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Tech Czar Unimpressed With US IT Workforce
theodp writes, "'The IT work force is not skilled enough and almost never can be skilled enough,' said Robert Cresanti, Under Secretary of Commerce for Technology. So what does the Poli Sci grad and ex-General Counsel for the ITAA think is the answer? Open the gates to more foreign workers, urged Cresanti, including H-1B holders."
But since he thinks the problem is that "there are not enough engineers with the appropriate skill sets", surely the long-term solution is to adjust your training and education regime so that there are enough such engineers? Hint to start with: degree courses in fields such as Computer Science and Software Engineering should not have teaching Visual Basic.Net and Java as the primary or only focus!
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Well, I guess that's a good short-term answer, if you're not at all interested in bolstering the skills of the local fauna. Short-term answers are great for politicians, too.
*sigh*
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
How about instead of H1-Bs, we fast-track green cards for people with needed skills, or is that not enough like indentured servitude?
Play Command HQ online
When faced with a workforce shortage, in no other field has the answer been to import skilled labor from other countries. The answer has always been to increase pay until the appropriate number of skilled candidates are attracted.
Allowing companies to import all of the skilled labor at cheap prices sets the stage for a dangerous trend. Ultimately it will sink wages throughout the workforce as companies see they can start trying this in other fields.
The government seems to think it has to use tarrifs to protect the iron industry but actively participates in the lowering of wages in the IT field.
I sincerely hope this starts to become a bigger issue and the word gets out. Undoubtedly if other fields start getting hit, the politicians will start to feel the pressure.
10 minutes working on a sig. What a waste.
The motivation behind this is: GREED! Big American companies want cheap disposable labor. They have no concern with what long-term effect this has on the middle-class, or on the economy, as long as it keeps propping up those bottom lines and rolling in the bonus and back-dated options. If they really wanted the best that the world has to offer, to be brought here and integrated into the US economy on a permanent basis, these would not be H1-B visas. They would have a program for work-towards-citizenship. Everything else is lies and misdirection.
...i read this as "czech tsar"... and who asked him, anyway?
They will never stop until somebody makes the
They were saying this during the bottom-of-the-barrel tech bust in the early 2000's. I personally met a representative from Microsoft who claimed this at a San Diego university, and he was saying this to unemployed techies in the same goddam room. He quickly left when the question-and-answer session came.
Table-ized A.I.
Is for technically skilled people to have more children. Companies must embrace women and pregnancy, with daycare and . Only Darwin can help us here. They are the only way to increase the force of people capable and willing to be the next generation.
The severe problem of supply of staff will lead to soaring salaries of course... Simple market economics, restricted supply and strong demand. What you say? Salaries are not soaring? Doesn't sound like much of a shortage to me then.
Deleted
The government seems to think it has to use tarrifs to protect the iron industry but actively participates in the lowering of wages in the IT field.
The reason for the difference?: UNIONS
You may complain about unions all you want, but without them your political ass is not powerful enough to compete with deep corporate pockets and armies of full-time lobbyists.
Perhaps we could form some kind of open-source union? Just a thought.
By the way, the Rand Corporation looked into general claims of tech/sci shortages in the late 90's, and found none. It is a scam.
Table-ized A.I.
VISAs are essentially an import tariff on employees.
Remember the steel import tariff Bush imposed a year or two back? the steel manufacturers were overjoyed - and rightly so; since imported steel now cost 45% more, they could raise their prices to match, and they made plenty of money out of it.
Who suffered? well, *EVERYONE ELSE*. All the companies who use steel had to pay 45% more. All their products (cars, construction materials for houses, etc) went up in price to compensate for their costs. You and I subsidized the steel industry, by Bush's decree.
Back to VISAs.
If you have demand for a skill-set and a shortfall in supply, wages go up.
Just like steel prices going up, when wages go up, final product prices go up.
So if you restrict the supply of programmers, software prices go up to compensate.
Who benefits? American programmers. They have fatter pay packets (which they notice), but most things they buy will be more expensive (which they won't notice). (Things are more expensive since the part of their cost which covers the price of the software used to make them has gone up).
So who pays? you and I, by Bush's decree.
The "solution" is to import cheap labour to further erode your citizens' desire to spend the time/money/effort getting those advanced technical degrees.
... why, in his opinion, are Americans so much dumber than citizens in other countries?
After all, why rack up so much debt from school when there will be someone else willing to do the same job for less because his school loans (if they exist) are a fraction of your's?
