Those numbers look a little high to me, too. They could be new visas plus renewals plus extensions, or they could be estimates for how many people were in the USA on each of those kinds of visas.
http://www.kermitrose.com/econ04VisaLimitsExcessive.html
This page has tables and links to the USCIS "Characteristics" reports and to the State Department "non-immigrant visas issued" reports. But the State Dept. numbers are low, because they include only visas issued by consular offices over-seas, they don't include visas in cases when the State Dept. initially rejected an application and then the applicant got a waiver or was approved on appeal (but I get the impression through their bureau-speak that they push those numbers into the next year's counts). And they don't include all of the cases of change of status from some other visa to an H-1B visa by people already in the USA. (But beware that these agencies sometimes change their URLs, so there could be some broken links.) Both agencies report on the basis of the federal government's "fiscal year" which begins on October 1 and ends at the end of September of the calendar year whose number is used to designate the fiscal year (so, e.g. FY2010 essentially began on 2009-10-01 00:00:00.0000001 and ended 2010-09-30 23:59:59.9999999).
"The problem is lack of skills in this area, not lack of jobs. Or perhaps it has something to do with unwillingness to relocate."
There are people with the skills to do worthwhile work all around the USA eager to be relocated. Before H-1B, the employers were able and willing to relocate that talent to where they wanted them... sometimes repeatedly. Before H-1B, employes were able and willing to invest in new-hire and retained employee training. Now, employers are able but unwilling to train or relocate US citizens even just a few hundred miles.
The numbers of H-1B and L-1 visas going to people born in India and Red China are much higher than those born in the UK and Europe. OTOH, it may well be a higher or lower percentage of the population of India or Red China applying for these visas than the percentages for people in the UK and Europe. Or it may be just that the over-populations of India and Red China are so much higher that it results in very excessive numbers of visa applicants.
Meanwhile, people are leaving both Ireland and Detroit in search of a way to make a living. I just read several articles to the effect that the population within the Detroit city limits is below what it was in 1910. (And the city poobahs of Detroit and Youngstown are very proud of their programs to demolish abandoned homes while taxes and regulation discourage new construction.)
I'm not sure what you mean, Atroxodisse. Out-sourcing can be totally domestic or across borders or over-seas. One form of domestic out-sourcing is "rural-sourcing". An example would be a firm in NY, NY contracting with a firm in North Dakota for work on their automated trading systems. (I've always been kind of surprised there haven't been more software product dev firms scattered all throughout "fly-over country", since there are good universities with CS and engineering departments, and yet super-computing was born and long held its lead in Minnesota.)
Off-shoring comes in multiple varieties, too. It can be intra-firm or it can be off-shore out-sourcing.
Some people call the use/abuse of guest-work visas to be "in-shoring", while others reserve the term for moving work that had been off-shored back to a domestic out-sourcing operation, or entirely back in-house. I tend to stay away from that term because I see no way to eliminate the ambiguity.
Some use the term "near-shoring" for off-shoring, e.g. from the USA to Canada or Mexico.
I mean having productive capacity enough not only to survive but to create capital with which to be even more productive of both more capital and consumer goods. But I also mean free -- honest and open -- trade in the absence of initiated force and fraud.
Once initiation of force and fraud are condoned, all reliability and agreements and contracts are null and meaningless. Anyone can be cheated and his goods or work taken without recourse. Incentives to be productive are greatly reduced.
Unfortunately, what we have is a lot of initiation of force and fraud. We have governments carrying out extortions on some and subsidizing some (often including those extorted; and then there are the VAT kick-backs to some). We have frauds like this "talent shortage" horse-hockey, and the "prevailing wage" fraud, and the "qualified"/ "unqualified"/ "disqualified" fraud, and the "willing" (to work at below market compensation and reduced conditions) fraud, and the "best and brightest" fraud, and the bodyshopping/ temp/ contingent/ consulting/ contract fraud (misrepresenting compensation, especially likely life-time total earnings to be the same as they would be for real employment when they are actually much less).
http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/williams120507.php3
"The [2007] Nov. 13 Wall Street Journal editorial 'Movin' On Up' reports on a recent U.S. Treasury study of income tax returns from 1996 and 2005. The study tracks what happened to tax filers 25 years of age and up during this 10-year period. Controlling for inflation, nearly 58% of the poorest income group in 1996 moved to a higher income group by 2005. 26% of them achieved middle or upper-middle class income, and over 5% made it into the highest income group. Over the decade, the inflation-adjusted median income of all tax filers rose by 24%."
http://www.indianasnewscenter.com/news/business/11242071.html
"'Economic Mobility of Families Across Generations', two-thirds of Americans saw increases in income, adjusted for inflation... 42% of children born to parents at the bottom of the income distribution remain at the bottom, while 39% born to parents at the top, stay at the top..."
