Like many other MSU students, finance senior Varun Jain hopes to play his cards in the U.S. job market when he graduates in May 2005.
But unlike the majority of students in his graduating class, his home is halfway across the world.
Jain, who came from India to attend college, says his international student status makes him more vulnerable in the already-shrinking U.S. job market.
"International students should know it's a really hard world out there," he said. "You'd better start early."
The India native said he started to search for a job last summer, a year before his expected graduation date.
Another international student, Junwei Zhou, an electrical engineering graduate student, will get his degree in May and also hopes to work in the United States before going back to his home country of China.
Citing immigration regulations as the biggest hurdle, Zhou said he did not know of many international students who have succeeded in landing jobs in the United States.
"Even though you have the same skills, companies are more likely to hire domestic students," Zhou said.
Jain and Zhou are among the international students who say skills and abilities are secondary issues in finding jobs within the United States.
"(Employers) think there's too much hassle, too much paperwork and legalities involved," Jain said, adding employers won't even hire international students for internships because they are looking for people whom they can hire back for permanent positions more easily.
He said there's nothing more he can do beside keeping his fingers crossed and hoping to get lucky.
Harsh reality
The law prohibits international students from working off campus with student visas. To be legally eligible to work in the United States, they have to switch their student visas to work visas.
Each year, the U.S. government issues 65,000 work visas, or H1B visas, that expire every three years. The government starts to approve the visa applications on Oct. 1, when the fiscal years begins.
As of Oct. 7, all of the visas were issued, meaning it took less than a week for the quota set by the U.S. Congress to be exhausted.
Peter Briggs, director for the Office for International Students and Scholars said the clog began in 2003, when a four-year special provision that set the quota at 195,000 expired.
As a result, Briggs said that the quota was reached in four or five months last year, which had a domino effect on this year's process. He added that the fast exhaustion of the quota this year was caused by the high turnout of both new and returning visa applicants from last year.
International students can have a year of Optional Practical Training, or OPT, after they graduate. During that period, they can work legally in the United States - in the field of their majors - without applying for new visas.
Briggs said that OPT has been a valuable tool for international students, because it gives U.S. employers time to evaluate the students' work and decide to sponsor them and get H1B visas.
It's not the case anymore, he said.
"Before, you could say 'If you like my work, we can work together,'" he said. "Now, you can't say that. It's really OPT about one year and you are really done.
"When you talk to an employer, what can you really say? What you can really say is that you can work here for one year on OPT, and that's it. You can't say more than that. It makes international students very vulnerable."
If students don't get work visas before the one-year OPT period is up, the students can do nothing but leave the country, he said.
Some experts in the field say there has been a tendency in employers to rule out hiring international students.
"Employers oftentimes will not want to hire someone from another country because of the expense involved in getting them work status," East Lansing immigration lawyer Daniel Learned said. "Another thing that makes them hesitate to hire them is they don't know anything about immigration, and their lawyers don't know anything about immigration, because it's a highly-specialized field. A lot of employers don't even talk to them."
Once an employer decides to hire an international student, the employer files a work visa petition on behalf of the student, and the employment can't begin until the petition is approved. The process could take up to three or four months.
Unless international students are far superior to their American counterparts, there is no reason for employers to bother going through the visa process to hire them, said Suezi Jung, international recruiting coordinator for Next Step Resources, a recruiting firm in Columbus, Ohio.
Briggs said especially when the economy is weak, as it is now, chances for international students to find employers who want them are even slimmer.
Foreign labor force: Something to bless or blame?
The presence of international workers in the United States often comes under fire, particularly when many Americans remain unemployed.
Reflecting this sentiment, Tom Tancredo, a Republican congressman from the 6th District of Colorado, proposed a bill to eliminate H1B visas last year.
"Essentially, the logic behind it was 9 million Americans are unemployed now," Tancredo's press secretary Carlos Espinosa said. "The last thing we should do now is to import workers. Until we figure out where the economy is going, we shouldn't import workers."
The bill is getting substantial support throughout the nation, he said.
However, some people don't agree with the logic.
"In a political year, there sometimes can be misconception that foreign workers take jobs from Americans. It can be very charged and very emotional," Briggs said.
MSU economics Professor Thomas DeLeire said foreign workers' demands for jobs can create more jobs, citing the information technology industry as an example.
"I think if we take a broader picture of the impact of foreign workers in the U.S., they create more opportunities as a whole," he said.
Briggs said the special provision to lift the work visa quota was a result of the need for qualified high-tech workers in the IT industry. He added that the recent downturn of the industry could be attributed to the lack of qualified workers, as competent international students, especially those from India and China - that the industry has traditionally relied on - keep going back to their countries.
"You need a talent pool in order to compete for these good jobs," Briggs said. "If you can't find enough Americans, you have to hire foreign workers."
He said if a business community is short of the qualified labor force it demands, it can result in limiting the economy.
Espinosa said, however, this argument implies there are not enough qualified American workers, which he said is not true.
He said he doesn't see foreign workers as the cause of the boom the IT industry enjoyed. Instead, the booming itself should be accountable for the higher demand for foreign workers, he said.
Espinosa said as the IT industry rapidly grew, there was a shortage of workers, which made it necessary at that time to import workers.
"It worked fine during the booming," Espinosa said. "We should eliminate the visas until it's necessary again."
However, the high-tech industry is not the only sector that relies on the foreign labor force. To some people, a typical picture of foreign workers in the United States includes gruesome work that Americans don't usually want.
English freshman Lindsay Carlson said she doesn't think foreign workers are taking away American jobs because many of them are working at places like factories, where not many Americans want to work.
MSU graduate student Alexandra Castillo, who came from Peru to study psychology, worked at a ski resort on H1B visa for two winters to save money for school.
She said she was hired and her employer sponsored her to get the work visa because she worked diligently and did work that kept many Americans away.
To some people, competition is the key.
"If they are lowering benefits like salaries for foreign workers, then it's taking away American jobs, but if everything is equal and they are the best for the job, it's not a problem," history junior Robert Gretch said.
According to the visa regulation, employers sponsoring foreign workers should pay them the same wages as American workers.
"Competition is good," Briggs said. "Competition makes everybody be better. If you have a talent pool competing for jobs, that makes everybody be better, and economy be better."
Double-edged sword
As a way to break the impasse, career experts advise international students to look beyond borders.
Kelly Bishop, director of the Career Services & Placement, said if international students don't find jobs in the United States, they should look for companies that operate in both their home countries and the United States.
"Even though you initially work for companies back home, you may come back to the United States because of your language and cultural ability," he said.
In reality, however, even though there are many openings for bilinguals, employers hire U.S. citizens who speak both languages perfectly, a quality an average international student is hardly likely to have, said Jung, the Next Step Resources recruiting coordinator.
Some international students say there is no niche for them in their home countries.
Claudia Alvarez, a visiting scholar from Columbia, said she would like to return to the United States after her one-month program in psychology is over. She hopes to continue to research and work in the United States, she added.
"Practically, there's no research in Columbia," Alvarez said. "It'll be harder in my home country. I already know the difficulties we'll have in finding money and resources for research."
