In the USA of 250-175 years ago there was a good reason for the separation between enlisted people and officers. The officers recruited the enlisted people, supplied, armed, and trained them, built the ships, designed the flags. Becoming so much as a captain required a considerable investment, and bought you the power to designate your own trusted lieutenants/ assistants/ aides. OTOH, colonel was a political job, typically held by a county judge or justice of the peace -- positions that were generally held only by the at least moderately well to do because only they had personal resources to pour into building roads and mills and government buildings and fortifications.
W. Edwards Deming pointed out the idiocy of designating as managers people who had no experience and knowledge of the nuts and bolts of productivity, no application area experience. Knowing the ways B-school bozos "think", this probably inspired them to do this even more than they had been.
Yes, shipping date is just another feature.
And so is experimentation that requires n iterations (where n is unknown).
The trouble with most project estimates is that the pointy haired bosses think everything is settled technology, that you don't have to experiment to figure out anything new at all, but only plug together well-known, well-tested components in well-known ways. That may be true of the many privacy violation projects any Oracle gig party would be doing, but it's true of hardly any software product development.
Most of the software developers I've known would find plodding old ground in those ways extremely dull and go into some other field or seek some other employer where they could find some real work to do.
"Dozens of employers asked to compare American engineers to their much-vaunted colleagues from India and [Red China] agreed that 'in education, training, quality of work, you name it, in every which way, Americans are better'. Even the best schools in those countries 'don't hold a candle to our best schools.', he continues. Newly hired American university graduates 'become productive within 30 days or so. If you hire a graduate of an Indian university, it takes between 3 and 6 months for them to become productive.'" http://www.kermitrose.com/econ200801.html#20080104
Gifted individuals account for only 5% of H-1B visa holders at most, so cutting the numbers of H-1B visas from the current 110K to 2,000 or fewer per year and auctioning them off monthly to the highest bidders on the basis of compensation would improve the likelihood that the best and brightest would be welcomed. Cutting them to 1,000 per year would begin to bring back the huge pool of unemployed and under-employed US citizen science and tech workers toward full employment, and thus boost the economy. If all else fails, we should set the bar by conducting multiple IQ tests and admit those whose average scores exceed 160 (or aggregate ACT score above 34 or aggregate SAT score above 1560 or "new" aggregate SAT score above 2100 or aggregate GRE above 1615). http://www.kermitrose.com/econ200705.html#20070513 http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/NotBestAndBrightest3.txt
"the mean literacy test score for U.S. adults (272) was 2 points above the mean for all adults in the 20 country survey (270)... Larger, statistically significant, literacy gaps between us and them unfold when you separate immigrant from native-born test takers, as is done in 17 high income countries surveyed by ETS. U.S. natives scored 8 points above the average native of the 17 high income countries. U.S. immigrants scored 16 points below the average immigrant in the 17 countries." --- Edwin S. Rubenstein 2005-12-22 _V Dare_ "The stupid American? Think again" http://www.vdare.com/rubenstein/051222_nd.htm
It's impossible to make a case that executives should continue turning their backs on some of the best science, tech, engineering and math talent in the world and instead hire lower-quality, low-skill, cheaper labor from over-seas.
"I've mentioned the TIMSS test, for instance, which showed that if [Colorado, Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska North Dakota, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, Wisconsin and Wyoming] -- none of which has a substantial under-class -- had been treated as separate nations, each of them would have been out-scored only by Singapore (professor David Berliner, 'Our Schools Versus Theirs', Washington Post, 2001 January 28)... This [both the TIMSS and PISA tests] once again shows, tragically, that the U.S.A. is not doing enough to bring up the educational performance of its under-class. But if one takes the white score as 'main-stream', the U.S.A. would rank 7th out of 27, instead of 18th." http://www.k
"i wasn't aware it was the responsibility of the federal government to deal in internet access"
Exactly. I'd much rather that local governments stop propping up monopolies, and instead demand competition. How? Every time one of them asks for a rate increase, or a territory expansion is an opportunity to require expansion into areas already served by a competitor. You want to serve the center of the city? Fine, if you serve these 90 square miles outside of the city that are already served by this other outfit. Of course, if you want to serve 25 square miles outside of the city, we'll let you do that, if you agree to also serve these 2 square miles inside the city already served by a competitor.
Letting Southwestern Bell merge (re-concentrate) to create SBC and then the new AT&T was a huge mistake. And the original break-up should not have created local monopolies, but competing firms with over-lapping territories.
I did tech support, SQA, sys admin, data-base analysis and design, and a little web weaving, but it all taught me that it's only software product development (especially scientific and engineering apps, but I'd like the opportunity to work with music/sound, images and video) and maintenance that keeps me energized.
Reading some of the discussions, and looking at some of the BLS stats, I'm surprised (and a little disgusted) at how how many people are content to be body shopped, how much "IT" work (services) there is, and how little software product development employment.
I read a story in the last couple weeks about a guy who quit programming, learned fine furniture-making and now is producing a series of how-to videos. If I were "ept", that sounds like it would be a decent fall-back. I really liked being able to work with CAD/CAM/CAE tools that let even me draw up a design for something and have the milling machines produce it. But then there's another sign of the hollowing out of STEM and related fields in the USA. One of our best machine tools companies now only produces coolants.
Berkeley might have been OK in the 1950s, but the threw it away.
There was a time when the Technion had a good reputation, but the reputation out-lasted the reality by a decade or so.
MIT's still fairly good, but not way ahead of Georgia Tech or the University of Cincinnati, especially since they stopped admitting based on merit. I ran across articles in the last couple years of people with the highest possible standardized test scores, top class standing, etc., who were rejected for, uhhh, what's the buzz-word?, purposes of increasing diversity.
Harvard long had a good reputation in medicine and law and "bidness", but have thrown most of that away.
In the 1700s most of ye ancestors came just after attending or went back to attend Oxford, Cambridge or Edinburgh, but the Log College had already started having quaint little spin-offs like Princeton and by the early 1800s, Miami U.
According to Wikipedia, the oldest universities started around the year 825CE (4586 in the Hebrew calendar).
John C. Hover, Joseph D. Barnes, Walter D. Jones, Charlotte Reeve Conover, Willard Jarey Wright, Clayton A. Leiter, John Ewing Bradford & W.C. Culkins 1919 _Memoirs of the Miami Valley_ vol1of3 (685 pages in pdf)
1789 Spring, they started cultivating the Little Miami "bottoms", taking turns, with half standing guard with rifle while half prepared the land and planted. Turkey Bottom, about 1 square mile, along the Little Miami had already been cultivated by the Amerindians, and supplied grain for Fort Washington and Columbia, supposedly yielded 963 bushels in the first season. Before that they harvested the "bulbous roots of the bear grass", boiled, washed and dried them, then made flour.
pg 46 (67 in pdf)
"First, the squatter, or man who 'sets himself down' upon land which is not his own, and for which he pays nothing; cultivates to a sufficient extent to supply himslef and family with the necessaries of life; remains until he is dissatisfied with his choice, had realized a sufficiency to become a land-owner, or is expelled by the real proprietor.