http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell112007.php3
"People in the bottom fifth of income-tax filers in 1996 had their incomes increase by 91% by 2005. The top 1% -- 'the rich' who are supposed to be monopolizing the money, according to the left -- saw their incomes decline by a whopping 26%... the IRS data, which are for people 25 years old and older, and which follow the same individuals over time, find those in the bottom 20% of income-tax filers almost doubling their income in a decade."
http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell112707.php3
"Recent data from the Internal Revenue Service show that more than half the people who were in the top 1% in 1996 were no longer there in 2005. Among the top 0.01%, three-quarters of them were no longer there at the end of the decade."
http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell012308.php3
"there is a fundamental difference between statistical categories and flesh-and-blood human beings. When there is a growing disparity between one statistical category and another statistical category over time, that does not mean that there is a corresponding growing disparity between flesh-and-blood human beings over time, since human beings move from one statistical category to another. The statistical categories in this case are income brackets."
The Economist article said nothing about economic mobility of individuals. They just talked about the spread of the snap-shots -- snap-shots in which the same individuals were in different quintiles at different times.
The center for American Regress isn't worth clicking on.
"we're talking about the elites and best of the best from around the entire world"
No, we're not. We're talking about cheap, pliant foreign labor to drive down compensation levels and professional ethics.
The average H-1B or L-1 recipient is not "best" or "brightest", and they're certainly not paid as though they were. The US DoL data is clear that the vast majority of them are in the bottom quartile, young, and cheap.
We have a surplus of very bright, creative, industrious US citizen STEM workers, who, by every measure, outshine the guest-workers (according to former cross-border bodyshopper Wadhwa). Some studies say we've been producing 3 times as many STEM workers as needed (based on hiring patterns). We don't need anywhere near that many foreign students. We don't need anywhere near that many immigrants. We don't need anywhere near that many guest-workers.
Giving every person who has an F visa, once he finishes a degree (or master's degree or even doctor's degree) a green card, would only add to the surplus... and continue to drive down compensation and employment opportunities for able and willing US citizens, something that's supposed to be prohibited in the current law.
Of course, if, instead of handing out hundreds of thousands of F visas each year to nearly everyone who applies, we conducted proper background investigations on every one, and then picked the truly "best and brightest" 10K, scattered among our 4K universities (just think of all the money US tax-victims would save by repurposing the many "outer erewhon student cultural centers" on every campus), and then from those who completed their degrees picked the top 50-100 of those for 10-month guest-work visas, and then gave a green card to the best 1 or 2 of those each year, that wouldn't be a problem. Those would be reasonable numbers.
The problem is on the front-end with those excessive student visas, and then with the 19 or so different kinds of guest-work visas, each one of which is excessive, and then that excess comes flowing into the green card (permanent residency) application process, which feeds in turn into excessive applications for citizenship.
IOW, we need to greatly reduce the numbers of student visas, reduce the numbers and time limits of OPT, generally reduce the numbers of refugee visas most of the time, greatly reduce the priority given to "family reunification" in the visa system, seriously reduce the numbers and shorten the time-limits of guest-work visas, reduce the numbers of green cards, eliminate the stupid diversity lottery visas, all to get the whole visa system down to reasonable proportions that can be conscientiously managed, greatly reduce visa over-stays, and stop worsening US job markets and exacerbating the existing problems from over-population and over-crowding.
So, we're not sales-clones. We're not supposed to be. We're software developers! (or scientists or engineers or mathematicians) That doesn't require much "selling". You're either bright or not and know your stuff or you don't, and since you'll be working in/with teams of people with complementary skill-sets, as long as you can communicate effectively with people in your own and those other fields you're all set; no big deal.
What I used to do was call my head-hunter. Everyone who worked at the academic computing center worked with the same one, based half-way across the country. I only had to call her twice, but I also called her when I was in town, visiting relatives who lived at the other end of the city where she was based. Other than that, she called me once or twice a year to see how things were going (and sometimes to see if she could interest me in jumping ship so she could get another commission).
She asked what sorts of work I'd done. I told her, and she listened. She asked me what sorts of work I was interested in doing. I told her and she listened. She asked me to scribble the things I'd done on the back of a half-used sheet of output. I did. She sent out a 1-paragraph letter to the appropriate hiring managers, basically: "NickGnome is a smart, industrious guy who knows a thing or two about programming."
Pretty soon, she called up to tell me to expect a call from Rochester, Detroit, Virginia, Kansas City, St. Louis, Albuquerque, Arizona, Cleveland, DC, California... I got the call. They asked me when I could fly in, what airline I preferred, what kind of plane, seating, time of day preferences, whether a sub-compact rental car was OK, and whether this or that hotel was OK. They made the arrangements, prepaid everything, and called back with reservation code numbers.
