Silicon Valley Under Fire for Weak Minority Recruitment Efforts

When Jeffrey Forbes, a native of New Jersey, chose to attend Stanford
University and later the University of
California-Berkeley in computer
science, he believed their close proximity to Silicon
Valley would help enhance his educational experience.
"There's great technology being developed by the companies out there," says Forbes, who recently began teaching computer science at Duke University in Durham, N.C.
Even though working in Silicon Valley did not rate as high on his priority list as preparing to teach computer science as a future professor, Forbes noticed that Silicon Valley firms were not making special efforts to recruit him and fellow African American students into their companies.
"I think a lot of Silicon Valley companies would be happy to have African Americans working for them. But I don't think it's a priority for them," Forbes says.
The perception that Silicon Valley, the northern California region said to be the most influential center of computer and information technology development in the world, is indifferent to recruiting and hiring U.S.-born Blacks and Hispanics has become a national issue in recent years. The issue has become visible largely because of the H-1B temporary work visa program that has allowed nearly 300,000 foreign nationals to migrate to the United States to work in high-tech jobs since 1992.
Although the major clusters of computer and information technology jobs are spread around the country, Silicon Valley businesses have come under considerable fire because its business leaders have been the most visible in pushing for expansions in the H-1B program. In 1998, the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper found that in a study of 33 leading Silicon Valley firms employing 146,000 workers, only 4 percent of the employees were Black and 7 percent were Hispanic. In the San Francisco Bay area, Blacks and Hispanics make up 8 percent and 14 percent of the work force respectively, according to the study.
The work-force disparities in Silicon Valley with regard to Black and Latino underrepresentation have spurred civil rights and labor groups into action. They have charged that the H-1B program is giving jobs to lower-paid foreign nationals that American workers could fill, and that the program is rife with fraud.
"While leading the world in cutting-edge innovations, Silicon Valley does not yet represent the best of America when it comes to diversity," wrote the Rev. Jesse Jackson in an opinion article published by the San Jose Mercury News in 1999.
 Last year, a coalition of groups loudly protested federal legislation to expand the H-1B visa program. Despite the outcry, federal lawmakers expanded the H-1B program by 70 percent, increasing the availability of visas from 115,000 to 195,000 per year.