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Silicon Valley Presses Obama, Congress On Immigration Reform
walterbyrd sends this excerpt from the LA Times:
"In a rare show of unity, Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer were among a coalition of high-profile executives and venture capitalists to send a letter on Thursday to President Obama and congressional leaders pressing for a fix to restrictive immigration laws by year's end. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, investors and executives are also planning a virtual "march" on Washington in April. 'Because our current immigration system is outdated and inefficient, many high-skilled immigrants who want to stay in America are forced to leave because they are unable to obtain permanent visas,' the letter says. 'Some do not bother to come in the first place.'"
The letter also offers these suggestions: "We believe that numerical levels and categories for high-skilled nonimmigrant and immigrant visas should be responsive to market needs and, where appropriate, include mechanisms to fluctuate based on objective standards. In addition, spouses and children should not be counted against the cap of high-skilled immigrant visas. There should not be a marriage or family penalty."
IT workers not realizing they control the means of production
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guSdjsctrUQ&feature=player_detailpage#t=2458s
wage slaves
If they didn't refuse to hire anyone over 40, they wouldn't have a problem...
...the US has a problem with high levels of employment.
Why can't these firms set up educational establishments to train US citizens to the skill levels they need? Or have apprenticeships? Or....
Actually I think it seems a cynical way to keep labour costs down, so perhaps companies ought to be allowed to hire from overseas providing they demonstrate they're paying that worker 25% more than a US citizen would earn in the same role.
I'm not a US citizen, but I think this, like offshoring is a way of trying to force labour costs down. Paradoxically I think you want labour costs up, as increasing the affluence of the lower/middle classes creates a larger market for your goods.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
"We believe that numerical levels and categories for high-skilled nonimmigrant and immigrant visas should be responsive to market needs and, where appropriate, include mechanisms to fluctuate based on objective standards. In addition, spouses and children should not be counted against the cap of high-skilled immigrant visas. There should not be a marriage or family penalty."
We should improve the education system and encourage our fine American youth to make use of it rather than importing immigrants from abroad. Why is the knee jerk reaction from these greedy corporate bastards always to import talent or export jobs rather than fix the what's wrong at home?
Marissa Mayer needs immigration reform, because she won't let them work from their home.
I'm here all night.
The brain drain is hurting the nation that the educated immigrant left behind (e.g. that immigrant is not filling positions nor creating opportunities in their homeland).
The immigrant is taking opportunities from educated Americans and likely reducing the potential wages of that educated American.
...hasn't learned the lessons that manufacturers and call center managers have learned?
That seems odd.
You never know...
The current state is a really bad deal. The smart ones realize this and stay away (well, that and the US looking more and more like a fundamentalist state...). Hence the quality of foreign workers drops and they cannot be used to depress the wages of the US workers so easily anymore, which of course is bad for corporate US, but good for US citizens looking for a job.
Just look at who complains and the story becomes pretty clear.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Is there anybody who thinks the US really has restrictive immigration laws considering how many millions of people want to come here?
We take in more immigrants than any other country already. The fact is there are only so many we can absorb at a time without compromising social services, stability and the job market. Some would say we have already gone past that point.
Tech companies love work visas, because they can draw smart kids from China, India, and elsewhere, pay them way below market wages, and the poor schmucks have to take it because their resident status is tied to their job.
Sure, you say, they could just switch jobs to a better paying one...but since it costs a company thousands to sponsor you for a visa, even if you've already got one and are transferring it to your new employer, so they won't want to pay you jack either so they can recoup the cost of sponsoring you.
How about hiring some americans at competitive wages, instead of indentured servants?