Second, the small farmer who had recently immigrated, had barely sufficient to pay the first installment for his 80 or 160 acres of $2 land; cultivates, or what he calls improves, 10 to 30 acres; raises a sufficient 'feed' for his family; has the females of it employed in making or patching the wretched clothing of the whole domestic circle; is in a condition which, if compelled by legislative acts, or by external force to endure, would be considered truly wretched; but from being his own master, having made his own choice, from the having 'no one to make him afraid', joined with the consciousness that, though slowly, he is regularly advancing towards wealth; the breath of complaint is seldom heard to escape from his lips.
Third, the wealth or 'strong-handed' farmer, who owns from five to twelve hundred acres, has one-fourth to one third under cultivation, of a kind much superior to the former; raises live stock for the home and Atlantic city market; sends beef, pork, cheese, lard, and butter to New Orleans; is perhaps a legislator, at any rate a squire (magistrate); is always a man of plain businesslike sense, though not in posession, nor desirous of a very cultivated intellect; understands his own interest, and that of his country; lives in sufficient affluence, and is possessed of comfort; but, in conclusion, and a most important conclusion it is, the majority of this class of men were, 10 or 15 years ago, inhabitants of the eastern states, and not worth, upon their arrival in Ohio, $20."
It took a month to get from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh by wagon, and nearly another month to get from Pittsburgh to Cincinnati by flat-boat, it took 5-6 days to ship goods down river from Dayton to Cincinnati. Local products were shipped down the Ohio and Mississippi to Spain-controlled New Orleans, where the goods could be confiscated, were always heavily taxed, and shipment might be delayed so long that the goods spoiled.
So, people are willing to undergo great risk and hardship, if, if they think they have a fair and decent chance to get ahead, and not have the value they create stolen, robbed, extorted, etc. This is regardless of whether they're Indian or Scottish or Chinese or English or Shawnee or German or Hutu or Turk or Tutsi or Swiss or Japanese.
What is it that you think the average US citizen college baccalaureate, or even sophomore, can't handle?
Sheesh! One of my sophomore friends was doing research on whether certain viruses can cause cancer (several have now been found). A junior was working on a US-wide water quality index. Others were crunching budgets for the state department of education, porting statistical packages, pioneering dead-start from disk, document management systems, examining the roles and levels of related enzymes in mitochondria from different species, teaching classes in various computer programming tools, developing testing systems for avionics.
If you give US citizen students opportunities to do interesting work, they will be able to handle it... especially if you pay them decently enough for them to "work their ways through" rather than relying on federal hand-outs and loans.
Yes, like copies of how to more precisely navigate in space, like copies of weaknesses of our submarines, like copies of how to more precisely target ballistic missiles, like copies of software we used to design parts for our nuclear weapons systems and toys and power tools and cherry-pickers and cars. And those are just examples of "knowledge transfers" to Red China.
And the NSF knew that this was the likely result when they were lobbying for lower standards for student visas and for creation of the H-1B visa program back in the 1980s:
"A growing influx of foreign PhDs into U.S. labor markets will hold down the level of PhD salaries to the extent that foreign students are attracted to U.S. doctoral programs as a way of immigrating to the U.S.A. A related point is that for this group the PhD salary premium is much higher [than it is for Americans], because it is based on BS-level pay in students' home nations versus PhD-level pay in the U.S.A... [If] doctoral studies are failing to appeal to a large (or growing) percentage of the best citizen baccalaureates, then a key issue is pay... A number of [the Americans] will select alternative career paths... For these baccalaureates, the effective premium for acquiring a PhD may actually be negative."
http://www.nber.org/~peat/PapersFolder/Papers/SG/NSF.html
I'm far more concerned about the hundreds of thousands of bright, knowledgeable, industrious US citizen STEM workers who have been displaced by the dozen guest-work visa programs, and the knowledge transfer and off-shoring which those visa programs facilitate.
Studies by researchers from
Computing Research Association (CRA),
Duke,
Georgetown University,
Harvard,
RAND Corporation,
Rochester Institute of Technology,
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation,
Stanford,
UC Davis,
UPenn Wharton School, and
Urban Institute,
have reported that we have continually been producing far more US citizen STEM (science, tech, engineering, math) workers than we've been employing in these fields.
Examination of employment data and projections from BLS when compared with NCES (US Dept. of Education) records of degrees earned by US citizens confirms these findings.
"As late as 1987, 60K graduates were competing for about 25K open positions, according to Janet Ruhl, author of _The Programmers Survival Guide_" --- Margie Wylie _CNET_ "The skills shortage that isn't: When the rising tide floats employees' boats, employers proclaim disaster"
http://news.com.com/2010-1077-281060.htmlhttp://www.kermitrose.com/econ1998.html#19980204
Yes, stop the knowledge transfers from the USA to its sworn enemies and the rest of the world.
Cut the numbers of student visas by restricting them to the best and brightest, those with IQs above 150, ACT aggregate score above 32, SAT aggregate above 1500 ("new" SAT above 1900, GRE above 1590, or equivalent.
End visa waiver programs, conduct proper background investigations on every visa applicant (and charge the applicant and sponsor the full costs... OK, charities can chip in), track visa holders to make sure they can be escorted out on the day their visas expire. Build the other 7900 miles of border fence and man them with fully-armed militia troops to assist the Border Patrol in repelling invaders and arresting them.
Then cut federal spending on unconstitutional activities like the Department of Educationism (return control of education to people at the local and state levels), non-defense grants, foreign aid (zero fund the UN & WTO, Ex-Im bank, IMF, World Bank, Hamas, Hizbullah, Israel), eliminate Medicare, Medicaid, the Socialist Insecurity Abomination, the Federal Reserve and income extortion. Wait to cut military spending until the Reds are no longer dictators in China.
The current monthly increase in federal debt is many times the total federal spending from the founding up to 1902.
"There must be a way for an individual to prevent information about him that was obtained for one purpose from being used or made available for other purposes without his consent."--- Elliot Richardson 1973 summarizing _Records, Computers, & the Rights of Citizens_ (quoted in Legislative History PL 93-579, Privacy Act of 1974, _Congressional Record_ vol 120, Senate Report #93-1183 pg 6924)
In practice, as you say, even the weak constitutional and statutory protections of privacy are most often ignored.
