What most people don't realize is that as Mexicans are to low-paying jobs, Indians are to our engineering and programming jobs. They are NOT more qualified. The "college" they graduate from in India is a technical institute and many programmers don't have any experience in the languages they profess to know.
What's true is that apparently companies are too cheap to call India to verify education and any possible experience, and turn down OUR college grads without experience, and hire the Indians. Why? Because they are so eager to get a job here, they will work 50-60-70-hours a week without any overtime pay. They are in essence, indentured servants.
In Silicon Valley in CA, they live 3-4-5 in small apts. and all they do is work. While some may commend their work ethic, I do not.
I was forced out as an engineer because they could hire two of them for my salary, and in addition, get all of that free overtime. They pose as much a threat to programmers as they do to engineers. Do you know that in America, a programmers career is over at 35, and an engineer's at 40? Why? Because at that point, they can be replaced by a cheaper foreeign worker, usually an Indian and the American is usually forced to train his replacement before being let go.
And many of these Indians have been found to be working on classified projects without having the necessary clearances (a company in Texas comes to mind) as well as on Military reservations.
Prof. Norml Matloff has testified before Congress and maintains an email list of those interested (and many who have been displaced) in how these H1-B's are taking Americans jobs, here at home, nevermind overseas!
Every time I saw a new Indian restaurant in No. VA, I wanted to puke. It meant that that many more of them were here, to support yet another dang restaurant.
Congress consistently gave away American jobs here at home by passing a bill with an amendment to it that upped the number allowed in, in a year. It started out at 60,000 and rose to 170,000 a year (a number that was often reached within months of the rollover of the year) before American programmers and engineers, thanks to Prof. Matloff, finally figured out what was costing them their jobs and their careers, and started lobbying Congress to quit it.
Former Sec. of Energy, Abraham, from Michigan, lost his Senate seat because of his terrible record on H1-B's, a fact that helped the Dems get the Senate away from the Repubs. In fact, it's a joke to us that Bush gave Abraham the job as energy secretary as a sop for losing his job on an immigration issue. To me, it shows me that the President's compassionate heart just goes too far in wanting people to have OUR jobs - whether it's Indians/Asians at the top of the food chain, or Mexicans, at the other end.
Why should any President of the US want to provide jobs for foreigners at the expense of Americans? I'll never understand Dubya and his stance on both illegals and legal immigration. I think it's a policy failure on his part. He's just blind to what it costs us "regular" folks out here.
WTF??
Well, my experience with Indian immigrants is that though they're hard worker, they really have no life whatsoever. They don't understand that by 7 pm, most people have left the office :) We had to deal with a few from THE major communication company from San Jose (you know the one) and the entire engineering staffs are Indians. Those guys would expect me to reply back to them during weekends.
I don't think it's all that productive. Working 70 hours a week, your productivity goes down, way down, because you're too tired to think clearly. I work for a startup company (well, *used* to be a startup company, now it's not in startup mode) and did just that for a few months during hte initial years and it sucked.
"The "college" they graduate from in India is a technical institute and many programmers don't have any experience in the languages they profess to know."
I think US universities have a preference to them becaue they "speak English". Nearly most of them are useless in the lab in terms of hardware problems (i.e. they keep thinking it's software, and it's software... and never outside of that realm). It's hard trying to convince them to look outside of the box.
Funny, I'm 56 and still employed as an Engineer. I was even doing some fairly heavy technical work until about 18 months ago, when I got transferred to a less technical, but still engineering, position.