It would also seem that if the nation has such a shortage of high-tech workers that we are forced to import them, spending some energy and money on improving our educational system and giving more able students the opportunity to learn these skills would be a good move. As a high-tech worker myself, I can assure you that America has enough workers, but employers who want to hire people with low pay, inadequate benefits, and no job security are unlikely to find many takers.

Agree on the point of wanting workers at lower wages but from the point of view of Mr. Gates (who is trying to improve education) even if they raised wages to the level of investment bankers and hedge fund managers, don;t assume that the people switching from the financial industry could suddenly do the hi tech jobs well. Some of those engineering and research positions require rare talent and the US does not have the majority of the supply of such talent.

Most of the people making big money in the financial industry have the talent of talking people into giving them money to invest and they failing to beat the market averages.

This is from a lobbying group, but has some interesting information.

And from Lou Dobbs populist wing.

BILL TUCKER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): There is no shortage of students studying for careers in Math and Science. There is a shortage of jobs. That's the simply bottom line finding of a new study from the Urban Institute.

The study shows that between 1985 and 2000 435,000 U.S. citizens and permanent residents a year graduated with Bachelors, Masters, and Doctoral degrees in Science and Engineering. That's three times the number of jobs in Science and Engineering added per year, 150,000 during that time.

Separately Michael Teitelbaum at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation told Congress last week that neither he nor a separate study by the RAND Corporation can find any evidence of worker shortages. These studies are not anomalies.

VIVEK WADHWA, HARVARD UNIVERSITY: Bottom line is that all of our research at Duke and now at Harvard shows the same thing. That there is no shortage of engineers; there's no shortage of scientists. Companies aren't going abroad because of skills. They're going abroad because it's cheaper.

TUCKER: As a result, Wadhwa says that more than half of the engineering graduate students at Duke don't pursue engineering as a career and there is another indicator that the market is anything but short of scientists and engineers.

Thanks for explaining supply and demand to these high tech companies. If these companies spent some of the money they spend on seminars on how to disqualify qualified US workers and spent it on wages they would be better off.

I have 4 years of graduate school. AT&T outsourced my job to IBM so it could be off-shored to India. There are no jobs. The unemployemtn office said there were no jobs. And the best offer I could get was less than half my previous earnings with less benefits.

If there was a demand, people would move to that field.

Since the H1-B program has reduced the career prospects for high-tech employees it's not surprising Computer Science enrollments at colleges have dropped by 50% or more in recent years.

Thanks for covering this, Dean. Every time I hear a politician talk about how important math and science education are, I think of the kids who are really good at this stuff, who hear the rhetoric about skill shortages and are misled into thinking that all they have to do is work hard in the field they love and their talents will be sought after. When they'd probably be better off going to law school or med school. At least English and philosophy majors aren't fed these kinds of lies.

I have been in IT for nearly 30 years, mostly as a consultant/contract programmer. In the early 90's a disturbing trend at all of the larger companies in my area. They closed down or dramatically reduced their internal training programs.

No, there is no shortage, just an unwillingness to pay reasonable wages (or, as Dean has repeatedly stated, without opening the doors to all occupations), and an unwillingness to spend even the minimal amount it takes to retrain programmers. Knowing first hand what it would take to retrain people, the amount is laughingly small.

On a side note, I work independently, but use a company to do the billing and shield my clients from 1099 risk. Recently, several clients have outsourced their contract management. Usually this means I get locked out, but sometimes they make exceptions. When they do, I am forced to subcontract through the vendor of their choice, adding another 20% or more to my bill rate. Certainly, that money could be better spent retraining workers.

Thanks for mentioning this. NPR had a similar piece this morning, interviewing a manager of an outsourcing firm, who claimed that America's demand for technical innovators was insatiable. I was tempted to ask him how much a manager of an outsourcing firm earned.

I'd also note that tech jobs tend to concentrate in areas where costs of living are higher. Someone earning $75k as an engineer (possibly after sucking up opportunity costs of grad school), may not be living high on the hog in the metropolitan centers of California or New England.