"in the US social security numbers [Socialist Insecurity Numbers=SINs] seem unique enough, assuming we could ignore clerical errors (which is a bad assumption, because American SS numbers, unlike those in other countries, do not contain embedded check digits). And, because so many real-world systems do [ab]use SS number as an identifier, the typical analyst would assume that it's a safe choice -- until he discovers that the numbers get recycled. Depending on the problem space (e.g. a banking system) this potential duplication could be a serious problem." --- Peter Coad & Edward Yourdon 1990 _Object-Oriented Analysis_ pg 115
"The use of social security numbers as a means of identification, both in private commercial transactions & in citizen communications with gov't, is common-place, despite Congressional efforts to curb expanding compulsory disclosure of the number. The requirements of section 7 of the Privacy Act have not been so widely disseminated, moreover, as to become an integral part of the public consciousness. To the contrary, the average citizen automatically reveals his social security number on a myriad of forms in the course of his daily life, never questioning the propriety of forced disclosure or suspecting that in many situations the number may be withheld at his option." --- judge Latchum 1982-01-19 in Doyle v Wilson 529 FS 1343 @ 1351
"Admittedly, however, the number is not a perfect device, since millions of people are estimated to hold more than one number or to share a number." --- Privacy Protection Study Commission 1975-10-22 _The Use of the Social Security Number in the Private Sector_ pg 7 (quoted in Weinstein 1977-03-03 in Stevens v Berger 428 FS 896 @ 907)
"A new sense of 'you have no right to ask that' needs to be defined & encouraged." --- John Curtis Raines (quoted in Gerald S. Snyder 1975 _The Right To Be Let Alone_ pg 162)
Yep, US grads are not rote drones. We're capable of dynamic problem solving, creativity, innovation. Not to mention that many of the currently unemployed and under-employed US IT workers have been productive software developers for decades, and done everything from tech support to SQA to application architecture to performance bench-marking to data-base analysis and design to preparing proposals.
"of the sample group", but then that's the whole gimmick.
BLS includes all those currently employed -- whether legal, illegal, on non-immigrant visas or green cards -- as part of the labor force, along with those in the USA who are unemployed and actively seeking work.
Well, if they're unemployed, those on H-1Bs quickly move over to the illegal alien category, but, if they still actively seek work they increase the official unemployment rate. And if they don't actively seek work they're categorized as "discouraged" or "marginal" labor force participants, so long as they're still in the USA and show up statistically in the surveys.
Yes, we can compete, so long as force and fraud are discouraged.
When someone starts talking about "best and brightest" while hiring the cheapest and most easily brow-beaten, something's amiss.
If it were really about "the best and brightest" there would be an IQ test. I'm thinking something along the lines of a score of at least 180 on multiple tests, or ACT aggregate of 32, or SAT of 1400 or better, or the equivalent for GREs.
As to the inherited title, the USA is already over-crowded. You can see the cracks (some of them literal) in the infrastructure systems: water, toxic waste clean-up, electricity systems, roads, bridges, locks and dams, schools... not to mention the vast pool of unemployed and under-employed US citizens who are bright, knowledgeable, creative, industrious STEM workers.
Every couple weeks I get an e-mail response from another "recruiter" saying that none of their clients are willing to relocate candidates within the USA.
The job ads are mostly for body shopping (temp and "services") and few for real, full-time permanent (or long-term) employment making software and hardware products. Few ads include e-mail addresses. Nearly all are so inundated with applicants that they run inquiries through resume parsers to grab random buzz-words and dump them into data-bases, instead of conscientiously and actively reading resumes, talking with applicants and matching able and willing people with the work to be done. There's not a "Jerry Maguire" or even a "Dave" out there, and I don't think there have been since before those movies were made.
(Then again, a lot of the projects I hear enthusiastically touted, even in radio ads recently, involve massive rights violations, most notably privacy violations, tracking individuals, etc. Why would they expect any self-respecting US citizen to aid and abet such abuse?)
"The reason it's profitable to use cheaper labor is because you're selling to higher earners. If you make sneakers at $1 a pair, you make a profit by selling them for $60."
A friend in a peculiar niche in the footwear business tells me that, as recently as 6 years ago, you could make shoes of equal or better quality (leather dress shoes) in the USA for about $10 per pair ($8 per pair in the mid-1990s). Considering marketing costs, if you sold them retail for $20 you'd still be making a profit.
Instead, what we've seen over the last 30 years is lower-quality materials and workmanship, production moving from the USA to Mexico to South Korea to VietNam and Red China. And the US prices rose over that same period from $20 to $45 to $65 or more. And the designs have gotten much uglier.
But, Americans would pay it until recently. 1. because they could, and 2. because competing products of better quality weren't appearing on the retail shelves anymore.
After kiting on credit for a decade or three, holding out for an improvement in the economy, because compensation to US production workers hadn't kept up with retail prices, enough people can't pay such prices anymore. They'd love the opportunity to go back to work at the tool & die works, or the auto parts factory in Dayton or Gary, or the shoe factory in NJ or SC, or the textile factory in NC or GA or TN, or the tire factory in PA or OH or IL, but those have all closed up shop and the capital goods scrapped or moved to Red China or VietNam along with the micro-chip fabs.
In the 1980s, they were told they could just go to the juco and upgrade their skills a little to become robot repairmen, software coders, data entry clerks, call center clones. Meanwhile, the software architects, software engineers, biophysicists, chemists and such, many with advanced degrees, are finding that, beginning in the early 1980s, they, also, were seeing these careers under-mined by body shopping, off-shoring, and cross-border body shopping (all of which facilitate the others) and being told by Greenspan to go to the juco for re-education because even the bleeding edge career opportunities have been decreased.
"M$ H-1B visa employees are on the same payscale and benefits program as US employees."
Show me. Let's see the actual cities where they live and where they actually work (not the phony baloney low cost of living cities mentioned in the LCA), the job descriptions, the actual daily work they're doing, their academic credentials, their IQ scores, SAT scores, ACT scores, GRE scores, their experience, productivity measures, etc., their wages/salary, paid vacation time, health care insurance, gym membership, stock, stock options, Socialist Insecurity taxes taken out, income extortion, workers' comp, unemployment insurance, the whole gamut of compensation, both for direct M$ H-1Bs and contractors/outsourcers/permatemps, etc., and actual M$ employees, if there are any left doing the same sorts of work. If there aren't any left, then we'd need to see figures for people in other firms doing the same work, with the same credentials, experience, their IQ scores, SAT scores, ACT scores, GRE scores, productivity measures, etc.
Of course, that would be a massive invasion of privacy of the US citizens doing comparable work, but that's what would be required to make a reasonable comparison.
As it is, all we know is that 20% of a sampling of H-1B applications are fraudulent in some way (pay, credentials, location, job...), that on average H-1B grantees are paid 7% to 55% below prevailing (previous to their introduction) local market compensation with the central tendency being about 13% under-payment (the range is due to slightly different data used by different researchers over the years), and that DoL classifies the vast majority of H-1B grantees to be wet-behind-the-ears apprentices of no extraordinary ability or knowledge (though, in regulatory-speak required to have "specialized knowledge or skills"), and that hundreds are approved each year for those lacking the equivalent of a US high school diploma and thousands are approved lacking the equivalent of a US bachelor's degree.
