Hightower Lowdown

Leave it to the barons of high tech in Silicon Valley to promise us economic prosperity and then deliver class warfare. High tech is the future for the middle class, they say. Forget manufacturing jobs! Get wired instead with an infor- mation-age job as a pro- grammer, software design- er, or engineer. The indus- try claims it will need 140,000 new high-tech workers a year for the next decade.

Here's where they sneak in the class warfare: It won't be Americans who are getting all these won- derful new jobs. Thanks to a little wage-busting loop- hole called " H IB Visas, - corporations can simply declare that no qualified Americans can be found and fill them instead with foreign workers. Russia, India, and other nations abound in skilled computer workers who'll gladly take the jobs for a third to a half less than the going salary in the U.S. The billionaire computer CEOs saw this excess of educated foreign workers as a great way to bust the salary level for their employees, so they began declaring that Americans weren't up to snuff and bringing in HI B workers from abroad.

There was a limit of 65,000 HI Bs per year, but no problem. Campaign cash flowed, lobbyists were hired, and-viola!-the visa level was raised to allow 11 5,000 per year. Now, they're pushing for 200,000 a year-60,000 more than there are high- tech jobs for!