I flew in, drove around town, picked up a map, took a few pictures, read the local paper to get a feel for the place. The next morning I put on the suit. Talked with the hiring manager for a short while. He introduced me around. We talked shop. We had lunch. We talked shop some more. Then I drove back to the airport and caught the plane home. A couple weeks later, the head-hunter called to tell me to expect some unofficial voice offers to be followed by written offers in the snail. (The only variation was 2 hiring managers who drove to the airport to pick me up and take me to the hotel, and then drove me back to the airport the next evening when we were through with the interview. One place had one of their analysts me about 35 miles each way, so I could interview for a second possible position with the same outfit at their proving grounds.)
No muss. No fuss. No gotcha! trivial pursuit games. No grillings. No stress interviews. No stupid brain-teasers or human compiler games. No cattle calls. No "Are you willing to relocate yourself?", but "When we relocate you, how much stuff do you have for us to move?". No "What degrees do you have?" or "What was your GPA?". No "Do you have an active security clearance?", but "This job requires a security clearance. Are you OK with that? We'll need to get that process going as soon as you come on-board, but we'll have some training lined up and other work for you until that's completed." No "What's your rate?". Just pleasant conversations with colleagues about the nuts and bolts of the business followed by reasonable offers.
Several of us worked at national research centers, I think one signed on at the DIA, others did super-computer sys admin and analysis work for oil companies, phone companies, the earth resources satellite center, research at universities, and, of course, several of us worked for the company that made the super-computers and OS and apps.
"Maybe you don't sell yourself well?"
"Most of the people who were in the bottom twenty percent thirty years ago have long since moved up."
Right. Longitudinal studies show that, historically, individual US tax-victims move from income quintile to quintile through various parts of their life-times, and different members of the same family are in different income quintiles, and don't necessarily land in the same quintiles in corresponding phases of their life-times.
It's more rapid than you depict. Even over periods of just 10 years, many people tend to move to a neighboring income quintile, and slightly lower percentages move 2 quintiles or more. Some move up; others move down.
Let's see if I can trim this down to a copyright-allowable 200 words while recommending that you read the sources cited: "Among those whose incomes were in the bottom 20% in 1979, 86% were in some higher income bracket by 1988... 14% of 'the poor' were still in the bottom quintile a decade later... 15% had risen all the way to the top quintile by 1988, & 40% of 'the poor' of 1979 were now in the top 2 quintiles... only 2.8% of the population studied were continuously 'poor'." --- Thomas Sowell 1993 "What's News?" in _Is Reality Optional?_ pg 24
"Even those in the top quintile [top 20% of annual income] are not really wealthy. Their median household net worth is less than $150K." --- Thomas J. Stanley & William D. Danko 1996 _The Millionaire Next Door_ pp 2-3
"there are 39M people in the bottom 20% of households, but 64M people in the top 20% of households..." --- Thomas Sowell 2000 _Basic Economics_ pp134-136 (Top quintile households tend to have multiple earners, so the per capita income isn't quite so high.)
"A major study at the University of Michigan has followed... tens of thousands of (individuals) over a period of decades. Among individuals who are actively in the labor force, only 5% of those who were in the bottom 20% in income in 1975 were still there in 1991... 29% of those in the bottom quintile in 1975 had risen to the top quintile by 1991. More than half of those in the bottom quintile in 1975 had been in the top quintile at some point during those years." --- Thomas Sowell 2008 _Economic Facts & Fallacies_ pp145-146 and 2010 _Intellectuals & Society_ pg38 (citing W. Michael Cox & Richard Alm "By Our Own BootStraps: Economic Opportunity & the Dynamics of Income Distribution" Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas Annual Report 1995 pp8, 14)
That's not what concerns me. What concerns me is the hundreds of thousands of bright, creative, industrious, knowledgeable US citizen STEM workers who have always engaged in continuous learning who, before H-1B (and before the explosion of F, J, L, and E-3 visas), were in the top 3 quintiles who are now in the bottom quintile, with no means to dig themselves out, while the US federal and state governments are actively working against them.
That would be a great improvement over the current practice of preferentially hiring non-citizens. Even workers from India would have to compete for work in the USA without any artificial barriers against US citizens for a change. Even spies from Red China would have to compete for work in the USA without any artificial barriers against US citizens for a change. If they run a background investigation on the candidate from Hualapai, they should at least run a background investigation on the candidate from Astrakhan.
If they relocate the worker from India, they should just as eagerly relocate the worker from Sopchoppy. If they give an internship to the student from Ghana, they should just as eagerly give internships to students from Chillicothe or Massapequa. If they fly in someone from IIT to an interview, they should be just as likely to fly someone in from Virginia Tech.