We've seen the spin of the executives and their lobbyists. The data tell a different story. But, if you've got some new, credible, reliable, more specific data, we'd be glad to see it, since USCIS and others have been, apparently illegally, suppressing release of the public records for the last couple years.
The point of the H1-B visa was allegedly not to get cheaper workers. It was to address a (falsified) shortage of "qualified" (wink wink nudge nudge) workers, "temporarily" (wink wink)... and meanwhile, flood the market with cheap, more easily brow-beaten labor afraid to speak up against abuse and under-payment, in order to drive down compensation, i.e. to get cheaper workers.
One thing the lobbyists aren't telling you is that high percentages of foreign students was a goal of the expanded F and H-1B visa programs. In the 1980s, NSF, in pushing Congress to establish the H-1B program, explicitly stated that they felt that PhD salaries in science and engineering were too high, and advocated bringing in foreign students to hold down wages. It also stated that a consequence of this would be that Americans would not find PhD study financially attractive and thus would not pursue it. The NSF stated:
"A growing influx of foreign PhDs into U.S. labor markets will hold down the level of PhD salaries to the extent that foreign students are attracted to U.S. doctoral programs as a way of immigrating to the U.S.A. A related point is that for this group the PhD salary premium is much higher [than it is for Americans], because it is based on BS-level pay in students' home nations versus PhD-level pay in the U.S.A... [If] doctoral studies are failing to appeal to a large (or growing) percentage of the best citizen baccalaureates, then a key issue is pay... A number of [the Americans] will select alternative career paths... For these baccalaureates, the effective premium for acquiring a PhD may actually be negative."
http://www.nber.org/~peat/PapersFolder/Papers/SG/NSF.html
http://www.nber.org/~peat/ReadingsFolder/PrimarySources/TimeLine.html
Policy and Research Analysis Division of the NSF
http://www.ucop.edu/ucophome/pres/comments/numbers.html
"A decade after lambasting the National Science Foundation (NSF) for botching a study of the science job market, Congress has asked the agency to once again take on the politically risky task of predicting how many high-tech workers the United States will need over the next decade... Nonetheless, such projections can spark a political fire-storm, as NSF learned after a 1987 study, led by Peter House, warned of a coming 'shortfall' of several hundred thousand scientists. After the forecast proved false, law-makers questioned the agency's reputation for dispassionate analysis (Science, 1992 February 14, p. 788)."
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol282/issue5395/s-scope.dtl
1998-12-04 vol 282 issue 5395
Gene Nelson
http://psyche.uthct.edu/nes/wwwboard/messages/53.html
US Department of Labor's 2006 Strategic Plan on page 35 states:
"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."
http://www.dol.gov/_sec/stratplan/strat_plan_2006_2011.pdf
http://programmersguild.blogspot.com/2007/04/news-flash-corporate-executives-and.html
The Federal Register 2006-06-30, Sec. 2, 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." (from Donna Conroy of http://www.brightfuturejobs.com/)
2000-04-24 Joel Stewart _Immigration Daily_
http://www.ilw.com/articles/2000,0424-Stewart.shtm
Legal Rejection of US Workers
"even in a depressed economy, Employers who favor aliens have an arsenal of legal means to reject all U.S. workers who apply."
"Think that what kind of labor a company must keep should be left to markets (who works for cheapest compared to their skills) instead of government regulation."
That would work, if there were markets that the top executives also had to face. As it is, the good ole boy network can rake off assets into their pockets even when their decisions have caused decreased quality of products, lower sales, etc.
Of course, the theory is that stock-owners would be able to oversee the executives... well, at least the stock-owners who are not executives, themselves. Only the executives have rigged the voting processes to prevent that. There are good and bad reasons for that, historically. I mean, if you come up with some great invention (as opposed to the piece of garbage Gates & company came up with and keep turning better software products into) and founded the company based on it, there's some reasonable expectation that you should receive greater rewards than the janitor who invested little.
OTOH, of you're a B-school bozo who doesn't really have a clue about the firms' bread and butter, it's core competencies, and you move in and get pushed to the top for your appearance and palaver after the retirement or death of the engineer/founder who is shy about management, then you don't deserve to be handed thousands or millions of shares of stock, gratis, nor to have locked in control of who is on the board and who else is in the executive ranks. But that's the way it seems to happen in far too many cases.
So, the back-slappers are able to shift funds into their own circle's pockets, and out of the pockets of employees, with little regard to market discipline, productivity, quality, etc.
Now, as to government regulation, there's too much and too little. There's too much mal-regulation, and too little defense against initiation of force and fraud. It's more a matter of needing just enough of the right kind of regulation.
OTOH, if there were markets all around, with supply, demand and prices balancing in an environment relatively free from force and fraud, the compensation of executives and janitors and production workers would all balance out with each individual's productivity.
So, the question becomes, how do we get there from here. The current non-market arrangement is dysfunctional. A fully regulated arrangement would be dysfunctional. Cutting the regulatory bonds on some but not all would be dysfunctional because it gives some an artificial advantage. Meanwhile, those who benefit from the fruit of force and fraud are using some of it for putting the politicians they want into office, to increase their artificial advantages, and the politicians are grateful, paying them back by enacting/imposing those additional advantages in the form of legislation and regulations.
So, if someone with an H-1b loses his job/sponsor, he has a couple months to find another, or he goes back home and looks for work there, having his high-class US experience as a marketing point.
The dumped US citizen, OTOH, is home, or would like to get work back at home after traveling around the country already to get his previous job. But he's been out of work for 2 months (or 9 years if he was caught early in the Clinton-Bush-Obama depression) and hiring managers and recruiters don't want to give him the time of day, because they'd still prefer lots of cheap foreign temps. The recruiters can churn the temps more easily for their commissions, and the managers can refuse to invest in training or pensions so long as the glut continues.
But, if we send all of the guest-workers and green-card holders home, we'd still have a surplus of STEM workers in the USA, because more US citizens have been learning these fields, earning degrees in these fields than have been hired in these fields for such a long time, that the pool of capable labor wouldn't be exhausted for over 18 years.
The recession is just about killing hiring activity, but there's a long-term depression of the IT job markets at work, too, with age discrimination kicking at about age 35, so, even if, after doing some volunteer/ internship, i.e. unpaid, work you manage to get your foot in the door, the odds are the floor will be yanked out from under you after just a few years.
Once you do get on someplace, grab as much education/training/ tuition reimbursement you can and have a non-IT back-up career staked out.
If you just "do what you love" (and what you love is IT) and expect your intelligence, talent and dedication to generate a positive recompense, you're dreaming.