And isn't in the corporation's best interest to get the cheapest labour they can find?
So, the question becomes
I don't think we are. But I do believe that our government is too closely involved with business's desire to get the maximum benefit with the minimum investment. Fuck that. I want to see scholarships for advanced technical studies. Lots of them. Put your money where your mouth is. When 50% of the computer science majors can get out of school and pay off their debt within 5 years, THAT will be sufficient. Only then can he talk about how dumb Americans are.
Such broad statements don't help. I think it is a mixture of the IT industry needing more specific skills AND more people.... I don't believe that blanket H1 increases will solve the problem.
The IT industry should look inward and admit that it has done a piss-poor job of training people (and the employees have been complacent in their training demands). While many companies have training courses, most of these courses cover only general topics. Highly specific and technical knowledge takes more than a two-week course can provide, it takes months, even years to develop. IT companies somehow expect Universities to deliver these people, ready made for work. As long as employee training is considered a cost more than a benefit, the industry will keep saying that they can't find the skilled people. What these companies are saying in reality is that it is not cost effective for them to train their own employees, it is much cheaper to get foreigners trained at much lower cost and then import them. This outlook denies the fact that many employees posses the practical experience to quickly learn new skills if given the opportunity.
So what is the solution? I don't know, but the net effect of allowing more H1's will not be an overall improvement of American skills.
Summary: US Kids are dumb, lazy, and fat and only interested in video games and lighting their farts on fire. Jobs in the US are leaving the country. Employers are moving their hiring to China, India, Brazil, Eastern Europe. Skilled workers in the US are having a hard time gettings or keeping jobs and the US companies' salary increases aren't even tracking the cost of living increases in the US.
Proposed solution: Bring in more foreign workers to compete for the few jobs that haven't been outsourced or moved overseas?!? Have them bring their extended families with them into the US. WTF! I'm not trying to be protectionist, but... we need to improve education in the US and we need to make sure that there will be good jobs for our kids when they grow up.
I know a lot of US companies now that only hire about 1 person in the US for every 20 they hire. Do you really think it's because they're aren't any qualified workers in the US!?
Could we see a day when our kids will be leaving the US to go to China and India to look for jobs and we'll be complaining about those countries limiting US foreign workers? I believe so...
Very worrying indeed. But we should not be surprised because the US education system has been in "free fall" since the mid-eighties. One day, I fear that the US, like all other "major empires" of the past, will be irrelevant. When this happens China Brazil and India will matter. This is scary!
You're getting as mixed a bag with H1Bs as you are with US IT workers. In IT you can make a salary well over the national average and it's a lot easier to get your foot in the door than it is with medicine or law. I've met some very talented H1Bs and I've had to clean up after some who were complete idiots. The trick isn't so much in the volume of smart people, the trick is in your HR Department's ability to filter out the folks who are only in it for the money.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
This is all the fault of outsourcing - I used to work in a callcentre for a now defunct computer company and while we did have some training, only two weeks mind, we had no incentive to fix problems. Even if we did have the skills, and it would take twenty minutes on the phone to fix, there was no reason to do that. I left when I got a better job, the last straw being my colleague being praised for fobbing people off because he took more calls than I did trying to fix things.
To gauge Robert Cresanti's comments, it is important to first grasp where he comes from. So who is Robert Cresanti? He is a former Vice President of Public Policy for the BSA. Yes, that BSA. Before that, he was the Senior Vice President and General Counsel for the ITAA.
Why is this important? Both of these are groups that are all about the interests of big corporations. The BSA, in particular, protects those interests without regard for anyone in its path. So when someone of this mindset says they need to import more workers, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out where he's coming from. There are two basic ways that companies in the US could increase the number of qualified workers. One is to increase salaries significantly enough to entice capable students of pursuing a career in IT. The second is to import workers from other countries often willing to work for the same or less.
For government, the two basic ways are to increase educational funding to lower the barrier for students to pursue higher education in IT and the second is to ease restrictions on workers from other countries to work in the US.
The second option is the quickest and "cheapest" solution from both a private and government perspective. The fact that he is promoting this as a solution shows that he thinks short term and not long term. It also means he thinks from the perspective of what is best for big business and not the American worker. This isn't totally surprising considering where he comes from and who got him in his position.
The outsourcing boom is not working so well.
The number of CS grads is going down.
The US salaries are going up.
What to do, what to do, they've got us by the short hairs again... what did we do before? Ah yes.
Convince Congress that we don't have enough people to do the job, and that those people who live here suck anyway.