Erik L: If Gates were genuinely interested in "improving education", aka maintaining and improving the technical skills base in this country, he wouldn't be lobbying for the opportunity to reduce the number of jobs available to American technical workers. No job opportunities = drying up of skills base.

Young Americans aren't stupid (contrary to the propaganda of the visa hungry), and have observed their parents' tech jobs being relentlessly offshored and "insourced" over the last decade. They also might have some hope of supporting a family (requiring on-going employment and financial stability), and have noted that tech employers are big on kicking older workers to the curb. Anybody honestly "interested in education" would acknowledge that the above do not provide terribly good incentives for the prudent young.

At any rate, you'd be hard put to find people opposed to giving visas to "rare talents". "Rare talents", by definition, don't drive down wages or drive people with more ordinary skills out of the market. What percentage of (the lion's share) of H1-B visas, scooped up by Indian body-shops, do you think go to "rare talents", anyway?

The notion that doing high-level technical work requires some "rare talent" is correct only in that high intelligence is rare.

Most people of high intelligence are capable of doing excellent work as engineers, with proper training. In many cases they can do excellent work even without much training -- although there are some engineering jobs that require advanced and highly specialized technical education, some can be entered into with the math and science foundation most highly intelligent people already have, the relevant specialized technical knowledge of the job being so specialized it isn't taught in any school.

Two of the quickest studies I've encountered in my career were lawyers -- neither of them patent lawyers. They quickly grasped the essence of certain technical issues relevant to the legal case at hand, and by "grasped the essence" here I mean not that they got the general superficial drift, but that they showed understanding of the deep implications of those issues.

Today, it's quite obvious that choosing to pursue a career in a technical field is going to place one in direct competition with large numbers of immigrants brought into the country on terms that place them in one of several forms of indentured servant status, unable to negotiate even the wages the market would offer in the presence of an equal number of immigrants free to change employers.

In this environment, the only native-born Americans who will choose technical careers are those who get sufficient intellectual satisfaction from them as to offset the lower income, or who come from family backgrounds such that they are not aware of how much more lucrative other careers are.

I'm very pleased to read Dean today because, in a break from tradition, he's not saying that IT workers should take their lumps like others before (steel, auto) and that the focus should be on why some guilds (lawyers, etc) aren't under pressure via H1-B or outsourcing.

(p.s. that Captcha is getting harder and harder to read.)

On a side note, I work independently, but use a company to do the billing and shield my clients from 1099 risk. Recently, several clients have outsourced their contract management. Usually this means I get locked out, but sometimes they make exceptions. When they do, I am forced to subcontract through the vendor of their choice, adding another 20% or more to my bill rate. Certainly, that money could be better spent retraining workers.

From Feeling The Elephant:

Another symptom of a true shortage: "Take people with lesser skills and train them up," Wadwha says. But employers still expect to find new hires with "exactly the right skills …Microsoft uses software to weed out resumes, they get so many of them….They want the exact skills that they need at the lowest possible price."
Indeed, some employers resist teaching Americans new skills, Matloff writes, because "then the newly-enfranchised programmer may demand a higher salary, threatening to leave for another employer….Thus the employers claim a 'shortage,' when in fact it is once again simply a matter of a shortage of cheap workers."

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Note: Dean -- your comment box is way too narrow. Can you make it wider? At least twice as wide would be better to notice things like extraneous carriage returns.

Exactly right, Mr Baker!

While education in science, math, and technology are certainly things that should be looked at, they are NOT the reason high-tech employers "can't get enough skilled workers." It is because they can't get enough CHEAP skilled workers!

I'm a retired software guy with a BS in Comp Sci. Writing software is not a exotic talent. Back in the 80's I helped write a heavy equipment maintenance tracking/scheduling app. The old diesel mechanics were coding they're own mods within 6 months of roll out. Good mods, I'd spend a day or two documenting and cleaning up each wildcat mod and distribute it to the other shops. Two of the best coders I knew were english majors (grammar police). The best ever was a biochemist.

OT:

I saw your interview on Lou Dobbs last night. I rarely agree with you, but GOOD JOB!