Slashdot Mirror
In the USA of 250-175 years ago there was a good reason for the separation between enlisted people and officers. The officers recruited the enlisted people, supplied, armed, and trained them, built the ships, designed the flags. Becoming so much as a captain required a considerable investment, and bought you the power to designate your own trusted lieutenants/ assistants/ aides. OTOH, colonel was a political job, typically held by a county judge or justice of the peace -- positions that were generally held only by the at least moderately well to do because only they had personal resources to pour into building roads and mills and government buildings and fortifications.
W. Edwards Deming pointed out the idiocy of designating as managers people who had no experience and knowledge of the nuts and bolts of productivity, no application area experience. Knowing the ways B-school bozos "think", this probably inspired them to do this even more than they had been.
Yes, shipping date is just another feature. And so is experimentation that requires n iterations (where n is unknown). The trouble with most project estimates is that the pointy haired bosses think everything is settled technology, that you don't have to experiment to figure out anything new at all, but only plug together well-known, well-tested components in well-known ways. That may be true of the many privacy violation projects any Oracle gig party would be doing, but it's true of hardly any software product development. Most of the software developers I've known would find plodding old ground in those ways extremely dull and go into some other field or seek some other employer where they could find some real work to do.
"U.S. engineers... [are] more creative, excelled in problem solving, risk taking, networking and [have] strong analytical skills..."
http://www.kermitrose.com/econ200707.html#20070702
"Dozens of employers asked to compare American engineers to their much-vaunted colleagues from India and [Red China] agreed that 'in education, training, quality of work, you name it, in every which way, Americans are better'. Even the best schools in those countries 'don't hold a candle to our best schools.', he continues. Newly hired American university graduates 'become productive within 30 days or so. If you hire a graduate of an Indian university, it takes between 3 and 6 months for them to become productive.'"
http://www.kermitrose.com/econ200801.html#20080104
"Dynamic" US engineers vs. "transactional" foreign engineers.
http://www.kermitrose.com/econ200512.html#20051213
http://www.kermitrose.com/econ200512.html#20051227
http://www.kermitrose.com/econ200601.html#20060110
Gifted individuals account for only 5% of H-1B visa holders at most, so cutting the numbers of H-1B visas from the current 110K to 2,000 or fewer per year and auctioning them off monthly to the highest bidders on the basis of compensation would improve the likelihood that the best and brightest would be welcomed. Cutting them to 1,000 per year would begin to bring back the huge pool of unemployed and under-employed US citizen science and tech workers toward full employment, and thus boost the economy. If all else fails, we should set the bar by conducting multiple IQ tests and admit those whose average scores exceed 160 (or aggregate ACT score above 34 or aggregate SAT score above 1560 or "new" aggregate SAT score above 2100 or aggregate GRE above 1615).
http://www.kermitrose.com/econ200705.html#20070513
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/NotBestAndBrightest3.txt
"the mean literacy test score for U.S. adults (272) was 2 points above the mean for all adults in the 20 country survey (270)... Larger, statistically significant, literacy gaps between us and them unfold when you separate immigrant from native-born test takers, as is done in 17 high income countries surveyed by ETS. U.S. natives scored 8 points above the average native of the 17 high income countries. U.S. immigrants scored 16 points below the average immigrant in the 17 countries." --- Edwin S. Rubenstein 2005-12-22 _V Dare_ "The stupid American? Think again"
http://www.vdare.com/rubenstein/051222_nd.htm
It's impossible to make a case that executives should continue turning their backs on some of the best science, tech, engineering and math talent in the world and instead hire lower-quality, low-skill, cheaper labor from over-seas.
"I've mentioned the TIMSS test, for instance, which showed that if [Colorado, Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska North Dakota, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, Wisconsin and Wyoming] -- none of which has a substantial under-class -- had been treated as separate nations, each of them would have been out-scored only by Singapore (professor David Berliner, 'Our Schools Versus Theirs', Washington Post, 2001 January 28)... This [both the TIMSS and PISA tests] once again shows, tragically, that the U.S.A. is not doing enough to bring up the educational performance of its under-class. But if one takes the white score as 'main-stream', the U.S.A. would rank 7th out of 27, instead of 18th."
http://www.k
Just so, Bob Coggeshall and Cliff Spencer (with a couple brownie points to SUNY Buffalo) apparently have the prior art on sudo itself...
while slapping a happy face on things (GUI) should go to Xerox PARC.
The only difference between us and the "cave men" is knowledge. They had all of the same stuff. They just didn't realize what could be done with it.
Exactly. I'd much rather that local governments stop propping up monopolies, and instead demand competition. How? Every time one of them asks for a rate increase, or a territory expansion is an opportunity to require expansion into areas already served by a competitor. You want to serve the center of the city? Fine, if you serve these 90 square miles outside of the city that are already served by this other outfit. Of course, if you want to serve 25 square miles outside of the city, we'll let you do that, if you agree to also serve these 2 square miles inside the city already served by a competitor.
Letting Southwestern Bell merge (re-concentrate) to create SBC and then the new AT&T was a huge mistake. And the original break-up should not have created local monopolies, but competing firms with over-lapping territories.
I did tech support, SQA, sys admin, data-base analysis and design, and a little web weaving, but it all taught me that it's only software product development (especially scientific and engineering apps, but I'd like the opportunity to work with music/sound, images and video) and maintenance that keeps me energized.
Reading some of the discussions, and looking at some of the BLS stats, I'm surprised (and a little disgusted) at how how many people are content to be body shopped, how much "IT" work (services) there is, and how little software product development employment.
I read a story in the last couple weeks about a guy who quit programming, learned fine furniture-making and now is producing a series of how-to videos. If I were "ept", that sounds like it would be a decent fall-back. I really liked being able to work with CAD/CAM/CAE tools that let even me draw up a design for something and have the milling machines produce it. But then there's another sign of the hollowing out of STEM and related fields in the USA. One of our best machine tools companies now only produces coolants.
There was a time when the Technion had a good reputation, but the reputation out-lasted the reality by a decade or so.
MIT's still fairly good, but not way ahead of Georgia Tech or the University of Cincinnati, especially since they stopped admitting based on merit. I ran across articles in the last couple years of people with the highest possible standardized test scores, top class standing, etc., who were rejected for, uhhh, what's the buzz-word?, purposes of increasing diversity.
Harvard long had a good reputation in medicine and law and "bidness", but have thrown most of that away.
In the 1700s most of ye ancestors came just after attending or went back to attend Oxford, Cambridge or Edinburgh, but the Log College had already started having quaint little spin-offs like Princeton and by the early 1800s, Miami U.
According to Wikipedia, the oldest universities started around the year 825CE (4586 in the Hebrew calendar).
