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Lost in the demagogic hyper-bloviating is the fact that no one is really against legal immigration.

So what, pray tell, are all those people who are against H1-B visas against?

Microsoft already has world-class research facilities. This expansion is a development center, not part of MSR. H-1B does not mandate paying exactly the average wage, the idea is to only bring in people who you would pay as well as your average American competing for the same job. Check this out, Microsoft has filed H-1B requests for researchers to be paid $110k/year. This is not the common definition of slave labor: 2005 Microsoft H-1B requests

H-1B, L-1 and Offshoring Opposition Bookmarks : More Info.

I think the best way to fix H1B here is to prohibit H1B holders to work as consultants. For real companies (like the one I work for) H1B should be made easier to obtain (and quota may be lowered, once Indian sweatshops are forced out) to bring in real top talent. They should also set up some reasonable cutoff salary, say $100K/year.

What I am afraid of, is that when battling abusing they will fold to xenophobic tendencies and just encourage outsourcing instead of promoting competitiveness.

It does not. You just proved again you do not know what you are talking about. L1 is intra company transfer: you would need to have an office overseas and employ that person there for at least a year.

And, or, BTW, L1 is abused even worse then H1B - if you look at top H1B users (http://www.h1b.info/lca_reports_top_100_by_worker .php) abusers are the consulting companies, they switch to L1 easily, while those companies that actually make good use of H1B program, would not be able to do that.

Uneducated xenophobe.

It's all about raising the value of their stock. Which is the same way Jobs makes his $$$ but it kills jobs but some investors wealthy.
http://www.h1b.info/

Microsoft in November 2002 announced plans to build a half-billion dollar complex in Hyderabad, India. With this new development center, Microsoft can use L-1 visas to displace further US citizen employees and will not be subject to H-1B caps. Other major companies in the US are doing the same. This is why reform is needed across all US visa types and not just for H-1B visas alone. It was through the use of these "special" visas that all of the September 11th terrorists secured admittance to the United States. There is virtually no security or monitoring of these special visa holders.

I guess the only thing to do is to hire more programmers from other countries!

Haha. Touche, no?

Please visit the following link.

public H-1B database

It enables you to find the number of H-1B employees employed at certain companies. Through some research on the Internet, I determined the H-1B composition of the following companies that plan to file for an Initial Public Offering (IPO).

15% Google (150 H-1B workers out of 1000) 24% Atheros Communications (24 H-1B workers out of 100)

The above data for H-1B workers pertains to persons who are currently in H-1B status. The number of employees for Atheros is estimated to be 100. Note that the percentages range from 15% to 24%.

If we include the number of former H-1B workers (now converted to American permanent residence and the like), we can safely say that the percentages are doubled, ranging from 30% to 48%. Is anyone bothered by these numbers?

Hundreds of thousands of American citizens lost their jobs in the tech sector, and these 3 companies claim that they cannot find just 350 workers to meet their needs. So, they sought out H-1B workers.

I urge you, my fellow Americans, to boycott the impending IPOs of Atheros and Google. When your fellow citizen was out of work for 2 years during the tech depression, these companies sought foreign workers to fill their ranks.

Do not participate in the IPOs of these companies. Do not financially reward companies that put the screws to American workers. If Atheros and Google want to have an IPO, they should relocate to Asia or another foreign country for the IPO. Those foreign countries have workers with the supposed right set of skills for Atheros and Google.

The original constitutional reason for copyrights and patents was to support "THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE AND USEFUL ARTS"--not to protect the creation of what the great Ralph Nader calls "violent corporate sponsored pornography".

I don't opposed government subsidies of "science and the useful arts"--if done on a basis that is fair and democratic --promoting technological development that creates the kind of advancements and culture much of the population wants. What Hollywood wants goes beyond free speech, or subsized technical advancements, Hollywood wants active government support of privately owned, corporate managed social control mechanisms. Given the fact that since protection of these mechanisms has intensified the last 40 years, we've seen a signficant drop in things like disposable income, and an increase in economic inequality, IMHO it is high time we use what political rights we have left and seriously look for alternatives here.

In the late 1800s, many of the Chinese who came over to work on the railroads in the U.S. were not captured, or slaves. History still regards their work as slave labor.

Let me just put it this way, if the mass importation of H1B workers wasn't a problem, why would their be legislation to stop it? See this link.

The decline of US IT is serious. US job growth isn't even keeping up with immigration. There has been substantial skills based immigration in IT even with declining overall employment-this was supported by huge political donations.

Yes, but Bushs's Guestworker program will bring the joys of H-1b to the entire population. It is really very simple, the jobs left for Americans are equal to existing jobs, plus jobs growth minus immigration and outsourcing. Now, Bush wants to claim that his wonderful trade policies are going to create lots of jobs any day now-never mind the $500 Billion/year trade deficits. Still even if there were not deficits and outsourcing ceased, a bad immigration policy (i.e. skills based visas in job areas with flat job growth) will reduce wages markedly over time. Outsourcing is really minor by comparison in its effect compared to immigration policy(or lack thereof).

Reagan's economics advisor Paul Craig Roberts estimates the decrease of software development/design jobs in the US the last 3 years at about 17%.

During this same period, substantial numbers of aliens were "subsidized"(in the words of Nobel prize winner Milton Friedman) to take American jobs in software development and design via the H-1b/L-1 "temporary" worker programs and various immigration programs. There were something like 600,000 corporate sponsored H-1b visas alone issued-about 50% of which were in the computer industry and about half of which might fit the category Mr. Roberts is talking about-that doesn't include L-1 visa holders and folks immigrating by other means.