In a show of unity both tech giants want their very own underpaid over worked employees just like every other segment of the U.S economy. Punks all of them.
immigrant minority citizen computer scientist here.
this whole thing is a bullshit ploy to provide high tech companies with skilled labor for less money along with a nice tax write off for the taxes that they don't pay anyways. between facebook, google, and apple they robbed california blind on the balance sheets. i say if they start paying taxes like the rest of us, they should be able to import whatever the fuck they want.
im tired of how stpid/lazy/fat americans have become. they are not inherently less intelligent. they are just drowning in media and eating fast food with no access to education. only children of the rich and immigrants have access to education in the usa.
people who go to school in the usa think that christopher columbus discovered the americas (lol). they think that edison invented the lightbulb (fucking thief). they think that lincoln faught the civil war to free the slaves (he apologized for it, and as an attorney represented slave owners). they think god gave israel to zionist colonizers (the rothchilds are better propagandists than hitler). they think terrorists hate america because of freedom (not even touching this one).
fuck the h1b visa. let americans learn to read. give them maps. take away their burgers. turn of their televisions. let them work respectable jobs. dont let them use calculators until after they graduate. most importantly, fuck silicon valley. the internet means anyone from anywhere can do anything. if zuckerburg cant find noobs in the bay area, he can hire from the rest of the usa so facebook can continue to peddle their crap.
...is money. And go figure that Zuckerburg would want it, he doesn't even like paying taxes, much less paying a decent wage to an American employee.
Don't even get me started on Meyer. She's directly answering to the oil sheiks these days with all the gas being consumed by telecommuting. We know where her investments lie.
There is no shortage, its companies attempting to avoid paying north american residents and to refuse to invest in training of their employees, Hey which would you rather hire Employee A who earns 50k and two weeks vacation and no benefits or Employe B 120k, four weeks, benefits and legally aware of their rights.
Employee A -> India
Employee B -> North American (Canada, USA, Mexico)
Globalisation is something we don't all get to benefit from. It about letting immigrants, generally from poor countries, come to a western country and probably working for poor wages. He'll be ok with that because we have clear water and hide our poverty away better, right?
But we still get web sites, films, games, etc divided up into regions. Why can't I take advantage of globalisation and buy games from anywhere? Why is it harder for an American to go to Hong Kong and take a job where he may be needed more?
Maybe if they'd push for the negotiation of free movement treaties and provide content on a global basis then people would be happier to support them. Instead, I can't help but feel all they really care about is driving down costs.
Yes, those reforms need to be passed. It's getting harder and harder to find highly skilled professionals willing to work for 20K/year.
All American IT workers payed between 60K-120K are standing in the way for companies to be competitive in the global market.
Let MBA's make the rules. Unemployment will be history and everybody happily will earn $5/hr.
" include mechanisms to fluctuate based on objective standards."
How about objective *tests* for these positions that supposedly there are no competent citizens available to perform?
If no citizens can pass the test, and H1B candidates can, fine, let the H1B candidate win.
The bogus thing is, the H1Bs hired by pimp contract agencies aren't the best available, they're just the whores that the pimp with the employment contract happens to own, and indentured servants who you can kick out of the country if they displease you make better whores than citizens with the right to be here.
Of course it will be a virtual march for them:
Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, investors and executives are also planning a virtual "march" on Washington in April.
They will be underpaying highly skilled immigrants to march for them.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
What are national borders for in general? Isn't the first reason for them to secure the resources and to know if somebody crosses in with an army to steal resources?
What should borders be in a global economy? Should they even exist to prevent people from moving from country to country for example to provide supply of labour?
What are the main problems with immigrants crossing borders? Isn't it the fear that "they" will come and take away your .... whatever government subsidy and a job?
But for example USA in the current economy is importing TRILLIONS worth of goods, and at least 500 Billion of it is unpaid for, it's 'borrowed' with vendor's money. Given that fact, doesn't it make sense to OPEN borders and ALLOW people to move in and out without even bothering with any visa regime whatsoever, as long as nobody can claim some form of social assistance? Why am I saying it? Because the more skilled labour is within your borders, the more offer there is for labour, the lower the prices are but this means that investors can actually hire people (yes, at lower prices), but given the unsustainable trade deficit, you want as much labour to be actually occupied within your borders in productive capacity as possible, because you want to be able to balance out that trade deficit and actually pay down the debt.