1789 Spring, they started cultivating the Little Miami "bottoms", taking turns, with half standing guard with rifle while half prepared the land and planted. Turkey Bottom, about 1 square mile, along the Little Miami had already been cultivated by the Amerindians, and supplied grain for Fort Washington and Columbia, supposedly yielded 963 bushels in the first season. Before that they harvested the "bulbous roots of the bear grass", boiled, washed and dried them, then made flour.
pg 46 (67 in pdf)
"First, the squatter, or man who 'sets himself down' upon land which is not his own, and for which he pays nothing; cultivates to a sufficient extent to supply himslef and family with the necessaries of life; remains until he is dissatisfied with his choice, had realized a sufficiency to become a land-owner, or is expelled by the real proprietor.
Second, the small farmer who had recently immigrated, had barely sufficient to pay the first installment for his 80 or 160 acres of $2 land; cultivates, or what he calls improves, 10 to 30 acres; raises a sufficient 'feed' for his family; has the females of it employed in making or patching the wretched clothing of the whole domestic circle; is in a condition which, if compelled by legislative acts, or by external force to endure, would be considered truly wretched; but from being his own master, having made his own choice, from the having 'no one to make him afraid', joined with the consciousness that, though slowly, he is regularly advancing towards wealth; the breath of complaint is seldom heard to escape from his lips.
Third, the wealth or 'strong-handed' farmer, who owns from five to twelve hundred acres, has one-fourth to one third under cultivation, of a kind much superior to the former; raises live stock for the home and Atlantic city market; sends beef, pork, cheese, lard, and butter to New Orleans; is perhaps a legislator, at any rate a squire (magistrate); is always a man of plain businesslike sense, though not in posession, nor desirous of a very cultivated intellect; understands his own interest, and that of his country; lives in sufficient affluence, and is possessed of comfort; but, in conclusion, and a most important conclusion it is, the majority of this class of men were, 10 or 15 years ago, inhabitants of the eastern states, and not worth, upon their arrival in Ohio, $20."
It took a month to get from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh by wagon, and nearly another month to get from Pittsburgh to Cincinnati by flat-boat, it took 5-6 days to ship goods down river from Dayton to Cincinnati. Local products were shipped down the Ohio and Mississippi to Spain-controlled New Orleans, where the goods could be confiscated, were always heavily taxed, and shipment might be delayed so long that the goods spoiled.
So, people are willing to undergo great risk and hardship, if, if they think they have a fair and decent chance to get ahead, and not have the value they create stolen, robbed, extorted, etc. This is regardless of whether they're Indian or Scottish or Chinese or English or Shawnee or German or Hutu or Turk or Tutsi or Swiss or Japanese.
Sheesh! One of my sophomore friends was doing research on whether certain viruses can cause cancer (several have now been found). A junior was working on a US-wide water quality index. Others were crunching budgets for the state department of education, porting statistical packages, pioneering dead-start from disk, document management systems, examining the roles and levels of related enzymes in mitochondria from different species, teaching classes in various computer programming tools, developing testing systems for avionics.
If you give US citizen students opportunities to do interesting work, they will be able to handle it... especially if you pay them decently enough for them to "work their ways through" rather than relying on federal hand-outs and loans.
Yes, like copies of how to more precisely navigate in space, like copies of weaknesses of our submarines, like copies of how to more precisely target ballistic missiles, like copies of software we used to design parts for our nuclear weapons systems and toys and power tools and cherry-pickers and cars. And those are just examples of "knowledge transfers" to Red China.
"A growing influx of foreign PhDs into U.S. labor markets will hold down the level of PhD salaries to the extent that foreign students are attracted to U.S. doctoral programs as a way of immigrating to the U.S.A. A related point is that for this group the PhD salary premium is much higher [than it is for Americans], because it is based on BS-level pay in students' home nations versus PhD-level pay in the U.S.A... [If] doctoral studies are failing to appeal to a large (or growing) percentage of the best citizen baccalaureates, then a key issue is pay... A number of [the Americans] will select alternative career paths... For these baccalaureates, the effective premium for acquiring a PhD may actually be negative." http://www.nber.org/~peat/PapersFolder/Papers/SG/NSF.html
Right. We should stop US tax-victim subsidies to foreign students.
Studies by researchers from Computing Research Association (CRA), Duke, Georgetown University, Harvard, RAND Corporation, Rochester Institute of Technology, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Stanford, UC Davis, UPenn Wharton School, and Urban Institute, have reported that we have continually been producing far more US citizen STEM (science, tech, engineering, math) workers than we've been employing in these fields.
Examination of employment data and projections from BLS when compared with NCES (US Dept. of Education) records of degrees earned by US citizens confirms these findings.
"As late as 1987, 60K graduates were competing for about 25K open positions, according to Janet Ruhl, author of _The Programmers Survival Guide_" --- Margie Wylie _CNET_ "The skills shortage that isn't: When the rising tide floats employees' boats, employers proclaim disaster" http://news.com.com/2010-1077-281060.html http://www.kermitrose.com/econ1998.html#19980204
In testimony to the House Science and Technology Committee, Harold Salzman reported that we've been producing as many as 3 times the numbers of STEM workers as we've been employing in these fields. http://democrats.science.house.gov/Media/File/Commdocs/hearings/2007/tech/06nov/salzman_testimony.pdf http://www.kermitrose.com/econ200711.html#Runnerup2007
Yes, stop the knowledge transfers from the USA to its sworn enemies and the rest of the world.
Cut the numbers of student visas by restricting them to the best and brightest, those with IQs above 150, ACT aggregate score above 32, SAT aggregate above 1500 ("new" SAT above 1900, GRE above 1590, or equivalent.
End visa waiver programs, conduct proper background investigations on every visa applicant (and charge the applicant and sponsor the full costs... OK, charities can chip in), track visa holders to make sure they can be escorted out on the day their visas expire. Build the other 7900 miles of border fence and man them with fully-armed militia troops to assist the Border Patrol in repelling invaders and arresting them.
Then cut federal spending on unconstitutional activities like the Department of Educationism (return control of education to people at the local and state levels), non-defense grants, foreign aid (zero fund the UN & WTO, Ex-Im bank, IMF, World Bank, Hamas, Hizbullah, Israel), eliminate Medicare, Medicaid, the Socialist Insecurity Abomination, the Federal Reserve and income extortion. Wait to cut military spending until the Reds are no longer dictators in China.
The current monthly increase in federal debt is many times the total federal spending from the founding up to 1902.