Let the H1B's start a-flowin'!
Salaries go down, more American students won't take CS as a degree, then we can ask for more, cheaper slave slabor from abroad! Eternal power-down cycle! Win-win! $$ for us managers!
Grapeape - excellent comments. In particular:
it is more from people who were forced out during the "offshoring" boom and the waves of layoffs due to "restructuring".
And to add to that, it's also due to the segmented, "pigeon-hole" strategy that most larger corporations use with their IT (which, incidentally, is even worse with off-shore IT workers).
I was a telecom engineer and manager who experienced the dot-com bust, worked as an infosec consultant for banks for several years while I went back and got a finance and risk management education. I'm now contracting to one of the larger international firms in critical infosec projects. I was brought on to accelerate lagging and failing infosec systems due to client and compliance issues - in spite of over 2,000 IT workers worldwide, serious problems were developing. Logs were being ignored, policies not implemented, and basic infosec systems falling apart. Production system hardening was being done poorly and risks were being assumed all over the place.
Outsourcing work the past 4 years for this firm made things even more of a disaster. The result was a segmentation IT environment where everyone just focused on their own specific area and nobody thought about interdependencies, broader operational and infosec issues, etc. When it got outsourced, the remaining internal people couldn't communicate with the outsourcing firms and nobody took ownership for understanding how things worked.
This is the real IT problem, and our educational systems do very little to address it. Cross-specialization is critical but ignored. H1Bs make this worse, not better, as the cultural/caste issues inherent in many of the outsourcing target nations make it less likely that people will speak up about potential items outside of their speciality. I deal with that aspect nearly daily.
So why is the Bush administration and the Democratic congresspersons so eager to blame US IT workers? They pursue the same myth the previous executive management of the firm I'm working with believed (previous as in their mismanagement led to across-the-board pink slips for the execs - something that is unfortunately too infrequent given how poorly many run their firms). Rather than develop a cross-functional culture (which is not easy), they seek the 1920s assembly-line, replacable cheap worker dreams where IT people only handle a single function and nobody is made responsible for the larger picture. Those people are difficult to replace for half the wages.
I blame schools. Secondary education is big business. There's only a handful of schools with quality programs. Here in Louisiana, many schools still teach pascal and basic. Later courses are taught by underqualified professors who've been out of the loop for years. For my C++ course, I had to constantly argue with the teacher over every program I would write because he did not know the ANSI standards. The class barely covered the first three chapters of a "teach yourself C++ in 24 hours" type book. Classes tend to "gear down" to the accomodate the dumbest person in the class, which is just wrong. I got fed up, left school, got six years experience, then came back and got a business degree.
Successful developing nations adapt their curricula to produce timely skills, and many are the targets of massive investment and job migration.
Meanwhile, in the face of mass offshoring, we have an increasingly undereducated population whose skills are steadily declining in value.
Visas and offhosring appear attractive short-term solutions because qualified candidates have TOO MUCH education and cost too much.
If the average high school graduate had the needed skills, we'd already have the labor at a reasonable cost.
"Before his confirmation, Cresanti served as Vice President of Public Policy at the Business Software Alliance (BSA). Prior to this, he was Senior Vice President and General Counsel for the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA). Earlier in his career, he served as Staff Director for the Senate Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem. He was also Staff Director for the Subcommittee on Financial Services and Technology for the Senate Banking Committee. Mr. Cresanti received his B.A. degree from Austin College and his Juris Doctor degree from Baylor University."
"The Under Secretary is focused on carrying forward President Bush's vision to grow the economy... the Under Secretary's priorities are to: foster an environment conducive to private sector investment in innovation, by identifying ways to facilitate knowledge exchange between scientists and investors, which will boost our country's economic performance"
He's a republican from big business, charged with carrying forth a republican agenda "conductive to private sector investment". And what is a way in which this is accomplished? Lower labor costs. See, most people on Slashdot see America's IT performance as the number/quality of native workers. Cresanti sees it as how attractive each company's stocks are. And in this case, what's good for the goose is not so good for the gander.
Of course, in all fairness, that is a valid perspective, and isolating our market's cost structure from the rest of the world is not sustainable long-term. Thus, this results in a more short term decrease in the American standard of living, and increase in the third world's standard of living-- which no one here likes. There is of course an alternative; 97% of the wealth in the US is controlled by 3% of the population, or something like that. As Mahatma Gandhi said, "The earth has enough to satisfy every man's need, but not any man's greed."