One reason H1bs will work hard is that their real goal is to get a green card one way or another. A green card has tremendous value for a non-citizen: free education for their kids, a civil society, great infrastructure, freedom to travel anywhere. Of course a citizen already has these benefits, so why work for less.

But the downside for the US is that its technicians are much less interested in the actual field than citizens who freely chose the field would be. Creativity will suffer. Note that almost all real progress in computer science comes from US citizens or from Europeans who also have very much less incentive to immigrate.

The worst problem with H1bs is that they assist in outsourcing as they are primarily used by firms to train workers to later move back home.

Dean, employers have been recruiting globally for months now to fill at least 120,000 openings for fiscal year 2009. However, they have yet to give American citizens and legal residents a chance to compete for these jobs that will become available in 2009. That's right - 2009.



And we have the want ads to prove it:”
• Alberg, Naperville, IL blatantly entitled “Currently we are in the process of hiring best H1/L1/B1/TN (other forms of guest worker visas);
• Sirius, Houston, TX, entitled “New H1b’s for 2009.”
• FTG International, Jersey City, NJ, entitled “H-1B Visa - FY 2008/9”
• SRM, Inc., Fairfax, VA, requiring a $2500 deposit before filing for an H1-b visa
• Aries Computers, Manalapan, NJ offering “Free Food and Guest House accommodation, H1-B applied in April 2008, Green Card processing in Jan/Feb 2009, Effective Resume writing help, Marketing and Placement, Behavioral and Technical mock interviews. Preparation of In Person Interviews/Client Interviews.”



The offering of such support and training is strong evidence that many, likely most H1-Bs are entry-level, contrary to corporate claims that their level of qualifications is higher than experienced US tech professionals. Corporate lobbyists’ claims that the H1-b visa hiring program is needed to fill a technical qualification gap in the US workforce are disproven right out of their own corporate want ads.



One would think that a system of job-discrimination enforced by the federal government would not be possible four decades after passage of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act. Now, tech firms only rely on the US workforce when they can't find any more H-1b visas. This program is killing our chances of landing jobs in 2009.



Despite the fact that these are American jobs – most of which will stay in America - employers needn't demonstrate a shortage, according to The Federal Register, dated June 30, 2006, Section II, paragraph 4, "the statute does not require employers...to demonstrate that there are no available US workers or to test the labor market for US workers as required under the permanent labor certification program."



The failure of US law to require employers to seek local talent before slotting citizens from abroad is attested to by the DOL's Strategic Plan, Fiscal Years 2006-2011 (pg. 35) "...H-1B workers may be hired even when a qualified U.S. worker wants the job, and a U.S. worker can be displaced from the job in favor of the foreign worker."



Dean, please note that employers never need to seek local talent before recruiting citizens from abroad. The IT workforce is segregated into 2 groups via guest worker programs. Each workforce has seen their salaries decrease.



There are too many citizens and green card holders competing for job openings they can fill. There are too many H1-bs competing for job openings they can fill.

The worst of the credit crisis has passed and that the economy is faring better than expected.

APRIL FOOL!!!

Unfortunately, we're in a market where perception trumps reality.

Oops. This reads a little better.

The worst of the credit crisis has passed and the economy is faring better than expected.

Anyway, it appears the real fools on Wall Street today were the irrationally-exuberant bulls.

Anyone who has worked in the US Tech industry has probably seen one department after another where solid, long time company veterans were completely replaced by people right off the boat from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Bangalore or wherever (at lower wages of course). It's too bad the general public isn't more aware of this. It's a bit harder to make the case that "there aren't enough Americans to do these jobs" when Americans WERE ALREADY DOING THEM.

If the job market for these positions were as tight as the companies say, then wages should have gone through the roof over the last decade. They have not. Those wages have barely kept up with inflation.

Further, nobody yet has mentioned the truly damning thought to this legislation: lawmakers are attempting this in the middle of a recession. The economy is contracting, yet politicians want to make things worse for American workers by giving their jobs to foreign workers in an attempt to further reduce wages.