Even new immigrants like Sona Shah, suddenly have had employers and recruiters refuse to talk with them once they were naturalized. She had the good fortune to have the opportunity to demonstrate it to congressional staffers.
"The sad fact is that in a level world, American workers at all levels will have to compete without any artificial barriers. What is wrong with that?"
This is a world where it's possible for bright, creative, industrious US citizens to not be able to earn enough to purchase the things they need.
Yes, it is evil when an executive says there's a "talent shortage" when there is not one; when, on the contrary, there is a great deal of evidence that there's been a surplus for several decades (well, only in the sense that one could say there's either, because the markets have been distorted).
Yes, it is evil for a recruiter to say that an able and willing US citizen job candidate is "unqualified".
Yes, it is evil for a recruiter to generate false pretexts on which to declare an able and willing US citizen candidate to be "unqualified".
Yes, it is evil to demand, at below-market prices, a mathematician/ physicist/ engineer/ software developer, and then whine about it instead of ponying up to hire a mathematician, physicist, engineer, and software developer at market prices to do the work together.
Yes, it is evil to remove moderate and high quality products from retail shelves and replace them with over-priced cheap garbage, and fraudulently representing it as being as good as the higher-quality products that are no longer available to US consumers.
Yes, it is evil to try to deceive US citizen students into investing time and effort into preparation for a "life-long career" in a field which dumps people at age 30 or 35, when you've already publicly confessed that you're out to drive down compensation.
Be honest. Confess. Repent. Sin no more, neither by initiating force nor fraud.
Unfortunately, the flood of cheap, pliant labor with obsolete skills is preventing us from making new pies.
"Economics in a global age isn't about dividing up the current pie, it is about making new pies."
Remember that cross-border bodyshopping got its big boost after the B-school bozos had been ignoring our advice about date formats for a couple decades, and then went into a panic. They looked around and we refused to pull their cans out of the fire they'd made. But then they found a bunch of people in India, who'd been handicapped for decades using obsolete COBOL on obsolete computers, and this gave them the chance to stick with their obsolete ways a little longer instead of reforming. While we (the general plural US STEM worker) had gone from unstructured, to structured to object-oriented design and programming they'd stuck with ways and tools that were obsolete in the early 1970s.
But it gave them a foot in the door with the B-school bozos. And they were cheap, and very pliant, extremely willing to nod and go along with whatever insanity was proposed. So, the B-school bozos thought, "Hey! Having more of these yes-men would be great! And they're cheap!"
Meanwhile, we (the general plural US STEM worker) were learning our 10th or 14th programming language, and our 4th or 5th DBMS, on our 11th or 12th operating system, using the 4th or 5th methodological approach. But we were declared "unqualified". Go figure!
"When corporations started demanding a degree to their specifications before they would let you work at their job.
If you think the average prole is going to get a decent job without a BS, then YOU are part of the problem."
That's just it. We're not proles (from pro+olescere, to grow from, i.e. progeny, child). Most of us are gifted; quite a few are geniuses (unless the statistical distribution has shifted drastically downward over the last couple decades). We're the sort who would drop out of HS to jump into 3rd-year university classes, and take classes beyond the rigid degree requirements, while doing additional study on our own.
Many of us have or did have decent jobs without BS. Before H-1B there wasn't so much hyper-credentialism. If you were good, they were happy to fly you in for an interview, hire you, relocate you (sometimes even buying your old house and helping you find a house or apartment in your new location), pay you a local cost of living differential, and invest in a more or less steady stream of training (a 2-12 weeks per year). If you had degrees or certificates, that was just frosting.
And, once again, we did/do great work in science, engineering, utilities, defense, nuclear power, fusion research -- not the lame garbage (CRM, social networking, ERP, web-weaving, "supply chain management"...) we see in job ads, today.
The Cohen & Grigsby video is about going from an F, H-1B, J, or L to a green card, while keeping the job market closed to US candidates.
It's about being dishonest with the visa system.
It's about putting on a charade (as the immigration lawyers association admitted), pretending to do one thing while actually doing something else.
It's about barely complying with the statute, but still avoidign and rejecting able and willing US applicants.
It's about setting the pay below US local market levels so that US job-seekers won't be "interested" (and thus driving down the local market compensation).
It's about placing ads in media where able and willing US applicants aren't likely to find them, and placing them for the minimal required time, and artificially creating other barriers to the members of the US STEM talent pool.
It's about not opening up and reaching out to the available talent pool but using dodges to place them with 3 extremely local outlets of 1 or 2 firms.
It's about exaggerating requirements and the amount of new-hire training that would be necessary for a US candidate whose experience, credentials, etc., don't exactly match those of the pre-selected foreign employee, regardless of whether they are actually necessary to do the job well.
It's about setting up additional gauntlets for able and willing US candiates to be put though if they pass all of the initial barriers, in order to manufacture pretexts on which to declare them "unqualified".