In practice, as you say, even the weak constitutional and statutory protections of privacy are most often ignored.
http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/42/408.html
http://www.usdoj.gov/04foia/privstat.htm
http://www.cavebear.com/nsf-dns/pa_history.htm
http://www.cavebear.com/nsf-dns/5usc552a.htm
http://www.cms.hhs.gov/privacyact/patraining.asp
http://www.cms.hhs.gov/privacyact/pa.pdf
http://www.so.doe.gov/documents/privactof1974.pdf
http://www.epic.org/privacy/laws/privacy_act.html
https://www.cnet.navy.mil/privacyact1974.pdf
http://library.lp.findlaw.com/articles/file/00007/004477/title/subject/topic/constitutional%20law_freedom%20of%20information/filename/constitutionallaw_1_88
http://library.lp.findlaw.com/articles/file/00007/004477/title/subject/topic/constitutional%20law_freedom%20of%20information/filename/constitutionallaw_1_88
http://www.cpsr.org/cpsr/privacy/ssn/ssn.faq.html
http://www.cpsr.org/program/natlID/natlIDfaq.html
"in the US social security numbers [Socialist Insecurity Numbers=SINs] seem unique enough, assuming we could ignore clerical errors (which is a bad assumption, because American SS numbers, unlike those in other countries, do not contain embedded check digits). And, because so many real-world systems do [ab]use SS number as an identifier, the typical analyst would assume that it's a safe choice -- until he discovers that the numbers get recycled. Depending on the problem space (e.g. a banking system) this potential duplication could be a serious problem." --- Peter Coad & Edward Yourdon 1990 _Object-Oriented Analysis_ pg 115 "The use of social security numbers as a means of identification, both in private commercial transactions & in citizen communications with gov't, is common-place, despite Congressional efforts to curb expanding compulsory disclosure of the number. The requirements of section 7 of the Privacy Act have not been so widely disseminated, moreover, as to become an integral part of the public consciousness. To the contrary, the average citizen automatically reveals his social security number on a myriad of forms in the course of his daily life, never questioning the propriety of forced disclosure or suspecting that in many situations the number may be withheld at his option." --- judge Latchum 1982-01-19 in Doyle v Wilson 529 FS 1343 @ 1351 "Admittedly, however, the number is not a perfect device, since millions of people are estimated to hold more than one number or to share a number." --- Privacy Protection Study Commission 1975-10-22 _The Use of the Social Security Number in the Private Sector_ pg 7 (quoted in Weinstein 1977-03-03 in Stevens v Berger 428 FS 896 @ 907) "A new sense of 'you have no right to ask that' needs to be defined & encouraged." --- John Curtis Raines (quoted in Gerald S. Snyder 1975 _The Right To Be Let Alone_ pg 162)
Yep, US grads are not rote drones. We're capable of dynamic problem solving, creativity, innovation. Not to mention that many of the currently unemployed and under-employed US IT workers have been productive software developers for decades, and done everything from tech support to SQA to application architecture to performance bench-marking to data-base analysis and design to preparing proposals.
"of the sample group", but then that's the whole gimmick.
BLS includes all those currently employed -- whether legal, illegal, on non-immigrant visas or green cards -- as part of the labor force, along with those in the USA who are unemployed and actively seeking work.
Well, if they're unemployed, those on H-1Bs quickly move over to the illegal alien category, but, if they still actively seek work they increase the official unemployment rate. And if they don't actively seek work they're categorized as "discouraged" or "marginal" labor force participants, so long as they're still in the USA and show up statistically in the surveys.
Yes, we can compete, so long as force and fraud are discouraged. When someone starts talking about "best and brightest" while hiring the cheapest and most easily brow-beaten, something's amiss. If it were really about "the best and brightest" there would be an IQ test. I'm thinking something along the lines of a score of at least 180 on multiple tests, or ACT aggregate of 32, or SAT of 1400 or better, or the equivalent for GREs. As to the inherited title, the USA is already over-crowded. You can see the cracks (some of them literal) in the infrastructure systems: water, toxic waste clean-up, electricity systems, roads, bridges, locks and dams, schools... not to mention the vast pool of unemployed and under-employed US citizens who are bright, knowledgeable, creative, industrious STEM workers. Every couple weeks I get an e-mail response from another "recruiter" saying that none of their clients are willing to relocate candidates within the USA. The job ads are mostly for body shopping (temp and "services") and few for real, full-time permanent (or long-term) employment making software and hardware products. Few ads include e-mail addresses. Nearly all are so inundated with applicants that they run inquiries through resume parsers to grab random buzz-words and dump them into data-bases, instead of conscientiously and actively reading resumes, talking with applicants and matching able and willing people with the work to be done. There's not a "Jerry Maguire" or even a "Dave" out there, and I don't think there have been since before those movies were made. (Then again, a lot of the projects I hear enthusiastically touted, even in radio ads recently, involve massive rights violations, most notably privacy violations, tracking individuals, etc. Why would they expect any self-respecting US citizen to aid and abet such abuse?)
A friend in a peculiar niche in the footwear business tells me that, as recently as 6 years ago, you could make shoes of equal or better quality (leather dress shoes) in the USA for about $10 per pair ($8 per pair in the mid-1990s). Considering marketing costs, if you sold them retail for $20 you'd still be making a profit.
Instead, what we've seen over the last 30 years is lower-quality materials and workmanship, production moving from the USA to Mexico to South Korea to VietNam and Red China. And the US prices rose over that same period from $20 to $45 to $65 or more. And the designs have gotten much uglier.
But, Americans would pay it until recently. 1. because they could, and 2. because competing products of better quality weren't appearing on the retail shelves anymore.
After kiting on credit for a decade or three, holding out for an improvement in the economy, because compensation to US production workers hadn't kept up with retail prices, enough people can't pay such prices anymore. They'd love the opportunity to go back to work at the tool & die works, or the auto parts factory in Dayton or Gary, or the shoe factory in NJ or SC, or the textile factory in NC or GA or TN, or the tire factory in PA or OH or IL, but those have all closed up shop and the capital goods scrapped or moved to Red China or VietNam along with the micro-chip fabs.
In the 1980s, they were told they could just go to the juco and upgrade their skills a little to become robot repairmen, software coders, data entry clerks, call center clones. Meanwhile, the software architects, software engineers, biophysicists, chemists and such, many with advanced degrees, are finding that, beginning in the early 1980s, they, also, were seeing these careers under-mined by body shopping, off-shoring, and cross-border body shopping (all of which facilitate the others) and being told by Greenspan to go to the juco for re-education because even the bleeding edge career opportunities have been decreased.
Show me. Let's see the actual cities where they live and where they actually work (not the phony baloney low cost of living cities mentioned in the LCA), the job descriptions, the actual daily work they're doing, their academic credentials, their IQ scores, SAT scores, ACT scores, GRE scores, their experience, productivity measures, etc., their wages/salary, paid vacation time, health care insurance, gym membership, stock, stock options, Socialist Insecurity taxes taken out, income extortion, workers' comp, unemployment insurance, the whole gamut of compensation, both for direct M$ H-1Bs and contractors/outsourcers/permatemps, etc., and actual M$ employees, if there are any left doing the same sorts of work. If there aren't any left, then we'd need to see figures for people in other firms doing the same work, with the same credentials, experience, their IQ scores, SAT scores, ACT scores, GRE scores, productivity measures, etc.
