Posted on 09/22/2003 12:14:29 PM PDT by AntiGuv
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States is about to cut the number of employment visas it offers to highly qualified foreign workers from 195,000 to 65,000, immigration experts said on Monday.
Unless Congress acts by the end of this month -- and there is little sign it will do so -- the change will automatically take effect on Oct. 1. Employers, especially technology companies, argue the move will hurt them and the economy.
The change will affect the number of H1-B visas that can be issued each fiscal year. The visas are mostly used to bring high-tech experts from Asia, especially from the Indian sub-continent, to work in the United States for up to three years.
"The fact that Congress doesn't seem anxious to act reflects the political climate, with a lack of jobs for Americans," said New York immigration lawyer Cyrus Mehta.
"The pressure to change the limit will build up again when the economy picks up."
The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the issue last week. Republican chairman Orrin Hatch of Utah noted that many U.S. high-tech workers are unemployed and the committee needed to find ways of helping them without hurting the country's ability to compete globally.
Vermont Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy said: "Given the weakness of our current economy, and the rising unemployment we have experienced under President Bush's stewardship, many who supported the increase in 2000 now believe that 65,000 visas are sufficient."
But Patrick Duffy, Human Resources Attorney for Intel Corporation, said finding the best-educated engineering talent from around the world was critical to his company's future.
"We expect that we will continue to sponsor H-1B employees in the future for the simple reason that we cannot find enough U.S. workers with the advanced education, skills, and expertise we need," he said.
Elizabeth Dickson, director of immigration services for the Ingersoll-Rand Company, speaking on behalf of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said: "In the near-term, we simply must have access to foreign nationals. Many of them have been educated in the United States. By sending them home, we are at best sending them to our own foreign plant sites, and at worst to our competitors."
Immigration attorneys expect the new rules to set off a scramble by companies to fill their slots early before the ceiling is reached. How quickly that happens depends on the state of the economy, they said.
Sincerely, Yoda
Well I'll be. You finally said something that makes some sense.
Everything except having a problem with everything.
I think you're using the phrase "prevailing wage" loosely. If the "prevailing wage" is less than anyone will work for, how did that wage come to "prevail" in the first place?
When we look at how you are using the phrase, we see that we are going in circles, and we are back to the assertion: "Importing H1B workers is a way to suppress wages in the US."
Here's the doom & gloom perspective - just another reason for bastard multinational corporations to outsource jobs overseas. Sorry, just another day in the neighborhood. Nothing to see here, please move along.
It's a start. Additional measures I would like to see:
I'm all for it. Devalue the dollar and let 'em choke on shipping costs.
I am a software guru for a small company (less then 250 people) and in my experience the foreign workers (at other companies) whether they be H1B visa holders or whatever is that they are not paticularly creative or innovative, and are often difficult to communicate with/to, and posess a narrow range of skills.
Of course this can be said about the majority of American born programmers who's jobs they took.
Having not only survived this latest high tech downturn with my job intact, but also having increased my salary every year I have developed a three simple guidelines:
1. Provide value for you company by providing a wide variety of skills. I am the Senior Software Engineer, Project Lead, DBA, Web Admin, E-Mail Admin and general all around technical guru for the company I work for.
2. Find out which of your skills is of the greatest value to your company needs and empasize those skills. In my case my company needs software fas so we use languages and methodologies that allow us to deliver products faster then any of our competition, though they have more resources (programmers) to throw at a paticular program.
3. And this one is the most important. Never work for a large company. Large companies treat people like dirt. Nameless faceless VP hand out pink slips without ever knowing shit about the people they are laying off or their role in the company. When I negotiate a raise or a bonus I go right in the President/Owners offices and hammer it out with him face to face. I know him as a person. I would never work any other way. If I couldn't work at a small company I would quit and work for myself.
I need to do some research on the rise, fall, and rebirth of slave societies. There's probably a point in every civilization wherein even the serfs become too expensive to maintain and life becomes so cheap that those with the gold cast their eyes about for easy-to-defeat enemies of the state or comparative savages and figure, "What the hey! Why incure ongoing costs when you can get free help with a one time cost upfront?" And another empire suddenly gets bankrolled.
Give 'em hell, johnb!
Hey, let them eat cake.
I don't know about that H1B, but Ford buses and vans work real well....Oh never mind, different program.
Sure it is, greed has nothing to do with it.
I was on another thread recently, and there was a discussion in which an employer asserted that American workers are just spoiled. He justfied this by pointing out the difficulty he was having finding and keeping $8/hr workers at his business.
It occured to me later that if the boss in question had actually owned the employees, he probably wouldn't be able to keep them for that price. It certainly costs much more than that to keep a prisoner, which is approximately what you would have to do keep a slave.
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