So the bigger picture here is that we are not an island, and our standard of living is also dependent upon the standard of living of the rest of the world. But the earth is very rich in resources, and there certainly exists enough for all to enjoy a reasonable standard of living. The question then becomes, how do you redistribute the ultra-concentrated wealth in such a manner it is to the benefit of all, without the detriments of communism and forced labor, without killing incentive, risk, and drive that led to its creation? I think the happy medium is displayed in many European countries, with a more reasonable redistribution of wealth that encompasses rewarding the people who create it and taking care of the rest of society. Hell, the wealthy should be wealthy. Just perhaps to not such a large degree. How many gold shark minibars does one truly need for their 4th vacation mansion?
The core attitude that is an immediate reaction to stories like this though creates the problem. We immediately think of us, our lifestyle, etc. But we fail to acknowledge the connectedness to others; by hoarding ourselves, either individually or as a nation, we let our neighbors fall into poverty, which comes full circle when they labor for much cheaper wages and are no less human or capable. So I think the true solution is to raise the standard of living in countries we so fear for taking our jobs, for a reasonable redistribution of some of the wealth in the hands of so few, with the intent of providing a livable baseline for all and still room and reason for success and risk taking. And that is very much within our power-- our nation already has the wealth, as evidenced by massive spending in Iraq, and the concentrated wealth at the hands of so few in the population. We simply lack the will to use it to help ourselves and our neighbors. And every time the response is one of selfishness instead of compassion, at any level of society, even for us... the problem perpetuates itself. For if the vast majority of society is committed to any particular economic policy, chances
Several other major countries such as Australia let people into the country for job reasons while approximately 2/3 of immigrants come to the US under family reunification. In an era of cheap long distance, the Internet, and discount airfares, giving such a high priority to family reunification probably doesn't make sense (definition of "family" includes adult brothers and sisters of US citizens etc...).
Its funny that you talk about the free market while simultaneously advocating protectionism. In what way are India, China and Mexico less free or more protectionist than the USA? How are they damaging you in the 'unskilled labour market'?
If someone is willing to work for $1/day, then in a free market he will get a lot of customers. That person is not damaging your 'unskilled labour market'. It means that the work he is performing is only worth $1/day. That is the definition of the free market.
You are free to disagree whether it is right or wrong, but don't pretend to understand the free market while condemning free competition and advocating artificial barriers to trade.
I teach the three-semester calculus-based freshman physics sequence to a lot of engineering majors to a community college. A lot of these people are intelligent enough to learn the material, but flunk out of physics because of their weak backgrounds. It's not uncommon to look at their transcripts and see them having started their community college careers by taking Math 20, which is basic arithmetic. It's extremely difficult to start from that level, and then work your way up to the level of competence required of an engineer. In addition, many of them have really weak language skills; sometimes this is because they're immigrants, but other times it's because they entered college with a sixth-grade reading level. Some of them also just don't seem to have put education very high on their list of priorities.
The net result of all this is that at my school, the total number of students who start the calc-based physics sequence every year is something like 300, and the number who finish it is roughly 30. (Some of the loss is from students who transfer before finishing, and or students who fail calculus, etc.)
There's a pretty simple solution to the problem, which is to set higher standards in math, English, and science in K-12; enforce those standards with standardized tests; and refuse to promote kids to the next grade if they can't demonstrate that they've mastered the material. Our present system is especially harmful to people who come from working-class backgrounds. They go to lousy public schools, and they and their parents get the impression that they're getting a good education. Then they arrive in college, and find out just how much they've been screwed over by our educational system.
Of course, Slashdot's readership is disproportionately composed of tech workers who are U.S. citizens, so I'm sure there will be plenty of people howling about the damn immigrants coming in and taking away our jobs. I'm none of their ancestors were immigrants. But seriously, would you rather compete for jobs against a coder who immigrated from India, and is expecting U.S.-level pay, or a coder who is still in India, and is therefore available for 1/4 of what you'd cost? If there's a problem, it's that H-1B visas don't necessarily lead to any opportunity to remain permanently in the U.S.
Find free books.
People don't make major choices about their broad vocations simply on money. Temperament and aptitude is more important. Now, within those broad vocational parameters, money matters. Someone may become an oncologist, a general practitioner, or a pediatrician based on various trade-offs between pay, workload, etc. But they aren't going to choose between software engineer and doctor - considering the vicissitudes of the labor market, it would be foolish for them to.
People don't make major choices about their broad vocations simply on money.
The hell they don't.