Of course, that would be a massive invasion of privacy of the US citizens doing comparable work, but that's what would be required to make a reasonable comparison.
As it is, all we know is that 20% of a sampling of H-1B applications are fraudulent in some way (pay, credentials, location, job...), that on average H-1B grantees are paid 7% to 55% below prevailing (previous to their introduction) local market compensation with the central tendency being about 13% under-payment (the range is due to slightly different data used by different researchers over the years), and that DoL classifies the vast majority of H-1B grantees to be wet-behind-the-ears apprentices of no extraordinary ability or knowledge (though, in regulatory-speak required to have "specialized knowledge or skills"), and that hundreds are approved each year for those lacking the equivalent of a US high school diploma and thousands are approved lacking the equivalent of a US bachelor's degree.
We've seen the spin of the executives and their lobbyists. The data tell a different story. But, if you've got some new, credible, reliable, more specific data, we'd be glad to see it, since USCIS and others have been, apparently illegally, suppressing release of the public records for the last couple years.
One thing the lobbyists aren't telling you is that high percentages of foreign students was a goal of the expanded F and H-1B visa programs. In the 1980s, NSF, in pushing Congress to establish the H-1B program, explicitly stated that they felt that PhD salaries in science and engineering were too high, and advocated bringing in foreign students to hold down wages. It also stated that a consequence of this would be that Americans would not find PhD study financially attractive and thus would not pursue it. The NSF stated:
"A growing influx of foreign PhDs into U.S. labor markets will hold down the level of PhD salaries to the extent that foreign students are attracted to U.S. doctoral programs as a way of immigrating to the U.S.A. A related point is that for this group the PhD salary premium is much higher [than it is for Americans], because it is based on BS-level pay in students' home nations versus PhD-level pay in the U.S.A... [If] doctoral studies are failing to appeal to a large (or growing) percentage of the best citizen baccalaureates, then a key issue is pay... A number of [the Americans] will select alternative career paths... For these baccalaureates, the effective premium for acquiring a PhD may actually be negative."
http://www.nber.org/~peat/PapersFolder/Papers/SG/NSF.html
http://www.nber.org/~peat/ReadingsFolder/PrimarySources/TimeLine.html
Policy and Research Analysis Division of the NSF
http://www.ucop.edu/ucophome/pres/comments/numbers.html
"A decade after lambasting the National Science Foundation (NSF) for botching a study of the science job market, Congress has asked the agency to once again take on the politically risky task of predicting how many high-tech workers the United States will need over the next decade... Nonetheless, such projections can spark a political fire-storm, as NSF learned after a 1987 study, led by Peter House, warned of a coming 'shortfall' of several hundred thousand scientists. After the forecast proved false, law-makers questioned the agency's reputation for dispassionate analysis (Science, 1992 February 14, p. 788)."
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol282/issue5395/s-scope.dtl
1998-12-04 vol 282 issue 5395
Gene Nelson
http://psyche.uthct.edu/nes/wwwboard/messages/53.html
US Department of Labor's 2006 Strategic Plan on page 35 states:
"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."
http://www.dol.gov/_sec/stratplan/strat_plan_2006_2011.pdf
http://programmersguild.blogspot.com/2007/04/news-flash-corporate-executives-and.html
The Federal Register 2006-06-30, Sec. 2, 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." (from Donna Conroy of http://www.brightfuturejobs.com/)
2000-04-24 Joel Stewart _Immigration Daily_
http://www.ilw.com/articles/2000,0424-Stewart.shtm
Legal Rejection of US Workers
"even in a depressed economy, Employers who favor aliens have an arsenal of legal means to reject all U.S. workers who apply."
That would work, if there were markets that the top executives also had to face. As it is, the good ole boy network can rake off assets into their pockets even when their decisions have caused decreased quality of products, lower sales, etc.
Of course, the theory is that stock-owners would be able to oversee the executives... well, at least the stock-owners who are not executives, themselves. Only the executives have rigged the voting processes to prevent that. There are good and bad reasons for that, historically. I mean, if you come up with some great invention (as opposed to the piece of garbage Gates & company came up with and keep turning better software products into) and founded the company based on it, there's some reasonable expectation that you should receive greater rewards than the janitor who invested little.
OTOH, of you're a B-school bozo who doesn't really have a clue about the firms' bread and butter, it's core competencies, and you move in and get pushed to the top for your appearance and palaver after the retirement or death of the engineer/founder who is shy about management, then you don't deserve to be handed thousands or millions of shares of stock, gratis, nor to have locked in control of who is on the board and who else is in the executive ranks. But that's the way it seems to happen in far too many cases.
So, the back-slappers are able to shift funds into their own circle's pockets, and out of the pockets of employees, with little regard to market discipline, productivity, quality, etc.
Now, as to government regulation, there's too much and too little. There's too much mal-regulation, and too little defense against initiation of force and fraud. It's more a matter of needing just enough of the right kind of regulation.
OTOH, if there were markets all around, with supply, demand and prices balancing in an environment relatively free from force and fraud, the compensation of executives and janitors and production workers would all balance out with each individual's productivity.
So, the question becomes, how do we get there from here. The current non-market arrangement is dysfunctional. A fully regulated arrangement would be dysfunctional. Cutting the regulatory bonds on some but not all would be dysfunctional because it gives some an artificial advantage. Meanwhile, those who benefit from the fruit of force and fraud are using some of it for putting the politicians they want into office, to increase their artificial advantages, and the politicians are grateful, paying them back by enacting/imposing those additional advantages in the form of legislation and regulations.
So, if someone with an H-1b loses his job/sponsor, he has a couple months to find another, or he goes back home and looks for work there, having his high-class US experience as a marketing point.
The dumped US citizen, OTOH, is home, or would like to get work back at home after traveling around the country already to get his previous job. But he's been out of work for 2 months (or 9 years if he was caught early in the Clinton-Bush-Obama depression) and hiring managers and recruiters don't want to give him the time of day, because they'd still prefer lots of cheap foreign temps. The recruiters can churn the temps more easily for their commissions, and the managers can refuse to invest in training or pensions so long as the glut continues.
But, if we send all of the guest-workers and green-card holders home, we'd still have a surplus of STEM workers in the USA, because more US citizens have been learning these fields, earning degrees in these fields than have been hired in these fields for such a long time, that the pool of capable labor wouldn't be exhausted for over 18 years.
The recession is just about killing hiring activity, but there's a long-term depression of the IT job markets at work, too, with age discrimination kicking at about age 35, so, even if, after doing some volunteer/ internship, i.e. unpaid, work you manage to get your foot in the door, the odds are the floor will be yanked out from under you after just a few years. Once you do get on someplace, grab as much education/training/ tuition reimbursement you can and have a non-IT back-up career staked out. If you just "do what you love" (and what you love is IT) and expect your intelligence, talent and dedication to generate a positive recompense, you're dreaming.