My proposal is that there should be no limits to any number of people coming into the country, as long as they do not get any form of social assistance, and they should be able to work anywhere at all without any government authorisation.
USA government isn't even authorised to limit people from coming in and working without some government official allowing them in the first place! Article 1 section 8 of USA Constitution says: Congress is authorised to regulate commerce with foreign nations, but individuals are not nations and if they come in and work inside the country they are not actually even engaged in Interstate and cross-border commerce.
My point is that this is one more thing that the government is doing that is illegal for it to do - limiting people's ability to move anywhere they want and work anywhere they want and where their abilities can be employed. It doesn't matter that they are not US citizens, actually nothing in Article 1 section 8 states that Congress has the right to prevent anybody from moving in and out of States unless they are a foreign occupying military force.
You can't handle the truth.
In the last three months, our company has hired THREE H1B employees, one being a programmer. They had to post the jobs, so I got to see the salary ranges.
'Less restrictive' is code for 'lower paid'. There are plenty of out-of-work US citizens that could have done these jobs, but if they hire H1B, they can pay less and keep them longer because of the sponsorship requirement. I was able to review resumes for one position, and there were definitely capable US citizens to do these.
I'm not against hiring talented, smart, folks. I'm not even against companies paying less and driving down wages if it makes products cheaper.
I am against lying about why they are doing it. Just be honest, and admit Mr. Zuckerberg that you just want to hire people you can pay less money.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
replacement?
This is also pushing Americans away from the tech field. Which will, eventually, cost the US it's technological edge.
If you want Americans to be attracted to engineering jobs, provide jobs for them.
Every couple of years I have a thought that I feel deserves to be voiced, I apologize in advance for my ignorance.
When I think of a group's need to import skilled labor I think to myself, "Hmm. We must be puling from the same old bag of tricks while at work and need some fresh perspective." That is a good motivation! But more importantly I think, and philosophically, and please try your best not to skewer me for not being able to be concise, the idea should be that we need to co-mingle at an earlier age to achieve lasting, non-bicker fraught, advantage.
All too often at places I have worked when the idea of "teamwork" is brought up during meeting, it is met with snickers and jeers instead of sincere concern that the cohesiveness that enables success as a group has been found missing.
In a nutshell I think that the "import" concept needs to extend more heavily and with support to a time when future "highly skilled labor" is still in the education phase.
or from her home.
Look. I work in a major US tech company and am involved with hiring from a technical level, and I can tell you first hand that the quantity of quality people in North America IS lacking. Out of all of the employees you hire, maybe 1 of the 10 is the rockstar you need for your project... the rest are OK, sure, but when you are working under tight timelines and need creative solutions on a global stage, you don't need a bunch of churned-out code monkeys, you NEED those rock stars.
This is NOT about cheap labor. Do you think it is cheap to pay a lawyer to handle the visa process (about 10K minimum), to handle the annual renewal (about 5K minimum), to pay global relocation expenses (another 10K)? On top of this, the wages and benefits we're talking about here in Silicon Valley are some of the highest in the country. We're not bringing people over from India and paying them 40K / year to work on Facebook - it is just not happening, it is a myth.
There are two problems we have here
- We are not getting enough kids into STEM at an early age. Only kids who are really into STEM in middle and high school are the ones who go onto be the rock stars this country needs to compete. Someone who goes to university just to get a job in CS that pays well on graduation, and does not have a PASSION for technology, is not going to be this rock star.
- The US, like most countries in the OECD, has a declining birth rate. The US is one of the only remaining countries in the first world that still has replacement population birth levels, but very soon (maybe end of 2014), it won't anymore. Combine declining birth rates with accelerating boomers retiring and you have a very poor economic picture. WE NEED more skilled immigrants just to maintain the economy. Otherwise, you are going to have a very very scary picture developing in the next couple of decades.