Most of them don't. I went into programming because I enjoyed it. I picked it over other careers that pay more because I don't enjoy them. Generally, the people who pick a career based on money are those who do poorly. Because it is just a job to them, and not something they love to do.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Apparently, Robert Cresanti, Under Secretary of Commerce for Technology; is a bought and paid for whore giving blow jobs to Microsoft and other tech corps. You mean a politician is corrupt and using his position to make recommendations based upon the bribes of corporate interest rather than doing 'the right thing'(TM)? Oh my, I am so astonished that such a thing could happen in our great nation.
Didn't anyone tell him we have the only shiny and clean political system and are the greatest most honest dudley do right nation in the world? Didn't he get the memo telling him that we don't brainwash our children with altered more patriotic versions of history to brainwash them? Or the part where in the land of the free our government doesn't perform thousands of warrant less wiretaps on the private domestic communication of citizens not even suspected of crimes. Certainly no corrupt politicians elected with rigged voting machines.
I just hope that this nation hasn't gone so far that people actually are lulled into a false sense of security because of a few wins for the other corrupt party in the two rigged party system. Those who rig elections in this country pay the ones with (D) in the title just as surely as the ones with (R).
All this talk about "what employers want" is moot without knowing what they really want. There is no specific research or studies that we can rely on. We know what us techies feel is important, but we don't call the shots. We will spin our wheels here until this is answered.
Now that thats out of the way. My personal observation is that they want instant skills in whatever is popular that month. The easiest way to get that is to comb the world for those skills rather than wait to train existing staff. This is a general trend in the economy, not just IT. I've seen it in the fashion industry thru the experience of relatives: permanent jobs are a thing of the past. Employers want faster staff turnaround to fit current needs (as they see them). The only reason companies don't actually hire more temps is because temps expect more to compensate for the instabality. They just hire in the guise of perm because it is cheaper, but that is not their real plan.
The US must specialize in fast-changing fields because commodity fields go overseas. Churn is now our comparative advantage.
Table-ized A.I.
There is no need for the government to "fix" shortages by importing desperate labor in the form of H-1B workers or illegal aliens. When the government "fixes" a shortage, the government is damaging the normal operation of the free market. The free market works fine without government intervention.
Regrettably, most politicians (and some journals like the "Wall Street Journal") cater to certain segments of the population and outright lie about how economic laws work. For example, many Republicans favor big agri-businesses and claim that the American economy will be irreparably damaged unless Washington allows illegal aliens to pick fruits and vegetables. Many Democrats favor ethnic pressure groups like La Raza and make an identical claim.
Journals like the "Wall Street Journal" use an even sneakier strategy. The Journal repeatedly claims that increasing the American population is wonderful because doing so increases the wealth of the nation via increasing human capital. To a point, this claim is true. Consider an economy of exactly one person. That economy is pathetically poor because one person, regardless of how smart she is, cannot be equally skilled in all areas of work. Here, when I refer to wealth, I am referring to wealth per capita (i.e., GDP per capita), also known as personal wealth. If the 1-person economy grew into a 2-person economy, we can easily imagine that the wealth doubles or triples: one person is tending the vegetable garden while the other person is protecting the grass hut from wild animals.
However, consider an economy with 100 million people. If we doubled the size of this economy, then its wealth does not double. The wealth increases by substantially less than 1 percent. After a certain population size, each doubling of the population brings a rapidly decreasing percentage gain in the wealth.
The game that the WSJ plays is to ignore this concept of diminishing returns. Further, the WSJ deceptively says that doubling the population doubles the total weath (i.e., the total GDP, not the GDP per capita). Though that statement is true, it does nothing for the actual wealth that you experience. What you experience is GDP per capita, not total GDP.
Finally, there is a trade-off between (for example) a 0.1% increase in personal wealth (i.e., GDP per capita) and annoyances (e.g., pollution) created by a doubling of the American population.
By the way, identical comments about diminishing returns apply to global trade. Onces a global free market reaches a certain size, it captures most of the advantages of a large amount of human capital. The USA loses almost nothing by restricting our free trade to only free markets, which includes (at the moment) only Western nations. We should slam our markets shut to non-free markets like India, China, and Mexico. The tiny percentage gain in personal wealth (i.e., the GDP per capita) that we get by including India, China, and Mexico is completely offset by their damaging impact on Americans in the unskilled-labor market. China indirectly erodes the quality of life for Americans in the unskilled-labor market.
