Posted on 07/05/2007 7:33:02 PM PDT by Babu
US software behemoth Microsoft Corp. said Thursday it would soon open an office in Canada, lamenting tough immigration rules in the United States that make it difficult to hire foreign staff.
"It is about recruiting the best and brightest, and right now, the majority are coming from overseas," Marc Seaman, a spokesman for the world's biggest software company, told The Globe and Mail newspaper.
"The United States has immigration quotas and some limitations for bringing in people from outside the country," he said. "That challenge is an opportunity for Canada, in the sense that this will bring the top software developers to Canada."
The development office, to be opened in Vancouver, a three-hour drive north from Microsoft's Redmond, Washington headquarters, will initially be staffed by some 300 recruits from around the world, the company said.
Eventually, it could grow to house as many as 1,000 employees.
Canada is currently the third-largest source of recruits for Microsoft outside the United States, after India and Japan.
You must be very proud of your son. However, don’t give up on the other two. My daughter played around with crappy jobs. Then one day, she announced she was serous about school, went back to school and earned her degree. Some kids take longer than others to ‘find’ themeselves.
The sad truth is that these students are subsidized by their government and can afford grad school more easily than an American can. If Gates was serious about the best and the brightest, he would offer scholarships to talanted American students-invest in this country. This is what disturbs me about the globalists, they are not concerned at all with this country. They sneer at America and her people while making billions in the American markets
Thanks to government sponsored school systems, Americans have been sufficiently, socially, dumbed down. They continue to spiral down also every day.
Well you better believe me. Not only four years in IT at MIT, but PhD, MS or BS students in Ivy Leagues or otherwise in all disciplines get in only through the H1B program. That’s the American system. My roomate, a PhD in electrical engineering got approved for his H1B this year. Incidentally, he’s making six figures.
The American system is heavily skewed towards family based immigration.
The Canadian system, on the other hand, allows for self petition, where a person does not need an employer to sponsor. The applicant is evaluated on skills, education, language, age, whether a person completed school in Canada etc. and based on all these, a green card is awarded (or rejected), usually within 6 months to 18 months. The need for an H1B is eliminated. A person could apply from anywhere in the world. I personally know of two foreign students in US universities who applied during their studies and are now permanent residents of Canada.
I guess Microsoft is hoping to tap into foreign graduates from Canadian and American universities who may have been given Canadian green cards. And they’ll do it without the attendant bureaucratic hassle of getting an H1B first. At least, they are right on one count - foreign students, no matter how talented, (or not, depending on your view)cannot be hired in the US at the moment - which to some Americans is a great thing.
And doing so will also have a dumbing down effect on the rest of the nation.
Not that it is important any longer, but boy, how quickly we forget...
As far as what you posted about the American people I have a great idea. Keep it to yourself and your friends and don't put it out here
Thank you once again. It is discussions such as these that are so enriching...
You seem to have become really bitter over the last year or so. Hope this is not a sign of any hardships in your life.
I disagree.
If Bill Gates was an example of a “globalist” who hated America, the EU wouldn’t have attacked Microsoft the way it did and Gates would have moved out after the trumped-up antitrust case against Microsoft in the US.
Gates is a businessman-— his duty is to his shareholders. When businessmen stop thinking of shareholders and start imagining that “stakeholders” supersede the former, they abuse their trust and their mission as surely as if doctor imagined that his patient’s interests were superseded by those of “stakeholders”.
It’s just not the case that foreign students are uniformly subsidized by their government is some way that U.S. students are not by our own. The fact is, just as in-state students get a better deal at our public universities and out-of-state students get a worse deal at our universities, out-of-country students get the very worst deal and constitute a great source of revenue for our universities. This only makes sense-— U.S. universities are far and away the best-— no country is even capable of mildly competing with us in that area, not Japan, not Germany, not the EU combined.
As a private citizen, Gates funds an insane amount of US students-— the Millennium Scholarship was funded by a billion dollar grant from his foundation, for instance.
I have a question, please: would you feel better if they closed up the shop and moved it to India? You would not have to face the change, but would this be better?
Probably not.
And yet, this is precisely what American business was doing for almost as long as America exists. Were the workers of oil companies American? Mostly not: it was management that was American. IBM had divisions in Switzerland, Ireland, Israel and other countries for years. It's a myth that "outsourcing" is a new phenomenon.
Conversely, when BP comes to America and hires American workers, is it doing outsourcing? Of course it does. Should the British accuse the company of betraying the U.K.?
The sole explanation is that all of us must be worth our keep. When we progress individually and as a nation, our wages and standard of living rise. When we stagnate in our development, our wages drop. This is particularly pronounced in IT, where wages were high due to shortage of labor. But all this happened before: companies analyzed the cost of operations domestically and abroad, adjusted for risk, and chose the least costless route.
Socialists in our schools and the media taught you to think about management as if they were royalty that does what it wants ("voting" themselves raises, drinking expensive water, etc.). As any management course will tell you, they are hired hands just as you are, but more expensive. Just because you cannot see fully the benefits of their work, it does not mean that they are not worth every penny of their salaries.
Corporations are merely legal notions. In real economic life there are people --- owners, employees, customers of a corporation. It is the owners that pay your salary and that of your CEO. In the present-day America, unlike in XIX century, large corporations are owned by common folk, especially the retirees. These are teachers, nurses, plumbers --- and you, too, if you have a savings account or at least one share of a mutual fund. Why should these people pay you or me more that they already do? How is a programmer more deserved of income than they are?
Any problems that Microsoft has with a "shortage" of employees is a problem that they have themselves created.
That sounds dangerously close to Congress looking out for Americans instead of Corporations. Perish the thought.
I cry for Bill Gates. The thought that he has to hire Canadian-Pakistani’s breaks my heart.
Microsoft is located in the State of Washington — not California.
>>The way you counteract racism is to even the playing field, not tilt it one way or another from time to time.<<
I agree. Gates has received criticism for this. It’s his money, though. He can give to “Lesbian Gangster Rap and Hip-Hop Studies” programs if he wants to. And probably does.
I realize that. Check Washington state law to see if they have a similar regulation.
The Canadian system, on the other hand, allows for self petition, where a person does not need an employer to sponsor. The applicant is evaluated on skills, education, language, age, whether a person completed school in Canada etc. and based on all these, a green card is awarded (or rejected), usually within 6 months to 18 months. The need for an H1B is eliminated. A person could apply from anywhere in the world. I personally know of two foreign students in US universities who applied during their studies and are now permanent residents of Canada.
Canada, Australia have skills based immigration. Gotta speak English too!
I guess Microsoft is hoping to tap into foreign graduates from Canadian and American universities who may have been given Canadian green cards. And they’ll do it without the attendant bureaucratic hassle of getting an H1B first. At least, they are right on one count - foreign students, no matter how talented, (or not, depending on your view)cannot be hired in the US at the moment - which to some Americans is a great thing.
America cannot open its labor markets to the entire world. But we should be liberal about letting foreign students who have gone to school here work here if they are in science and engineering. Not enough hi IQ Americans are doing this. They want to be lawyers and investment bankers
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