There's no shortage of qualified Americans. Those companies prefer to employ cheap foreign labor. Where IT jobs have not yet been offshored, the companies want to bring in foreigners.
My hopefully future employer is applying for an H1B on my behalf for a software developer position, so let me give you that perspective. This company is hiring everyone they can find with the right aptitude, so I don't see that I'm taking anyone's job. I don't think I'm depressing wages either, given that my salary is going to be in excess of $150,000 a year and I am not a senior developer. According to Glassdoor.com, my salary is higher than the average for people in that position at that company and also for people in that position in that area. The company is known as a good place to work, so it's not that Americans don't want to work there. It's simply that they can't find enough qualified people, even though they are hiring for aptitude more so than concrete skills - the specific topic I'll work on is something I haven't done before. Yet it is possible that there will be an H1B lottery this year (it happens if the cap is reached in a single day) and that I will lose the lottery and therefore won't get an H1B. I'm not sure that really benefits the US, but I imagine that my home country won't mind me sticking around.
for a small sliver of the population. That's why these immigration programs are so great for companies. There's a small group of people that are fully productive working 60 hours a week. Thanks to the H1B program you're competing head on with all of them at once.
I tell ya, what we IT people need is a Super Pac. If everyone that touched a computer got together and pitched in $5 bucks a month in we'd at least be able to buy some House reps, maybe even a senator. If that's how the game works, I say we start playing.
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If globalisation is so great then why can't we have region free digital goods
Decades-long exclusive territorial distribution contracts agreed to before home broadband became affordable make that difficult. So do exchange rate discrepancies caused by historic lack of an export sector in a country's economy. So does a dearth of local advertisers in some regions.
really it's not. I don't understand why people get confused and bemused when they see Capitalism as it's always been doing what it always has.
Australia OTOH, a largely socialist country, just voted a guy in on a platform of job protection.
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in a place with lots of H1Bs. They're code monkeys and entry level sys admins. We're not importing their physicists and mathematicians. India is smart enough to take care of those guys and see that they don't leave. We're bringing in guys at the entry level. If you can read, write and type I can have you doing it in 3 months. Sure, I can do it with an H1B in half that, but that's because they'll work 80 hours a week until they get the job down.
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Then why hasn't a Thirteenth Amendment lawsuit been filed over the indentured servitude-like aspects of the H-1B program?
it's not designed to reward underachievers. It pulls funding from failing schools for God's sakes (you lose funding if you're kids don't pass the tests). It's goal is pretty obvious: gut the school system so education can be privatized for profit.
There was just a really nice article on why the US Healthcare system is so bleeding expensive and the conclusion of an extensive multi-year study was: because it can be. My buddy drove a school bus until they privatized that and cut his wages. Did the district save money? Nope, not after 3 years. They're just so short on cash they wanted to sell their bus fleet so they could operate another year, and hope the voters would take a 1% tax raise to pay for schools (they didn't). Now the company that has the contract is jacking up prices because they know the district can't afford to buy back their fleet and make it public again.
But yeah, it's a nice side effect that it makes a weak, dumb populace.
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What they are doing is importing cheap skilled labor willing to work for below market rates. They are trying to cheat the free market of supply and demand within the United States. The is no shortage of people able to do the job. There is a shortage of people willing to work at half the market rate in a slave type manner.
I will agree that the laws are outdated. Congress shouldn't be limiting by artificial numbers but rather by the going market rate of employees. Lets start at 25% over the market rate and have it exponentially increase from there.
We should start a web sites for tech workers looking for work and their qualifications and then the companies have to prove why there are not hiring these Americans. They should be forced to show why they let go of past employees and how they could not perform the task that some imported worker could.
