The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [179]
Of course, not all Chinese moguls of the information age made their wealth through dotcom firms. Some, like Morris Chang, earned their fortunes by enabling high-tech companies to outsource their manufacturing to Taiwan. Revered as the “godfather of high technology” in Taiwan, Chang, an electrical engineer educated at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford, pioneered the integrated circuit foundry industry as the founder and chairman of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC). Recognizing that fabricating chips required enormous startup capital (a semiconductor factory could cost literally billions of dollars), Chang’s company, largely funded by the government of the Republic of China in Taiwan, permitted small American chip companies to contract their fabrication work in Taiwan. Taiwan Semiconductor provided independent chip designers, who could not compete on their own against giants like Intel, Motorola, and NEC, access to affordable manufacturing services, freeing them to focus on creative design work. Thus Chang’s insight accelerated the pace of computer innovation worldwide. Thousands of entrepreneurs were now able to compete by offering their own innovations, instead of leaving the industry’s development to just a
Any gold rush has a few celebrity winners and many exhausted losers. Some Chinese immigrants found themselves in a quandary when Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1990, introducing the H1-B visa program for highly educated and skilled immigrant workers, but restricting the time such visa holders could work in the United States to a maximum of six years. The act abruptly reversed previous immigration policy, which had eagerly welcomed foreign immigrants with advanced education or professional occupations. After 1965, the government had imposed virtually no limits on the admission of Chinese foreign nationals with specialized training. In 1989, the foreign Chinese students who happened to be in the United States during the Tiananmen Square massacre were allowed to obtain green cards immediately. But for those who came after the 1990 act, it was a different story.
High-tech employers viewed the H1-B program as an attractive solution to their labor needs because it gave them a fresh crop of minds to exploit every six years. The policy was perceived as giving domestic industry the opportunity to harness the brainpower of foreign immigrants, but without granting these contributors the full rights and privileges of American citizenship. At first, Congress capped the program at 65,000 visas per year, but the 1990s high-tech boom created a massive shortage of computer programmers, engineers, and systems analysts, which companies hoped to rectify by recruiting from abroad. After intense lobbying from corporations like Microsoft, the U.S. government raised the cap on H1-B visas to 115,000 in 1998, then to 195,000 two years later. India provided the greatest number of skilled foreign workers in the program, followed by the People’s Republic of China.56
Critics soon denounced the H1-B visa program as “white-collar indentured servitude.” Middlemen recruiters took as much as half the salary of the workers they procured for companies, and visa holders were beholden to their employers, whom they needed as sponsors for permanent