I don't have any problem with expanding it, as long as it cannot be used as a labor-abuse as it is now by employers.
Our Marxist education system is churning out the proletariat for the immigration marches, through the "social science" programs, while hard science is getting short shrift from high school all the way up.
Our corporations will have no choice but to export our technology to subsidiaries overseas if we cannot boost how many scientists they can hire here.
But, I want to retain the scientists they hire, as citizens with a permanent stake here, and retain the children of those scientists and begin to restore our production of new scientists and engineers.
I don't want an H1B visa program through which Intel brings in a person from India for three years, to become expert on a totally new branch of their technology, who Intel then returns to India to lead Intel's export of the production of that technology back to us from India. That is how the high-tech firms are using the H1B now.
The H1B program is their "feed stock" program, by which they provide the human resources component of the means to exporting the production of their technology overseas.
The idea that it is competition that requires this is totally false. In many areas, American high tech firms only have American competitors. The "competition" claim is no more than an excuse for them all to do it. If none of them were doing it, they still would not be losing sales to "foreign competition"; and Indians and Chinese would not be building hi-tech firms after "graduating" from their H1B work for U.S. firms.
No. We need immigrants in the skills that the H1B was designed for. But we need the H1B process to encourage citizenship and retention of those individuals, not re-exporting them along with the skill-value-added in their experience here.
The latest and newest Intel chip production facility is planned for construction were??............................
...........................................................?
Communist Vietnam, not the U.S.
You're making an assumption, though--that people who want to come here on H-1B visas *want* to become American citizens. I imagine some do, but many (most?) don't.
I'm actually surprised this came back up again. With offshoring being the Next Big Thing, and with the communication infrastructure being what it is worldwide nowadays, Prakesh and Shilpa can do much of the work from Bangalore and Hyderabad. You don't always need to go through the immense expense and pain of the paperwork jungle to get them the visa and bring them Stateside anymore. And for the roles that DO have to have a warm body sitting in a chair in the US, I'd rather see that chair filled with somebody who was already here and looking for the job, if they can do it.
The problem is that the H-1B is solid in theory--the supposed safeguards that a job "has" to be offered to Americans first and that it has to pay the same regardless of who's filling it. But we both know that's not how reality works. Companies collude with the body shops to write the job requirements in precise, sneaky ways so that ONLY the chosen visaholder can fill it--I used to read my old employer's H-1B postings and marvel at the esoteric, precise skillsets they required when I knew damn good and well that half those skills wouldn't be needed. They were there to keep out-of-work local programmers in South Carolina from getting the job. Then they'd set the job position three pay grades lower than anybody else in the company, so (for example) a SQL programmer that would've logically been a pay grade 14 "lead" position (as mine was on the mainframe side) was advertised as a grade 11 "junior" position that paid $25k less.
Your idea works if you're wanting to attract the best and the brightest from overseas *if* they actually do want to stay here, contribute, and assimilate. But I can't see business interests ever giving up that bondservant feel to the H-1B. And meanwhile, there's a growing pool of domestic homegrown IT and engineering talent that's working at Home Depot because Ashok is either sitting at their desk or doing their job from twelve timezones away.
}:-)4