I would in fact favor laws that forced companies to hire and spend money proportionately from all the countries in which they derive their income. If Facebook makes 90 million a year from France then it should be obligated to spend at least half of that in that country and have a proportionate number of workers (total salary) not only from that country but actually in that country.
you think labor laws are enforced. IBM got caught and nothing happened. What? You thought that 30 years of tax cuts would have no consequences? None of the labor regulators are funded. They exist on paper only. There's no money to hire anyone. In your zeal to cut bureaucrats, red tape and waste you've only succeeded in making the world a worse place. Those bureaucrats did good work, the red tape held back a tsunami of evil business practices and there never was that much waste to begin with when the entire budget is looked at. Shit, you waste more on sodas and coffee in a year than the gov't does.
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reform higher EDU / more trades based schools / apprenticeships?
Right now we have lots college who are turning out people who have skills gaps do the over load of theory that can be over kill for most jobs.
The Trades / techs schools get passed over even when at some of them you can learn more in 2 years then you do at a 4 year school.
Also in tech there are lot's things where you need to work hands on to learn and that is where a Apprenticeship system can work good.
Some of the H1B's only have paper skills / are good at passing tests.
They exist for the sole purpose of keeping the slave trade alive. The rich countries have just moved the plantation offshore, and business is better than ever. Contrary to all the propaganda we see and hear on the TV, we have been living in a post scarcity world for over 70 years. We can transport anything anytime anywhere, and if not for the paperwork, it can be done in less than 24 hours. Only a very class group of people actually benefit from the present system. It's long past time to tear it down and allow people to move to 'where the food is'. Nations are prisons, quite literally for some.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Whichever side of the issue you stand on, it's worth noting that arguably the most prominent signatories to this letter and/or the companies they represent - Intel and Google - came under fire for allegedly secretly conspiring together to block worker mobility ("The no-hire paper trail Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt didn't want you to see"), so a cynic might suggest perhaps they're not quite as concerned with labor's free-and-natural-flow when it doesn't suit their needs. Also, Ireland seems to be finding that importing tech labor isn't quite the rising-tide-that-lifts-all-boats that it was cracked up to be ("Ireland too scared to tax big tech, Let the poor eat potatos"), "Google paid only £5.6m tax despite £10bn turnover").
Unions only work when everyone is in one place and you can organize them. What we need is something more like the AARP but for tech workers. Focus on specific goals, send out political communications so you know when to bombard your reps, etc, etc. It's not a union because you're not negotiating, your lobbying.
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When did the bosses acquire this obsessive delusion that someone coming from abroad must be a superior worker to a home-grown one?
It's not complicated. The workers are here on visas. They can be sent back on a whim. This gives the employer enormous leverage to make the H1B employee work harder. Also it lets them bring in a lot of extra workers, increasing supply and lowering demand. That drives down wages by $10k - $20k (USD, convert to your own currency)
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Because the laws regarding H1-Bs are quite fair to all involved, and certainly constitutional. The real problems with underpaid H-Bs come from companies breaking existing law. It's already illegal to pay your H1-Bs less then locals (but many companies just cheat). It's already fairly straightforward for someone on an H1-B to changes jobs (but many companies just lie to young employees about this).
There's no constitutional problem here, because the existing laws, as written, are fine. It's the real-world consequences of the laws, not the laws as written, that are the problem. What we need are more quite ordinary class action lawsuits against companies illegally underpaying H1-B workers.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I say lets "fix" the situation and reduce H-1b and make green cards harder to get. .. they're gone.
My Sister in HR confirmed that the H-1b is an indentured labour program. That her company likes to lord it over the H-1b's and if they twitch wrong
I too am peeved for years at the preception that 12 hr days and 60+ hr weeks are the norms.
If you have two people working 60 hours you need to replace the manager.
if there was a shortage of high tech people, the salaries would justify that. it has been an employers market since the dot.com crash. salaries have not kept up with inflation, benefit cost has risen. if there truly was a shortage of people, the competition for those people would rise and we would see higher compensation packages
I infer from slightly disproportionate executive pay that business talent must be at a premium; to attenuate this problem, I advocate the mass importation of foreign executives, especially at the senior level, in investment banking, and in finance. Let's give more B-school slots to foreigners and keep Americans out. Also doctors do make so very much, let's import 300,000 foreign physicians. What are some other industries where American workers finally get a good shake? We could wipe them out.
