This business of importing cheap labor and exporting customer service jobs overseas could be stopped by Congress, and SHOULD be stopped by Congress.
Penalize corporations via the tax code to the point where it costs more to engage in this practice than it does to employ an American.
Customer service jobs in particular could be great way to increase employment as stay at home moms, the elderly, and welfare cases could perform this work from their houses with today’s technology.
Instead hundreds of thousands of people in India and the Philippines are doing customer service for corporations like ATT and American Express.
There is no IT job that cannot be learned through on the job training.
NOT A SINGLE FOREIGNER SHOULD TAKE AN AMERICAN JOB.
Where the hell do you expect to find that many American folks with an unintelligable accent?!?!
“There is no IT job that cannot be learned through on the job training.”
We have Americans already trained to do these jobs; companies don’t want to pay them. A programmer friend was out of work for years before getting a job as an airport screener...
But Government regulations are the reason why corporations can't afford to hire (legal) Americans in the first place.
More Government isn't the answer.
Instead, why not reduce the formidable barriers to hiring Americans?
I'm thinking here of minimum wage laws and the horrendous Obamacare regulations but I'm sure that FReepers can think of other examples.
I’m just a 6 class crash course PC repair grad from 2000 and I’m essentially 3rd in command of US MIS operations for an international corporation. The the leaders have 20 plus years on me. That came from a lot of contract and suffering in a couple of horrible support jobs.
Your insistence that IT jobs can be taken with training is just silly. Good systems engineer is akin to brain surgery. You have the aptitude or not. Many don’t. I have had plenty of employees with Masters in computer science who still can’t code their way out of a paper bag.
Careful, lest you sound like a Democrat who insists that everyone is suited for higher education! Computer programming is the same thing.
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I believe that the H1B program is doing terrible damage to the growth and the future of the American tech field (1) by creating morale problems among highly-skilled American tech workers----"Will I have job tomorrow? Will I have to move every few years in search of a job because more and H1B workers keep popping up wherever I work and taking my job?---and (2) by discouraging smart young people from entering the tech field because they know that they could lose their jobs any day to an H1B foreign worker, so they try to enter occupations where H1B workers are not eligible.
There should be a law like this one for private companies and even for public agencies : If you lay off American tech people, you are ineligible for foreign worker programs like H1B.
1. My point is this: It is morally wrong and makes no sense for a tech company like Microsoft, Facebook, and Apple to, say, layoff 20 tech workers, then turn around and beg the federal government to let them hire more H1B foreign workers under the pretense that they can't find American citizens to do the job, referring to the same American workers who they just coldly laid off.
2. As I see it: It is morally wrong, obscene, and downright un-American for a company to layoff, say, a $80,000 a year American worker just so that the company can turn around and stab American workers in the back by hiring an H1B workers at, say, $60,000 a year to do the exact same job.
3. And to add insult to injury, the greedy company may order the fired worker to help the H1B foreign worker learn his new job before the fired worker can leave his job. Sick I tell you.
4. California Edison biggest abuser? I recently read that California Edison is one the biggest abusers of the H1B foreign worker program. (I don't live in California.)
5. California Edison's top officials: Does anyone have a list of the top officials at California Edison? Thanks.
6. Let's Email California Edison officials: Once we have the list of California Edison's top officials, we can then bombard them with letters, emails, and phone calls in which we tell them what scumbags they are for abusing the H1B program by laying off good American tech workers and cold-heartedly replacing them with H1B FOREIGN workers, simply because the foreign workers work for less money and benefits. Sick I tell you.
7. List of American companies with the most H1B workers? Anyone have a list of American tech companies with the most H1B foreign workers?
8. List of American companies who have requested the most H1B foreign workers in the past 2 years? And continue to do so?
9. List of states with the most H1B foreign workers?
10. Imagine this scene in South Korea, India, and Taiwan. Tech teachers tell their students something like this:
11. "If you get good grades, you can look forward to going to the United States under the United States H1B program.
12. "And after a few years, you can leave the company and start your own company and automatically get your green card. America is not going to send you back home after it has invested so many years in training you and letting you live comfortably in the United States."
13. To those tech companies that hire H1B workers: Your cold-hearted hiring and firing practices are contributing to the slow destruction of the American Way of life as most of us have come to know and love.
The current regulatory environment you see today is what happens when someone makes a case for regulatory fiat in reasonable cases and establishes a precedent... and then the Democrats get control of that apparatus.
No thanks to adding to that jenga stack.