Like many businesses and economists, Clinton says that the United States benefits by admitting high-tech workers from abroad. She backs proposals to increase the number of temporary visas for skilled foreigners.
The Tata deal shows the difficulty of proving concrete benefits to U.S. workers from the visa system. Since 2003, the year its Buffalo office opened, Tata and its affiliates have sought permission to bring more than 1,600 foreign high-tech workers to the state, including at least 495 to the upstate region and 45 to Buffalo, according to government data. Tata has brought additional workers into the country under a second visa program whose numbers have not been disclosed.
Some U.S. worker organizations say Clinton cannot claim to support American workers if she is also helping Indian outsourcing companies and proposing more worker visas.
"It's just two-faced," said John Miano, founder of the Programmers Guild, one of several high-tech worker organizations that have sprung up as outsourcing has expanded. "We see her undermining U.S. workers and helping the offshoring business, and then she comes back to the U.S. and says, 'I'm concerned about your pain.' "
Among Indian American activists, Clinton's work with Tata has been seen as a sign of her independence from outsourcing skeptics within her party -- and a break from the Democrats' 2004 presidential nominee, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, who lambasted "Benedict Arnold CEOs" for shipping jobs overseas.
The main lobbying organization for the Indian-American community, USINPAC, cites the Tata deal as one of Clinton's top three achievements as a senator -- and evidence of a turnabout, in its view, from her past criticism of outsourcing. "Even though she was against outsourcing at the beginning of her political career," the USINPAC website says, "she has since changed her position and now maintains that offshoring brings as much economic value to the United States as to the country where services are outsourced, especially India."
Clinton regularly reinforces that view. When CNN anchorman Lou Dobbs, an outsourcing critic, pressed her on the Tata deal in 2004, Clinton responded: "Well, of course I know that they outsource jobs, that they've actually brought jobs to Buffalo. They've created 10 jobs in Buffalo and have told me and the Buffalo community that they intend to be a source of new jobs in the area, because, you know, outsourcing does work both ways."