The same techniques are used by firms that are supposed to comply with the even weaker requirements for "H-1B dependent employers" and H-1B employers who have already been caught scamming. Before H-1B, batteries of telephone pre-screening "trivial pursuit" or "human compiler" quizzes were unheard of and interview discussions centered around knowledge and work experience rather than irrelevant pretexts on which to thin the ranks of applicants.
"Adding foreign talent to the US will not "drown out" homegrown talent."
It already has. It's driven down opportunity, pay, and career prospects. The flood of cheap, pliant labor has also driven down the standards of professional ethics, allowing projects that would not have seen the light of day be developed despite their ethical questionability.
When the "enterprises" created by the immigrants (and guest-workers) are examined, it's clear that many of them are merely more bodyshops. They're not inventing great new products. They're not employing US citizens or even indirectly creating cutting-edge opportunities for former US citizen STEM workers.
Opportunities for US citizen STEM workers to do great things -- plentiful in the 1980s (before H-1B) -- are extremely rare, now. The career ladder has been totally disrupted. Young US citizen students used to have many opportunities for employment while they developed their knowledge and skills, and they could look forward to a full and ever-improving career into their 70s. Now, bright Americans have a hard time getting internships, graduate assistantships, new-grad employment, and they're dumped once they reach the age of 35.
We'll welcome the brilliant foreigners when we begin to see some. We certainly don't need 98% of the not-brilliant H-1Bs we've been getting over the last 2 decades. For the "best and brightest" claims to hold up statistically, the list would have to be in the hundreds of thousands of names, and the products/inventions would have to be a lot better. Since the US government has been admitting over 100K "best and brightest" people on H-1B visas each year, year after year, there should be a couple million staggeringly brilliant superstars to list instead of a few dozen milquetoasts.
"While it is higher the fact is the average employee making $60K their employer has to shell out $30-35K more for that employee."
In the 1980s, the total cost to employ a person was about twice their pre-extortion salary. In this case that'd be $60K+$60K, for a total cost of $120K... thus giving yet another demonstration that one of the effects of bodyshopping, including cross-border bodyshopping, has been to drive down total compensation.
""As someone in the Dakotas, this is what I've observed""
"No offence, but the Dakotas, are not exactly a tech hot-spot."
They were showing some metaphorical hot tech sparks a couple decades ago. Some of them relocated, but even they aren't what they were.
Route 128 (Digital Equipment Corp., Data General...), Minneapolis-St. Paul (a couple medical product firms, Control Data Corp., Unisys, and CDC spin-offs Cray, MPI, ICEM Inc., Citigroup), Dayton (NCR), the NC Research Triangle, Cincinnati (Milacron, SDRC, Wright/GE), Columbus, Cleveland (SOHIO super-computing center now part of BP), Kansas City (United, Sprint, Bendix/Allied Signal), St. Louis (lots of small engineering firms), Chicago, Rochester, Atlanta (remember GT STRUDL?, Scientific Atlanta, Marconi Avionics), Houston, Hampton, Indianapolis, Tampa, and a lot of other locations that were showing some tech promise in the 1980s are essentially dead, now.
Austin and Dallas, which struggled from the early 1980s through the 1990s to fan the sparks into flame, seem to be barely hanging on but with more net destruction than creation.
San Diego was showing a little promise, in the 1980s and late 1990s, in software, embedded software/hardware, biotech, web-weavers, but that was smashed by the cross-border bodyshopping and off-shoring. We've had certified geniuses struggling to hang on, teaching the guest-workers for several years, now.
"Services", consulting, contracting, temping, etc., is tread-mill work. You tot up your tasks accomplished for the day, and maybe you took care of 20 or 200 tasks today instead of 5 or 100 yesterday, but you're not really moving forward; they're the same kinds of things you did yesterday. And worse, your work isn't fully appreciated, regardless of how good you become at it.
When you develop a software product, you just keep on making it better (well, unless you're MSFT). You build on the value you've already created. You engage in experimentation, R&D.
Analogously with your line of thought, you can pour your heart into designing and making a great piece of software or a movie, and then offer it up to the public where hundreds or thousands or millions pay what it's worth to them. With "services", temping, etc., you're in one dungeon this month and a different dungeon the next month, but your'e still walking in circles, doing very little that's new and exciting and worthwhile. At worst, you're merely facilitating privacy and other rights violations (cloud services, social networking, ERP, CRM, digitizing medical records...).
"The root of the problem is the extreme backlog of a decade or more for visa numbers"
The problem is that they've been rubber-stamping too many visa applications instead of conscientiously investigating claims of sponsors of applicants, considering whether the application truly is outstanding, whether the applicant does or does not have knowledge and skills which are not readily available among the US citizen population, and examining whether the applicant is likely to initiate force or fraud, respect or violate patents and copyrights, leak intellectual property, cheat on tests, etc.