You would think that the companies pressing for this would be smarter. They are all quite stupid. I'm not just trolling: 1. They insist that people live near headquarters, 2. They insist that they can't get any qualified help. The first is just stupid, the second is a bold faced lie. The internet is quite outstanding at moving electronic data from place to place. All of the output of any employee working for these companies is electronic data, and one of the modern "Truisms" is that you can locate a company anywhere in the world, and so long as there is some kind of connection to the internet, you can move data just as easily from that place to any other place. This has several important implications: 1) You don't need to be 'downtown', 2) you don't need to be in a particular city, or geographical region, or even country. Since the first part is true, the next part "Can't get help" is also untrue, since whatever the location of the people you are trying to recruit is, if there is an internet connection, you have access to all the people there. There is an old notion that the boss must be breathing down the neck of the employee for the employee to be productive, but there is a ton of documentation about the destructive nature, plodding progress, and derth of creativity under micromanagement. Its like a death sentence for a company. Restating: How very odd it is that these modern high-technology companies are being so terribly old fashioned. Its ludicrous.
If you want Americans to be attracted to engineering jobs, provide jobs for them.
It's my impression that those jobs are already here...
I'm not living in the US... And there's lots of IT jobs here... and University is free, (in fact students are financially supported by the state).
But teenagers thinks computer science is boring!
By the way, on to topic of H1B, I'm in the process of getting one of those... Not because I couldn't get a job here, actually I could work remotely for the company I'm starting at (at more or less the same salary)... But because I want to work out of an office full of other hopefully smart people...
I'm moving because I'm talented, and moving to California is a really smart carer move, in the IT industry... If I couldn't move to the US, I'd just work remotely from somewhere else... and suddenly the Silicon Valley wouldn't be the place where things happen anymore...
(On the note of being cheap, I think it's fair to claim that my salary is well above the average for US workers in the same area).
Coming from the greedballs like Melissa Mayer, Bill Gates, John Chambers and the rest of that crowd who PROFIT by encouraging this race to the bottom. It's disgusting, and a blatant betrayal of the American worker.
Here are some references that *accurately* put the lie to the claims made by these lying SOBs. Does that sound harsh? It's meant to. These so-called "American leaders" are betraying the very workers who helped them make their unreal wealth. They need to be called out.
http://www.epi.org/publication/bp356-foreign-students-best-brightest-immigration-policy/
http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc_23_2/tsc_23_2_nelson_printer.shtml
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/02/silicon-valley-h1b-visas-hurt-tech-workers
http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/07/report-for-first-time-in-decades-us-is-bleeding-high-skilled-immigrants/
So now you've got a choice. Ship cheaper workers in (the lesser evil), or ship jobs overseas, and never punish corporations for doing so. Happy unregulated market. Is there nothing you can't do? Of course, you voted for it in your 20s, when you weren't going to be the person with obsolete skills that got laid off, before you had a spouse and kids. Before you got sick and got the hospital bill that bankrupted you. Before you were conned into buying an overpriced house because you actually were stupid enough to believe the value would keep going up, forever. Before you decided that the benevolent Wall Street geniuses would make stock markets go up forever, and never down. Before you were bought the oil company line that gasoline would always be cheap and plentiful. Before you realized that companies wrote contracts that allowed them to change the terms of your retirement health care at will. Before if finally soaked in that laws are purchased for corporations, not voted in for the benefit of the citizenry. Before it dawned on you, finally, that you might not be the big winner in the casino of capitalism.
You, who voted for Reagan. For Bush, and Bush again. You voted for it. You got it.
So, enjoy the increasingly unregulated, conservative, free market capitalism you ranted about in your 20s as it comes back to bite you ever so slowly and painfully in the ass.