Nevermind the fact that increasing this program makes American students less likely to study computer science and thus making us more dependent on foreign workers in the future.

The H1-B program is bad all-around and needs to be eliminated.

My company, a chip-maker from Silicon Valley, has a very hard time filling engineering positions, even junior ones. Most of the people we do end up hiring, are either people who are yet to receive their green card (on student and H1B visas) or naturalized citizens. If anybody thinks businesses in competitive markets are just refusing to hire qualified Americans so they can have congress, years down the road, allow them to use more H1Bs they are insane. We want to make products, and would hire anyone who comes close to meeting the requirements. I don't think many Americans are deterred by our compensation (80-100k + bonus and benefits).

I see H1-B workers at Microsoft every day. Do you understand how rapidly the industry continues to grow? Microsoft's currently building a campus across the highway that will be larger than its existing "main" campus. They've opened in Vancouver and India because they need to grow fast. When pies grow this fast, shortages, not wages, determine the growth rate. Nor is there much room for #2. Wait around for wages to rise? Or just leave the country! Congress leaves MS few choices.

My own wage continues to rise and I experience aggressive recruitment daily from across the industry. I tell them I want $54/hr and a window office and I get it. Tell me again how Indians are depressing conditions for Americans like me. Or would you prefer we sacrifice our leadership position to a country with the forethought to welcome the world's best? It's a global industry and the company that dominates it will reside in a nation where the best can be imported from everywhere. I work with Russians, Indians, Arabs, Australians, Chinese, and others every day. They all earn remarkable wages. But opportunity is growing faster than numeric caps on immigration grows. Keep it up, and we will export that opportunity and our leadership role.

Congress hasn't renewed Schedule A (the nurse equivalent of H1-B) for two years. A hospital in my city offers a $10,000 bounty for a nurse referral. The state is lowering standards to meet demand. Nurse wages continue to outpace wage advances in other professions. The hilarious part--and I've taken to laughing at the quagmire--is how high wages raid academia of professors, reducing our ability to train, causing school applicants to be turned away, despite the shortage. Immigration policy in this context means a reduction in services, rising medical insurance premiums, and increased mortality rates in hospitals.

What if you become hospitalized, press the red button, and get no attention? Then you'll know the difference between a wage issue and a shortage.

What ever happened to companies training employees for better jobs?

The H1-B program has been so successful that companies have moved a substantial share of manufacturing offshore.

It is also hard to claim that America retains it's primacy in many industries in which it was previously unchallenged.

Perhaps the results are in the pudding.

Some good comments. More facts refuting Baker's arguement at:

http://www.chamberpost.com/2008/04/its-workers-not.html

John: "Tell me again how Indians are depressing conditions for Americans like me."

I don't think anyone is telling you that Indians are depressing wages for Americans like you. The question is whether on the whole H1-Bs, as they are now used, have lowered the wages for comparably-skilled citizen workers, driven them out of the field entirely, or - more importantly for the long term - removed incentives for the young to enter certain fields. (And call me cynical, but I don't think the Chamber of Commerce - "ChamberPost", above - is the definitive source for information on this issue. They also think unlimited importation of unskilled and low-skilled labor is a bottomless fount of fabulosity for the nation.)

I certainly hope you know unusually talented H1-Bs at Microsoft making "remarkable wages". Those are the people the visa was meant for. But these anecdotes don't tell us about overall wage patterns in the field since H1-B was implemented, nor answer points that Al Czervic (above), for example, brings up.

"It's a global industry and the company that dominates it will reside in a nation where the best can be imported from everywhere."

Well, yes. It's a global industry that resides in various countries, not a national company whose preferred policies in pursuit of its interests (maximum profitability)can simply be assumed to be congruent with long-term national interests.

"Or would you prefer we sacrifice our leadership position to a country with the forethought to welcome the world's best?"

Who's the "our" in this statement? Microsoft, or the United States? Microsoft is a global, not an American, corporation. As such it has no intrinsic interest in maintaining "American" dominance in this field. And, as Americans, we need to think seriously about that when it comes asking us to change our policies for its benefit.