If he's one of the rare, truly brilliant, creative, and nice, peaceable individuals who respects the rights of others, then the door should be open.
Instead, the government has been handing out over 100K H-1B visas every year, the vast majority of applicants are not above-average, and the government is not running background investigations on any of them.
The executives in business and academia just want an unlimited supply of cheap, pliant labor, apparently regardless of any other consideration. If they spent half the money and effort on relocation and training of US citizen candidates that they've been putting into manufacturing pretexts on which to reject all US applicants, 200 H-1B + F with OPT + L + J + E-3 visas per year would be more than enough.
It's slow. It's poorly designed from a work-flow standpoint. I could handle scores of usenet messages in NewsWatcher and dozens of e-mail messages in Eudora (even back when I had a 1200 baud dial-up) in the time it took to handle 1 or 2 HotMail messages (over DSL). (Of course, in Eudora, with a higher speed line, I could down-load a few hundred messages in a minute or two, handle them off-line, and send replies in a minute or less.)
Over time MSFT broke HotMail, making it worse and worse until it was totaly unusable. First, I noticed objects on the screen started stepping over each other and it went down-hill from there; sending attachments became hit or miss, requiring a couple tries through the loop of screens; clicking on the right spot to get it to display message contents became more difficult; buttons were painted off-screen and you couldn't just use the scroll-bar controls to bring them in reach.
"In the 1970s, almost no technical people were replaced by H1b workers. There were still a good number of H1bs working in the country."
There was no H-1B visa in the 1970s, and the STEM job markets were good in the 1970s and up to the stock market crash in 1987. There was an H visa for agricultural workers, created in 1952. H-1B was created in 1990, but the first visas weren't issued until fiscal year 1992.
I worked with genuine temporary guest-workers who had specialized knowledge back in the 1980s. They came, made their contributions, maybe did a little tourism while they were here, and then went back home within 2-3 months. The guy who developed ICEM Surf is a good example. He worked with our firm as a field analyst working with engineers at VW in Germany, developed Surf while riding the commuter train, he said, but it was riddled with bugs. He came over and we worked with him for a couple months to pound it into shape. We had a very few other field analysts from Germany, France, Israel... who came over for a couple months mainly to check whether their customers' most important wish-list features and bug fixes were taken care of. They'd all worked for our firm for several years and continued working for our firm afterwards, helping to support and sell our software products. There weren't thousands of them. Though before they arrived, several of them seemed to have thought Americans weren't industrious and didn't put in enough hours, they quickly learned that the opposite was the case and weren't able to keep up the pace. I think only one, a manager already, ended up getting a green card or citizenship.
1705-05-12: "An Act for the Naturalization of Phillippe De Richbourg, Francis Ribut, Peter Faure, James Champagne and others". The point being that it required a special act of the legislature; it was a big deal.
INA1952 - Immigration & Nationality Act; McCarran-Walter; effective 1952-12-24; Truman's veto was over-ridden (created H visa); 66 Stat. 163, 8 USC 1101 et seq.
IMMACT1990 - Kennedy-d'Amato-Dodd-Moynihan-Simpson Immigration Act of 1990; PL101-649; 104 Stat. 4978, 5019-5022; effective 1991-10-01 or 1991-11-29; (created H-1B visa requiring only "specialized knowledge" and H-1B3 fashion models.)
The USA has an very good K-12 education system and an excellent post-secondary system. When the under-class is separated (as is done in India, Red China and many other countries) the US K-12 student is excellent.
The problem is that the US under-class, coming from countries and cultures that do not value academic achievement, drags down the averages. Even worse, the illfare state and political correctness have dragged down the standards for and achievements of US citizen blacks who used to do much better before the "Great Society" program of LBJ.
But what you say regarding burger-flipping applies to being a grad student. NSF wanted to drive down compensation to those with graduate degrees in STEM fields, and they knew the resultant reduction in pay and employment security would drive out US citizens as the expected compensation fell below costs. Indeed, some scholars have said that the life-time incease in compensation for a STEM PhD is below the opportunity costs of being paid below market levels for 3-10 additional years (thus, going for the extra degree actually costs you in the long-run).
Between 2000 and 2008, US citizens earned 487,480 additional CS degrees (bachelor's + master's + doctor's), and 2,397,446 additional STEM degrees (according to the US DoEd, NCES, Digest of Education Statistics), about 702K additional US citizens developed their computer wrangling skills to the professional level, and some 858K developed professional skills for engineering (based on NCES and NSF figures). Yet, employment of production workers in software (commercial off-the-shelf, shrink-wrap, software publishing) product firms (REAL software development employment as opposed to being bodyshopped) has remained flat under 220K in that period. IOW, we'd be able to replace all of the real positions every 3-4 years, just from US citizens.