I will now sit back and wait for the legions of morons who will tell me this is all the fault of over-regulation, liberals, muslims, taxes and evil spirits. We've all heard it all before. Have at it.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
This has been probably said a million times, but the attitude these companies have is disgusting. They keep hiring out of country simple because it's cheaper. Why hire local when I can hire an immigrant that will work, for much less cost. The immigrant doesn't know what are considered normal work behaviors and is trapped at the job until he can get legal citizenship. Basically the company wins with a compliant servant.
Clearly the US has a problem with overpaying it's executive staff and numerous studies have shown that US based executives are radically overpaid.
We need immigration reform to allow immigration for reasonably paid executives from abroad who don't run amok and seek to undercut immigration for their staff so they can pay themselves 200x the global average for executives.
Belgium, France and Norway appear to be good countries to relax restrictions for:
http://www.verisi.com/resources/us-ceo-compensation.htm
Well the 13th amendment only got ratified a few weeks ago (Feb 2013 for Mississippi) after all :-)
They said "We believe that numerical levels and categories for high-skilled nonimmigrant and immigrant visas should be responsive to market needs"
IMO, laws should serve the general interest of citizens, not market needs.
We do know the other guy is in charge now, right? Two elections ago? And we also know that free-market conservatives are generally against immigration? But don't let that stop you from spewing hatred against people who don't share your political views.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
While I sympathize with those forced to leave, I am one of those "experienced" software engineers who feel they have been "pushed out" of the I.T. job market due to the influx of foreign talent. We need to take care of our own first, but the American corporate culture persists in not following through with that for a variety of reasons (I am sure greed is among them). Before anyone jumps on me and accuses of me of being solely responsible for my situation by not keeping up technologically-speaking, have a gander at my LinkedIn page: http://www.linkedin.com/in/caryscofield . I'd be interested to know if anyone really thinks my perception of the overall situation (not just my own) is misguided and wrong, and, if so, why.
Free-market conservatives are fine with immigration. Anyone who's against it is by definition asking the government to interfere with the marketplace of labor. If such a person claims to be a free-market conservative, they are lying.
be a shame if facts came along and did somethin' too it. You're just repeating the old "There's lots of waste to cut" bullsh@t we've been hearing for 30 years. Also, you managed to make (without irony) an argument Fred Pohl made in the Space Merchants:
"Better a thousand innocent men punished than one guilty man go free".
But anyway back to the meat of the matter, which is increased spending. Fundamentally the problem is that the rich can't spend enough to keep our civilization going, and when they do spend it's on big monuments to their greatness that don't really get us anywhere (think more corporate jets than Sphinxes, it is the year 2013 after all). Given the chance (and they got it) the rich will cut your share of the pie so they can have more themselves. Gov't counteracts / fixes that. It's the only thing that can, since it's the only thing with enough power to say *FU* to a Rockefeller. Individuals can't do that. They get blackballed. Which is why the term "blackballed' exists (and why my spell checker doesn't see it as a misspelled word).
And evidently I'm not the only one that thinks $3.8T isn't enough to fund a labor department, since WE ALREADY CUT THE DAMN THING, JUST LIKE I SAID IN MY POST ABOVE. Sorry, getting tired of this conservative Astroturfin' nonsense. At least, I hope you're an Astroturfer or at least a troll. Nobody should believe the stuff you wrote honestly and without pay.
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It only makes sense - corporations have found out that while outsourcing to the developing world results in cheap labor that's easy to abuse, there are all kinds of nasty side effects. Instead of going to all those poor countries full of brown people, why not *bring the slaves to the US*? That way, you can still pay them next to nothing and abuse them as much as you want, but you don't have to deal with flying to some remote part of the world! You can keep them in line by danging their visas just out of reach. That way you can have a nice breakfast, abuse your slaves all day, and get in a nice round of golf! And all it costs is some really minor payments to congresspeople. It's win/woin, really. Well, except for the slaves. But who cares about them? It's their fault for being born poor and in the wrong country.