The United States, I believe, has a more generous immigration policy than any other country in the world, yet we've managed to lose our leadership position in quite a few fields to countries with highly restrictive immigration policies. Last time I looked we also seemed to be running mildly troubling wee trade deficits with a few of these same countries.

Overhauling the visa system to weed out fraud and abuse, and getting visas to the genuinely "specially skilled" is a good idea, but I don't think handing out visas and green cards to the world is going to fix what ails us.

The hilarious part--and I've taken to laughing at the quagmire--is how high wages raid academia of professors, reducing our ability to train, causing school applicants to be turned away, despite the shortage.

Ah, so that's why enrollments in CS have dropped - we need more training programs for nurses. Agreed - a real laff riot, that.

Dean, why don't you point out that high-skilled immigration reduces inequality and raises the real wage of low income people ? Why not simply let anyone immigrate who gets a job paying more than, say 100k and pays more than 30k in federal tax per year? 100k might not seem like a lot for readers on here but it corresponds to something between 5 and 8 times of a minimum wage earner annual income?
It seems like you are opposed to a lot of immigration in general? Why?

Not much mention of the practice of sub contracting jobs that were traditional done by employees. I am an engineer for a major telecommunications company, one of the remaining baby bells. In the old days our work would have been done by Bell Labs and Western Electric. Over the last 15 years the contract has been awarded to three different companies. Each time I (we, it's mostly the same people every time) had to start again as new hires even though we still do exactly the same work as before. As soon as VZ think we have got a few raises or built up vacation time they look for find a new low bidder, who struggles until they finally hire the same people again as new employees. Why would anybody spend 4 or more years at Va. Tech for this?

Yes, I know unusually talented H1-Bs at Microsoft making "remarkable wages". The low-wage Indians aren't on the H1-B program. They're on some scheme where they're paid Indian wages and a housing stipend and they're poor. They can only stay a few months. Not H1-B. I take them to the beach and show them the sites.

CS enrollment dropped during the recession when people realized it's not some free lunch. Alright, so now we lack graduates, just as the industry booms again. IMMIGRANTS COULD DO SO MUCH for America's leadership role.

Americans do need to think seriously about skilled immigration. London (with very liberal immigration policies for skilled labor) has eclipsed New York as the world's financial capital. Who will become its software capital? How much of AMERICA's leadership position would you like to sacrifice at the alter of... of what? The alter of protectionism in an exceptionally global marketplace. Global leaders want the best the WHOLE WORLD has to offer. They'll center operations here or somewhere else.

If we closed the doors tomorrow (actually we closed them yesterday), Microsoft would move (at least the center of operations would have to, there are simply too many brilliant H1-B immigrants), and I'd make less money. And just try outsourcing medical care! Instead, your hospital will serve you with robots! Or you just can't afford the cost of American-only assistance, and you'll have to go to Mexico.

You bet we need to think hard. GET TO IT, AMERICA. I've been waiting for this debate. I saw outsourcing eliminate my old job and then enable brand new ones that never existed before. I've seen how skilled immigrant labor makes "more pie", more value for everyone.

$10,000 for a nurse referral at Overlake Hospital.

I need to do my part. I'll pay $1,000 to defeat the political opponents of skilled immigration. I won't see America fail to fund higher education *and* fail to import what we won't train ourselves. Skilled immigration is CHEAP and VERY VALUABLE and politically I'm at war with its opponents.

Ha ha strident enough for ya? GO OBAMA!

Funny that a supporter of Microsoft would cite protectionism as a reason to increase H1-B visas given that Microsoft was built on protectionist practices.

Software patents are protectionism. Copyrights are protectionism. How about we get rid of them first? Both of them helped turn Microsoft into a certified monopoly. Getting rid of those protections would do a lot to reduce the cost of software products, which would boost the entire economy just like lowering wages for workers boosts the economy.

What's good for the workers are also good for the employers. Where's the outcry for the expensive products resulting from copyright and patents?

Please take a look at the data here on H-1B wage (disparities) at US companies. The data there was used at some congressional hearing last year; I don't vouch for it, only that it seemed to received in Congress as valid.

