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I tried to hire under the "H" visa a few fellows from Scotland that had a vast experience in the forets products industry. All I got is a run around and told in short that there were a lot of people in this state that could fill the positions.
I now ask any of you here, do you think that you would hire people that have never held a chainsaw in their hands and put them to work in the woods and stand back and watch the blood fly or the arms and legs snap?..that is if they are lucky and dont kill themselves? The whole rotten immigration thing is a joke. I need EXPERIENCED timber fallers, and they say I should hire and train. Ya right! And then all the skunks, drunks and creeps come along and my WC insurance goes so friggan high I cant survive. I wonder why these friggan jerks in the DOL think that we in this industry are so rich we can just throw money away like that. It takes years to learn how to fall trees...much to everyones amazement.

That may be your experience. In the high tech, computer related, industry it is quite different. 100's of thousands of US citizen IT workers have been laid of in the last 2 years. Yes, > 100,000 in that industry. The big consulting firms have crashed. They are merging right and left and shedding workers like crazy. The software houses have been doing layoffs. Silicon valley has been trashed. The dotcoms are dead (not that they actually hired that many, really.) The corporate IT shops have done layoffs - and hardly anyone is hiring.
Big deal, you say. Well, those workers tended to be college educated, advance degrees, and higher income. When their jobs got cut - they either remain unemployeed, and thus not spending money, thus impacting everyone else from barbers to car salemen; or they are taking jobs in real estate, telemarketing (god forbid more evening phone calls), etc. - thus filling job holes for which they are overqualified and preventing other Americans from filling those same jobs. Its a real problem.