We should put in place some reasonable standards. If you're not at least in the top 0.5 percentile (5/1000) as compared to US citizens, then you're not "best" or "brightest", and hence not eligible for an H-1B visa. If you're not in the top 0.0002 percentile (2/million), then you're not eligible for an O visa.
And if you don't pass a proper background investigation you're not eligible for any kind of visa (business, student, guest-work, exchange, ambassador...). We've had far more than enough Khalid Sheik Mohammeds and Faisal Shahzads.
The fact is that many US citizens who don't even have high school diplomas, and US citizens with degrees in music, psychology, classical languages, and other non-CS fields, have developed excellent software products, designed massive data-warehouses, administered sytems and networks, etc.
""I'm an employer in California desperately searching for skilled programmers. I've been searching for about 3 months now and I haven't found any qualified programmers (java web developers) with a salary requirement less than $100k.""
"You have come to the conclusion that qualified applicants are not willing to work for the prevailing wage. I have come to the opposite conclusion, which is that your company is not offering the prevailing wage for qualified applicants."
Right. Consider also the nature of the work. Is it new, exciting, cutting edge? Will it lead to new, exciting, cutting edge work? No. Web weaving is trodding well-known ground, so well-trod that, even focusing on the Java world, the technology has already gone through several waves of framework development aimed at just such applications.
I'd also do a reality check on the meaning of "qualified" in your context. Most experienced programmers could pick up Java in a few hours, and the specific frameworks needed within a few weeks. If you'd offered market compensation, reasonable relocation, and new-hire training, those new employees would be productive by now.
But I understand. You don't think you've got that much money to invest. So, you don't have enough money to pay for what you want. Period. As much as I'd like, I don't have money to get every new Mac or iPad that's released, cars, pizza, land, house... That's life. Live with it. Stop demanding that everyone else put aside their priorities, goals, and dreams to artificially subsidize yours.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.kermitrose.com/econ04VisaLimitsExcessive.html This page has tables and links to the USCIS "Characteristics" reports and to the State Department "non-immigrant visas issued" reports. But the State Dept. numbers are low, because they include only visas issued by consular offices over-seas, they don't include visas in cases when the State Dept. initially rejected an application and then the applicant got a waiver or was approved on appeal (but I get the impression through their bureau-speak that they push those numbers into the next year's counts). And they don't include all of the cases of change of status from some other visa to an H-1B visa by people already in the USA. (But beware that these agencies sometimes change their URLs, so there could be some broken links.) Both agencies report on the basis of the federal government's "fiscal year" which begins on October 1 and ends at the end of September of the calendar year whose number is used to designate the fiscal year (so, e.g. FY2010 essentially began on 2009-10-01 00:00:00.0000001 and ended 2010-09-30 23:59:59.9999999).
There are people with the skills to do worthwhile work all around the USA eager to be relocated. Before H-1B, the employers were able and willing to relocate that talent to where they wanted them... sometimes repeatedly. Before H-1B, employes were able and willing to invest in new-hire and retained employee training. Now, employers are able but unwilling to train or relocate US citizens even just a few hundred miles.
The numbers of H-1B and L-1 visas going to people born in India and Red China are much higher than those born in the UK and Europe. OTOH, it may well be a higher or lower percentage of the population of India or Red China applying for these visas than the percentages for people in the UK and Europe. Or it may be just that the over-populations of India and Red China are so much higher that it results in very excessive numbers of visa applicants.
Meanwhile, people are leaving both Ireland and Detroit in search of a way to make a living. I just read several articles to the effect that the population within the Detroit city limits is below what it was in 1910. (And the city poobahs of Detroit and Youngstown are very proud of their programs to demolish abandoned homes while taxes and regulation discourage new construction.)
Off-shoring comes in multiple varieties, too. It can be intra-firm or it can be off-shore out-sourcing.
Some people call the use/abuse of guest-work visas to be "in-shoring", while others reserve the term for moving work that had been off-shored back to a domestic out-sourcing operation, or entirely back in-house. I tend to stay away from that term because I see no way to eliminate the ambiguity.
Some use the term "near-shoring" for off-shoring, e.g. from the USA to Canada or Mexico.
Once initiation of force and fraud are condoned, all reliability and agreements and contracts are null and meaningless. Anyone can be cheated and his goods or work taken without recourse. Incentives to be productive are greatly reduced.