Note: Check out Wal-Mart as H-1B employer data. Weird.

Red Oak: Young Americans aren't stupid (contrary to the propaganda of the visa hungry)

What we need are selectively stupid young Americans: bright enough to pursue careers in science, math, engineering and computer science, yet dumb enough to actually pursue those careers.

Red Oak: What percentage of (the lion's share) of H1-B visas, scooped up by Indian body-shops, do you think go to "rare talents", anyway?

Additionally, the O-series visas for truly exceptional people existed long before the H-1B body shop visa was created. Truly exceptional technical people have never had any trouble emigrating to the US.

Joe: My company, a chip-maker from Silicon Valley, has a very hard time filling engineering positions

Cry me a river. In a market based economy, increased prices reduce "shortages".

Depending on the degree of specialization and so forth, you can't expect an endless supply of qualified people to be available whenever a company decides to hire.

Joe: I don't think many Americans are deterred by our compensation (80-100k + bonus and benefits).

Hardly poverty, but not an outrageous amount in an extremely high cost-of-living area like Silicon Valley either. Do you think anyone could buy a house there on that salary. LOL!

Here's a hint: contrary to Silicon Valley lore, there are places besides Silicon Valley and India. In fact, some of them are actually in the US! Lower cost-of-living means you can attract more people at a given price.

John: Americans do need to think seriously about skilled immigration.

This thread isn't about immigration - it's about H-1B guest worker visas.

John: If we closed the doors tomorrow ... Microsoft would move (at least the center of operations would have to, there are simply too many brilliant H1-B immigrants

First, "H1-B immigrants" is a contradiction. The H-1B is a guest worker visa that doesn't let you immigrate.

Second, what percentage of H-1B visa holders are "brilliant"? As demonstrated by the statistics, and my anecdotal experience, most H-1B's are competent (albeit inexperienced), not brilliant, and their average capabilities are no better than the average American's.

Third, anyone who truly is brilliant can get an O-series immigration visa. No one is complaining about those.

John: and I'd make less money.

If you're a programmer that's certainly not true (unless supply and demand magically doesn't work in your corner of the universe). OTOH if your job is something like "H-1B visa coordinator", I'm sure you're right.

If there were a shortage of engineers, then salaries would be rising, just like the price of gasoline or corn or milk. Salaries were rising in the 90s, but they have not been rising lately.

You here the same arguments about the shortage of labor in agriculture. The companies have bad business models, since they are based on low cost labor. If I have a business based on low cost gasoline, I need to rethink things when gas prices rise.

In the United States, we hire immigrants to cut sugar cane. In Australia, they use sugar cutting machines, and they have much tighter control of immigration. There is nothing like a labor shortage to make things more efficient.

You hear Microsoft complaining that they cannot hire enough programmers. You also hear that their customers want nothing to do with Vista. How inefficient are the guys at Microsoft? They probably have too MANY programmers, and if they rethought the way they produce software, they wouldn't be whining for software braceros.

Before anyone complains that H-1B opponents are anti-immigrant, remember that H-1B visa recipients are not immigrants. They are guest workers, and their visa status is tied to their employment. When the visa expires, they have to go home, and it is not a path to permanent residency.

I would welcome the H-1B program if tech immigrants could compete on a level playing field from day one. They should be able to apply for full citizenship with voting rights (their spouses and children should get citizenship, too). Then, they wouldn't be tied to an employer and subject to exploitation (or at least more than usual).

My employer hires H-1B to fill entry level positions. These are not positions that require unique skills, only a BS in computer science. It isn't a matter of policy. H-1B workers will apply for entry level positions, even when they have a few years of experience because they have to keep their status. Fresh graduates don't stand a chance against them. Any citizen-worker who asks for market rate is screened out at the beginning of the interview process. The practice is different for mid and senior level positions, so we end up with a caste system inside the company.

Applications for 85% of visas in the computer field were for BELOW median wage.