Then, along comes the WSJ to deceptively talk about total wealth (i.e., the total GDP) in absolute numbers, say, an increase in total GDP of $15 billion dollars. $15 billion is an eye-popping number. However, divide that number of the number of Americans to get the GDP per capita, and you see only an increase of $50. Is $50 worth destroying the quality of life for Americans in the unskilled-labor market?
"never can be skilled enough" what a racist fuck. he thinks just because your forgien you can become more skilled??? what an asshole. deny kids the training and experience to become skilled then take away any chance they might have had by flooding the country with imported workers? this guy is the worst kind of cocksucker.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
that's also why they build most of the cars they sell HERE with US workers.. as well as BMW... Americans actually do quality work CHEAPER than in Japan or Germany. Those companies realize that our government are suckers for sloppy management.. and they are eating the good employees up like hotcakes. Most German or Japanese companies can tell you EXACTLY what they want you to do... unfortunately, they leave little room for short term advancement and tend to be to "high-school" for my tastes. American companies can't give you a definite job description ever... they always expect employees to be able to pick up the slack for funding shortages, unexpected up sizing, or downsizing or management mis decisions. American companies are not productive because business owners and managers are always chasing the "big dream" and not running the business they have RIGHT NOW. Productivity at auto makers has gone up 7-9% every year for 10 years, but automakers still loose money? Hint, it's not the workers, even the lazy union ones costing money. Perhaps we need to import MANAGERS under H1B and not techs.
Business wants cheap labor. It has nothing to do with "skill sets" - which these morons wouldn't understand if you paid them anyway, as anybody who has ever looked for a tech job knows.
They stop supporting universities and trade schools. They also treat the tech grads they have miserly - as they have since the dot.bomb. They make sure the tech employment market slows down.
Wallah! No more tech grads.
Now they go to the government and say, "We don't have enough tech grads! Let us import cheap labor."
Suckers.
Again, if you don't understand the underlying motives of humans, you'll never understand how things work in the real world.
Go see the movie, "The Departed" which illustrates the point. Jack Nicholson as Frank Costello has a great line. Told somebody's mother is dying and "on her way out", he replies: "You all are. Act accordingly."
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I for one welcome our new graduating class of Real Estate Brokers, Cosmetic Surgeons, Politicians and Lawyers specializing in IP law.
Do we have any hard evidence that having a free market, where Indian or Chinese programmers were favored over American ones -- however 'overpriced' the Americans might be -- helps America? We seem to be taking on premise that a completely free market helps the First World, but I'm not sure why this is. The WSJ crowd never seems to explain exactly the reasoning and evidence for this claim; it's treated as holy writ, beyond all question. And if there's one thing that I really dislike, it's claims that aren't allowed to be questioned.
So what if Americans are "overpriced" compared to workers in areas where basic working conditions aren't guaranteed? That's not a level playing field; it simply guarantees that if Americans want to compete, we have to drop to that level. Why should we allow this? If it doesn't help our economy, why are we implementing economic policies that help China and India, at our workers and our economy's expense?
Simply saying that 'so-and-so doesn't facilitate a free market,' doesn't automatically make it a bad thing. Maybe we don't want a completely free market, if it means we're going to have to compete directly with countries that treat their workers as disposable units. We need to think about the ultimate effects of our economic policies on our citizens, in the long term, and back it up with convincing evidence and research instead of just polemics.
I'm open to both arguments here but convinced of neither; there seem to be a shortage of factual arguments when it comes to foreign and domestic economic policy, and I don't think that helps anything.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
OK, Mr. Cresanti, so the US is lacking in IT workers with the "appropriate skill sets."
Pray tell, then, what are the appropriate skill sets? What, you don't know? You just know that the IT-industry lobbyist who took you out for a lobster dinner and lap dance last night said we don't have the right kind of people in the US, and we need to allow cheaper workers in. He must know, because he's getting paid so much by the big IT brass, right?
Oh, wait, is the "appropriate skill set" something like eight to ten years of developing a particular part of a particular kind of application in a particular environment using a particular set of tools? Then BS, because you don't learn that in school.
From where I sit, I see thousands of experienced IT people getting laid off every month for the last five years. I don't see any of the employers who are crying labor shortage looking to scoop up even some of these people.
I don't see many employers striving to hire new college grads who lack experience, but have demonstrated ability, for purpose of mentoring them to be the next generation of leaders. (Oh wait, we are doing that with foreign workers, I forgot).
Cry me a river, Mr. Cresanti, but until you have some specifics to back up your argument, at least do us the favor of crying in private.