A Homeward Glance For Students

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The shortage of skilled technical workers in the electronics industries may be exacerbated by a law wending its way through Congress. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1982, introduced by Rep. Romano L. Mazzoli (D-Ky.) and Sen. Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.), would require all foreign graduates of U.S. universities to return home for two years before working in this country. The provision is intended to discourage aliens from attending U.S. schools as a way to obtain legal residency in this country.

The American Electronics Association, however, says the new law will make electronics companies less able to fill vacancies in their booming industry. Small companies will be hit the hardest, an AEA spokesperson notes, because the salaries they pay usually can't compete with those offered by larger companies.

Stuart Mabon, president of Micropolis Corp., a Chatsworth, Calif., manufacturer of computer disk drives with 450 employees, maintains that aerospace and defense companies avidly seek American technical workers since certain government contracts require employees to have U.S. citizenship. Consequently, says Mabon, "Independent companies must hire from the [remaining] manpower pool, which contains many foreign students." Without those foreign candidates, he says, "we would be seriously handicapped."

Several electronics companies, including NCR, Xerox, and Digital Equipment, have joined a new lobbying group called Alliance for Immigration Reform to try to influence the immigration legislation. The group has already proposed an amendment that would exempt from the go-home rule those students "possessing skills in short supply in the United States."

According to Ben Jarratt Brown, executive director of the organization, the group supports most of the goals of the bill. Aside from the provision concerning students, the act grants legal standing to aliens who entered the country before 1980, establishes new annual immigration standards and quotas, and creates civil or criminal sanctions against employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants.