Posted on 04/01/2008 4:44:27 PM PDT by shrinkermd
...ated in 1990, H1-B visas allow companies to sponsor highly educated foreigners -- architects, doctors, engineers, scientists among them -- to work in the United States for at least three years. The H1-B program, which accounts for nearly all skilled immigrants admitted to work here each year, is capped annually at 65,000 for people with a bachelor's degree or higher, plus an additional 20,000 for those with a master's degree or higher.
Skilled immigrants have long contributed to rising U.S. standards of living. They bring human capital, brimming with ideas for new technologies and new companies. They bring financial capital as well, with savings and resources to develop these new ideas. And they often bring connections to business opportunities abroad, stimulating exports and affiliate sales for multinational companies.
One of the most innovative and productive sectors of the U.S. economy, which accounts for more than half of the economy-wide productivity acceleration since 1995, is information technology. At the end of the 1990s, 24% of all IT firms in Silicon Valley had been founded by immigrants from China or India.
Is this enough supply to meet market demand? Not even close. Last year, by the afternoon of the first day petitions were accepted, more than 150,000 had been filed. So USCIS rejected all petitions received after close of business the next day, and then allocated the 85,000 visas via random lottery. USCIS is forecasting a similar crush today for 2009 petitions
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Yeah, that’s the ticket! Strictly limit H1B applicants with university degrees but turn a blind eye to the tens of thousands without education who walk across the border undocumented.
Typical incompetent logician.
He compares the British “Highly Skilled Immigrant” program which gives visas to top talent from business schools, to the H1B visa program which includes merely BA/BS recipients.
When I stop seeing American companies laying off 40+ year old engineers and computer scientists in favor of foreign or younger workers, then I’ll be in favor of opening up the H1B visa program.
The entire article neatly refuted in ONE sentence.
Consider yourself highly commendedTM, sir!
Cheers!
Overall this may be the case and we should NEVER EVER reject brilliant minds.
However, right now the job market is deteriorating. So as long as people are willing to relocate (NOT an easy thing to do) many of the jobs can be filled.
It is foolish to be for FREE TRADE and then reject HIGHLY SKILLED work force. You are simply trading away resources to places where highly skilled workforce can be assembled.
GOP needs to get its act together.
The H1B Program is nothing more than the Congressional Fat Cats playing up to Big Business. The tired argument that the US doesn’t produce enough engineers, IT professionals, etc. is put forth so that Big Business can keep salaries low. There are a lot of Americans who graduate from quality engineering schools with degrees, but can’t find work because some H1B has undercut them.
And as job shops go, they have a pretty monotone supply, with one basic aim....drive down the cost of churning out boilerplate code. The kind that really doesn't take a lot of creativity, but does require some knowledge.
The kind that plenty of yeoman developers of the pale persuasion in Silicon Valley used to do, before they were laid off and ended up managing storage units (hint: real person behind that line, not myself. Vietnam vet, to boot).
BTW...wonder what Mr. Slaughter will say the day the Journal decides to dump him for someone from Bombay?
Maybe he can get a job writing the biz page for the Fargo Times.
Go ahead and call us xenophobes. Who gives a rat's butt about name callers, anyway.
This program could be fixed with two simple tweaks:
1. Instead of letting in the first 65,000 applicants, let in the 65,000 with the highest salaries. You need ‘highly skilled’ guys - you got ‘em.
2. After three months, they would be free to quit their sponsor and take another job. But they would never do that - the sponsor is paying the market rate, right?
I’d go for that.
I’d also like to see these visas restricted to those with Masters or PhD degrees in the sciences; not finance, not history, or whatever.
What YOU said!!
I'm not opposed to LEGAL immigrants, but when businesses use them to displace equally or better qualified American workers, then there's a problem!!
Thanks !
My further point - sentence two - when did companies start believing that training their own was bad and hiring only those already trained by others was good ? When defining a job meant defining it in such specific terms that it is seemingly tailored for only one or two specific persons ?
That’s not the attitude that made companies great. Bell Labs, for one, always had a policy that its employees attended school - physics, math, engineering, chemistry - all year long as a condition of employment, paid for by the Labs. I know highly skilled scientists who have multiple degrees because of this, who would be an asset to any company. Instead, they were laid off and not hired by other companies, primarily because they were not as cheap or as young as could be had thru the H1B program.
Been there, done that, got the T-shirt to prove it.
Oh, I would say that
Xenophobes are breaking into our sovreign country all the time...
There’s about 35,000,000 of them now...
They are all illegal aliens...
They are also anti-immigration...
And most of them hate American citizens and murder, abuse and bully American citizens...
They make demands for bennies that American citizens cannot get...
And they demand H1B visas and more...
And they steal good jobs from Americans, with or without the HiB visas...
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
I wouldn’t say that...
Short term cost savings. The only question is whether or not the companies will come to their senses before the entrepreneurs in China and India, to whom we have given all our trade secrets, will become competitors to the short-term, MBA-driven companies here and successfully eliminate them, completing the destruction of the US economy.
OR it could be that the US companies want to undermine the US middle class, having sucked all the cash out of them that can be managed: and the companies are trying to foster a replacement middle class in the "developing" (and younger!) countries, in order to replace the aging baby boomers as key consumers.
I have written several vanities on this; FReepmail me if you want more info.
Full Disclosure: I am sick of hearing about "Americans who can't do science and engineering" myself, as I have an earned doctorate in molecular physics.
Cheers!
Remember, Americans are unqualified -- but they are still required to train in their Third-World replacements in order to be given a meager severance package.
Cheers!
proxy - outstanding response - I live near Microsoft HQ in Redmond - half the tenants in my apt house are H1b’s - nice guys, all of them - but, they are NOT the world’s intellectual elite - they are virtually all Indian, all male, all under 30, and all single - they don’t compete against senior, top grade code writers - they compete against 25 year old recent grads from UWashington - in my opinion, part of the graduation ceremony from UW’s school of Computer Science should be a class walk-through of my apartment house - proxy, once again, great idea!
Yeah.....but can they speak Hindi?
Perhaps we should begin importing foreign help to do the work Jorge Bush and the chair-moisteners in congress are too lazy to do.
And ditto with lawyers and journalists.
Been there, done that, got the T-shirt!!
More knowledgeable, educated, motivated, immigrants.
(Way) fewer ignorant, low skilled, immigrants who only want access to the gravy train.
It's not 'immigration', it's 'which immigration'.
(PS - if a US college educated engineer is forced to compete with an Indian or Taiwanese engineer (likely, at least in part, educated in the USA) - so be it.)
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