds in a referendum scheduled for the November 2002 elections. Warner thanked his guests “for helping me get this job. I just wished you had told me the state was broke.” But like the sunny high-tech entrepreneur he was before launching a political career, Warner didn’t linger long on doom-and-gloom, instead lauding the ethnic and cultural diversity of his visitors. “These are the new faces of Virginia,” he says. “We must take advantage of the talent in this room to realize the full potential of the Commonwealth in the 21st century.”

Such talent is increasingly coming in the form of entrepreneurship. According to Virginia’s Secretary of Technology George Newstrom, 50 percent of technology jobs in the state are being created by small businesses. Of those, a “disproportionate number” are emanating from the Indian community, Newstrom says. In part that’s because of ease with English, but also because of a demanding educational system that fosters intense competition between India’s best and brightest. The country is also growing its own internal software industry and software specialists, in cities like Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Pune. Overall market value is set currently at $1 billion but is projected to increase to as much as $10 billion by the end of the decade.

In particular, the Indian Institute of Technology, or IIT, has produced a number of prominent technologists. Those from IIT and other notable schools who emigrate to the United States, like IMC’s Shenoy, have a special comradeship because of their intelligence, language skills and comfort with a wide range of cultural and ethnic diversity. And because they are highly motivated, immigrants are more likely to see and pursue ventures where others may not. “People in this room grew up elsewhere,” says Devinder Bawa, the CEO of Hemodyne Inc., a Richmond-based biotech startup, as he networked with those attending the Warner reception. “They already have a global perspective. That helps enormously in identifying, navigating and understanding markets and the ability to exploit commercial possibilities. If your mindset extends beyond local borders, you have an inherent advantage in business.”

Many foreign nationals working in Virginia also studied here. According to a survey sponsored by the Institute of International Education, the number of international students studying in the states increased by more than 6 percent in 2001 to 547,867, the largest one-year enrollment jump recorded by the Institute since 1980. Since 1955, the number of international students in the United States has grown each year, with flat growth noted only twice, in the mid-1980s and mid-1990s.

In Virginia, foreign nationals who want technology employment are likely to find it, particularly if they’re looking in the computer-services field. According to the Information Technology Association of America, while 500,000 IT jobs nationally have been lost, more than 1 million will be created through spring of 2003. Demand for those with special skills, like IMC’s Dilpreet Singh, remains high. According to Harris Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of America, immigration has been an essential factor in the growth of America’s information-technology sector. “Andy Grove, co-founder of Intel, is an immigrant,” he says. “With immigration, you get the crème de la crème. While the percentage of workers is relatively low, their impact is disproportionately high.”

Even so, Virginia educators worry that so many foreign students are filling their classrooms, especially in graduate-level engineering and technology schools. So concerned are Virginia Tech officials that they have taken steps to lure more American students by adding extra stipends and allowing them to work at private-sector jobs while studying.

The problem is that American-born students seem less willing than their foreign-born counterparts to spend more classroom time acquiring advanced degrees or training that can provide them a leg up in the marketplace, says John Heyl, executive director of the Office of International Programs at Old Dominion University in Norfolk. The cost of government-supported education in other countries is relatively modest, Heyl says, so foreign students are able to get inexpensive undergraduate degrees at home and then invest their monies in graduate studies at American colleges and universities. “American citizens aren’t flocking to these [complex technological] fields and getting masters and Ph.D.s,” Heyl points out. “They’re difficult fields and require the kind of mastery Americans usually aren’t all that patient with. Plus American students are saddled with debt once they finish their undergraduate degrees. It’s much easier to take a job and pay off college debts.”

Malcolm McPherson is an immigrant from Scotland and interim dean of engineering at Virginia Tech. McPherson says that in the last several years American students have opted for fatter paychecks just out of the undergraduate gate. The Internet bubble collapse is bringing a bit more sanity to the process, but the domestic-student pipeline remains emptier than Tech and its fellow state universities would like. “American citizens aren’t being frozen out of graduate programs. It’s the exact opposite,” McPherson says. “Recruitment of domestic students is a constant topic of discussion and activity. With the economy having gone down over the last several years, that should relieve the problem somewhat.”

One high-tech sector where foreign students may find themselves unwelcome involves Virginia’s thriving defense industry. For example, some 12 Virginia colleges are involved with defense research at the Virginia Advanced Shipbuilding and Carrier Integration Center in Newport News, but foreign students can’t participate because of security concerns of the U.S. Department of Defense. Such restrictions could be a major hindrance for foreign students and visa-holders since Virginia’s defense sector is one of the few undergoing a major expansion.

On a personal level, however, aftershocks from 9-11 seem to have been relatively few for Singh and Abhijeet Shinde, his roommate who works for IBM. They say they have had few problems. They haven’t been harassed or intimidated nor have they experienced discrimination — even if Singh was a little apprehensive soon after arriving in the states. “I took a big risk coming here. It was after September 11. A recession was beginning,” he says. “[At first] I thought twice before talking. I thought people might not understand [my accent]. Or maybe they’d be a bit frightened by how I look. But that hasn’t happened.”

Will Singh try to extend his visa after it expires? At the moment, he is undecided, but seems to favor returning home. “In India, people are more traditional, in terms of the family,” he says. “I’d want my kids to know traditional Indian life. I’m not sure I’d want to raise a family here.”

Meanwhile, if the drumbeat for measures against foreigners and immigrants on Capitol Hill and elsewhere continues, Virginia could face a talent crunch. Without immigration, high-tech or otherwise, the state could damage its own future fortunes. With or without political pressures produced by last year’s terrorist attacks, globalization will proceed and professional mobility will become more, rather than less, important. The challenge for government is to establish reasonable levels of security so the Virginia economy can find the workers it needs.

Return to Virginia Business - September 2002