The total displacement of US IT workers is near 40% or as bad as unemployment ever got during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

This is clearly not a stable situation-but the current trend is temporarily maintained with the aid of hundreds of millions in campaign donations.

When not only editorial authority over "news for nerds" is taken over by the advocates of this situation, but "representative" government itself, there are good reasons for IT professionals to be "unhappy".

Plus, you will make 1/3 what you would working the same job in the U.S.

Write your congressman. Organize a protest. Find someone to get active with. Boycott companies that use large amounts of foreign I.T. labor (IBM, G.E. & subsideraries are two). H1b visas are just as bad. Boycott companies that use large amounts of technical H1B visas.

Check out http://www.h1b.info/

Namecalling is the technique of the intellectually bankrupt.

It seems to me that Western governments are trying their best to improve the technical education of their people. Do you have evidence otherwise?

What I would suggest you want to look at here:

Enrollment in Science programs prior to H-1b/L-1 expansion and after. I think what you'll see is that the effect of offering large numbers of visas to those in Scientific and technical fields has been to drive US citizens from those fields. When I look at what the promoters of the H-1b/L-1 expansion were promising a few years ago, the effect was the opposite(Phil Gramm was saying stuff like "every one of these guys is going to create 20 jobs").

I'm not commenting on the moment about trade deals-but specifically about the wisdom of creating visa categories for specific jobs in a situation where the US economy isn't creating jobs at the same pace as immigration.

It also appears that rather than creating jobs in the US, H-1b and L-1 have been intensively used to facilitate outsourcing and to facilitate movement of capital to places like India. For example, Enron had 21,000 employees worldwide, about half were in the United States, and they had over 4700 Visa applications(overwhelmingly from India). Interestingly, out of $12 Billion of shareholders losses, at least $3 billion wound up in India.

Bad trade deals, including the WTO/NATFA have played a very important role causing the US currency to be highly valued, creating a large trade imbalence and locking the US into worker replacement programs like H-1b/L-1, and into the present tax structure.

The sad thing is that the US range of options is rather limited. We have a nuclear power that has shrinking manufacturing capability and enormous amounts of debt held by powers that have their own agendas.

An Indian will work twice as hard, for half the pay, that a fat, lazy American worker will do. I suggest that all companies start hiring your H-1Bs now, as the H-1B cap is set to be lowered to 65,000 in October 2003.

Stats for Sun Microsystems in Palo Alto care of h1b.info

More can be found by searching for Sun at http://h1b.info/lca_search.php

The memory company Micron is a perfect example. I can not find the figures right now but I believe they recieved over $15 million from the federal government to compensate for potential chip dumping from Hynix in South Korea (which Micron tried to buy but failed). Well, two months ago Micron all but closed both of their US fabs to concentrate on cheaper overseas production.

Here is their H1-B info

a link on h1-b. In short, H1-B is an expanded guest worker program for tech workers. Most H1-Bs are young men from India. Supporters say "It's good for business : lower labor costs for owners of capital ". American tech workers say "Why pick on us : lower wages for labor."

I guess there were no American Web Applications Engineers left to fill the spot.

Even your beloved Democrats have done NOTHING to stem the flow of H1B. Understand? NOTHING.

I never claimed to be a democrat. Anyone who believes the democrats or republicans in 2003 is a fool. Read about the people your beloved Bush is chumming around with:

Impending Worker Shortage

Your comments posses some qualities that contribute to the failure of America. Reflexive thinking. Your reality picture automatically placed me into one of the two facets that makes up your personality. It didn't fit into the "Republican Good" facet, so it went to "Democrats bad." And once I was in that cubby hole of your complex classification scheme, you discounted everything I said.

I didn't make any elaborate claims. Bush is pro H1B. H1Bs discplace American workers. Is that too much to understand? You're so determined to paint everything into your little political worldview that you are no longer able to grasp the self-evident.

And you even complimented Bush on his terrorist solutions in the context of an H1B discussion. Tell me, if a terrorist was in the united States and working, what sort of visas are available? And wouldn't H1B fall into that category?

I'm trying to discuss things. And everytime some political zombie like yourself gets into a discussion, you've got to drag the entire political blunderbus with you. You can take your two-faceted, partisan, and simple worldview and shove it up your ass. The world is more complex than Republican versus Democrat, and this is not a good time in history to look at events like a goddamned football game where everyone roots for their "team" regardless of the insanity of their policies.

sorry if this is offtopic but it's got to be said. The high-tech lobby continues to clamor about "Worker Shortages". To hear such statements in 2003 is disturbing. Are our representatives actually listening to them? I hope not. The dire employment outlook in the United States should be self-evident. Especially in the tech sector. To not acknowledge this high unemployment would be an indicator of some profound failure in our government. Are the wings of our government folding up and breaking apart like the shuttle's? Is our government able to make sound decisions anymore?

According to this:

In October 2003, the H-1B visa cap will automatically return to 65,000 annually, but the high-tech industry is already lobbying for more H-1B visas. Right now, groups such as the Information Technology Association of America
(ITAA) are circulating tails of an impending worker shortage if the current 195,000 visa cap isn't maintained. See stories in: CIO Magazine and Information Week.

Looks like a real life Worm-Toungue. After seeing things like this, there is no longer any doubt in my mind about the existence of real evil in this world. .

h1b info

Go to http://www.h1b.info to learn how to stop corporations from giving away all of our jobs. Despite the thousands of unemployed American tech workers. Evil CEOs and their cronies keep bringing in cheap labor from 3rd world countries.