From "The Bottom of the Pay Scale - Wages for H-1B Computer Programmers" at
http://www.cis.org/articles/2005/back1305.pdf :

"Wages on LCAs for 85 percent of H-1B workers were for less than the median U.S. wage in the same occupations and state."

The tech industry has been lieing to Congress and the American people when they claim these are for the "best and brightest". If they were the smartest, they would be paid the top 10% of the wage scale.

Why not grant H-1B visas based on highest salary since that is really the best proxy for skills?

There were 130,000 H-1B visas granted in 2006 (BLS statistics). Not a single American was given a chance to apply for these jobs. Not a single American was given an opportunity to see who was hiring and what skills employers were looking for.

Why? Because our laws don't require that jobs reserved for H-1B visa holders first be advertised and made available to US citizens.

Why are employers permitted to hide these job openings from Americans?

Imagine you could see the list of 85,000 or more positions that are currently being reserved for H-1B visa holders.

Congress should at the very least fix the loopholes to give their own constituents a fighting chance for these positions.

Thank you, Dean, for saying this so straightforwardly.

I experienced a bit of this in 1998, when I decided to leave academia. With a doctorate in math, and some recent computer science courses under my belt, and the tech boom in full swing, I thought for sure there'd be private-sector jobs out there for someone like me. I sent out resumes, went to job fairs, and got very few bites.

It seemed pretty clear at the time that the H1-B program, which gave employers the option of hiring fully-trained programmers from abroad, rather than having to invest anything in training Americans who had the background and the clear ability to quickly learn the remaining skills needed, was the source of the problem. If you weren't ready to contribute on Day 1, they didn't want you, because they had other options.

Obviously, if as Dean says companies offered millions of dollars for engineers etc, there'd be plenty of them. But that would drive up the costs of their products and make them uncompetitive in the world market. Thus the fever for offshoring, the worldwide race to the bottom.

The next big thing is what the Economist magazine calls for constantly -- increasing the mobility of labor to catch up with that of capital. That way, if the jobs are in India, you could move to India. Hey, travel is enriching -- culturally, anyway.

You are missing a crucial part of the picture - namely that the recruitment of highly skilled foreigners is a highly profitable strategy for the US as a country. These people have gotten a high-quality education in their home countries, highly subsidized by their own societies. They are coming into the US at the height of their productivity without having cost the US society a cent in schooling, health care, etc. They are young, fit, motivated, good people, having been subjected to all kinds of health and criminal background checks. They are a great deal.

It is true that the US could train more of its own citizens in these highly skilled professions but that would cost a bunch of money and basically, Americans don't want to cough up that money necessary to improve their schools etc. You can blame this on greedy corporations which is fair (they could invest some of their profits in education) but they are not the only culprits.

If you object to the H1-B program, it would be more honest to do so on the basis that the US is effectively robbing other countries - mostly poorer countries - of some of their most valuable assets. To complain that H1-B are taking something away from Americans is, I have to say, not only cheap but totally wrong.

The previous post has it wrong. They think H-1Bs as entrepeneurs and PhDs. If that were really the case then it wouldn't be a problem. But in fact most H-1Bs are practitioners doing jobs that other Americans are fully capable of doing and would be doing if the H-1B didn't work so cheaply and wasn't indentured to his employer.

Here's an example of an H-1B earning $23k per year!! Yes, the "best and brightest" working for near poverty wages.

"But this was no dream job come true. Goel's base salary was $23,310, about half the $44,000 that Patni had said it would pay on the visa application, according to a lawsuit he has filed against the company. When Goel complained, one official said that Patni would brand him a "troublemaker" and that his parents in India would be harassed unless he stopped,"

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_06/b4070057782750.htm

Tell me, would you encourage your child to go into technology with these kinds of salaries and working conditions?

The H-1B category also includes scientistst (yes, with PhDs) hired by US universities. I agree that cases like the one mentioned in the above post are abuses. But my argument stands that the emphasis on abuses misses a crucial part of the picture, which is that importing trained and skilled foreign workers saves the US as a country a bunch of money, and that is why it is done.

Hi
which other hospitals are looking for nurses and also do they bring them on H1? thanks

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