Unfortunately, what we have is a lot of initiation of force and fraud. We have governments carrying out extortions on some and subsidizing some (often including those extorted; and then there are the VAT kick-backs to some). We have frauds like this "talent shortage" horse-hockey, and the "prevailing wage" fraud, and the "qualified"/ "unqualified"/ "disqualified" fraud, and the "willing" (to work at below market compensation and reduced conditions) fraud, and the "best and brightest" fraud, and the bodyshopping/ temp/ contingent/ consulting/ contract fraud (misrepresenting compensation, especially likely life-time total earnings to be the same as they would be for real employment when they are actually much less).
http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/williams120507.php3 "The [2007] Nov. 13 Wall Street Journal editorial 'Movin' On Up' reports on a recent U.S. Treasury study of income tax returns from 1996 and 2005. The study tracks what happened to tax filers 25 years of age and up during this 10-year period. Controlling for inflation, nearly 58% of the poorest income group in 1996 moved to a higher income group by 2005. 26% of them achieved middle or upper-middle class income, and over 5% made it into the highest income group. Over the decade, the inflation-adjusted median income of all tax filers rose by 24%."
http://www.indianasnewscenter.com/news/business/11242071.html "'Economic Mobility of Families Across Generations', two-thirds of Americans saw increases in income, adjusted for inflation... 42% of children born to parents at the bottom of the income distribution remain at the bottom, while 39% born to parents at the top, stay at the top..."
http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell112007.php3 "People in the bottom fifth of income-tax filers in 1996 had their incomes increase by 91% by 2005. The top 1% -- 'the rich' who are supposed to be monopolizing the money, according to the left -- saw their incomes decline by a whopping 26%... the IRS data, which are for people 25 years old and older, and which follow the same individuals over time, find those in the bottom 20% of income-tax filers almost doubling their income in a decade."
http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell112707.php3 "Recent data from the Internal Revenue Service show that more than half the people who were in the top 1% in 1996 were no longer there in 2005. Among the top 0.01%, three-quarters of them were no longer there at the end of the decade."
http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell012308.php3 "there is a fundamental difference between statistical categories and flesh-and-blood human beings. When there is a growing disparity between one statistical category and another statistical category over time, that does not mean that there is a corresponding growing disparity between flesh-and-blood human beings over time, since human beings move from one statistical category to another. The statistical categories in this case are income brackets."
The Economist article said nothing about economic mobility of individuals. They just talked about the spread of the snap-shots -- snap-shots in which the same individuals were in different quintiles at different times. The center for American Regress isn't worth clicking on.
No, we're not. We're talking about cheap, pliant foreign labor to drive down compensation levels and professional ethics.
The average H-1B or L-1 recipient is not "best" or "brightest", and they're certainly not paid as though they were. The US DoL data is clear that the vast majority of them are in the bottom quartile, young, and cheap.
Not just dull and old. Dull, old, and evil. "ERP, CRM, and supply chain management have been around a long time; they're dull, but not new."
Giving every person who has an F visa, once he finishes a degree (or master's degree or even doctor's degree) a green card, would only add to the surplus... and continue to drive down compensation and employment opportunities for able and willing US citizens, something that's supposed to be prohibited in the current law.
Of course, if, instead of handing out hundreds of thousands of F visas each year to nearly everyone who applies, we conducted proper background investigations on every one, and then picked the truly "best and brightest" 10K, scattered among our 4K universities (just think of all the money US tax-victims would save by repurposing the many "outer erewhon student cultural centers" on every campus), and then from those who completed their degrees picked the top 50-100 of those for 10-month guest-work visas, and then gave a green card to the best 1 or 2 of those each year, that wouldn't be a problem. Those would be reasonable numbers.
The problem is on the front-end with those excessive student visas, and then with the 19 or so different kinds of guest-work visas, each one of which is excessive, and then that excess comes flowing into the green card (permanent residency) application process, which feeds in turn into excessive applications for citizenship.
IOW, we need to greatly reduce the numbers of student visas, reduce the numbers and time limits of OPT, generally reduce the numbers of refugee visas most of the time, greatly reduce the priority given to "family reunification" in the visa system, seriously reduce the numbers and shorten the time-limits of guest-work visas, reduce the numbers of green cards, eliminate the stupid diversity lottery visas, all to get the whole visa system down to reasonable proportions that can be conscientiously managed, greatly reduce visa over-stays, and stop worsening US job markets and exacerbating the existing problems from over-population and over-crowding.
What I used to do was call my head-hunter. Everyone who worked at the academic computing center worked with the same one, based half-way across the country. I only had to call her twice, but I also called her when I was in town, visiting relatives who lived at the other end of the city where she was based. Other than that, she called me once or twice a year to see how things were going (and sometimes to see if she could interest me in jumping ship so she could get another commission).
She asked what sorts of work I'd done. I told her, and she listened. She asked me what sorts of work I was interested in doing. I told her and she listened. She asked me to scribble the things I'd done on the back of a half-used sheet of output. I did. She sent out a 1-paragraph letter to the appropriate hiring managers, basically: "NickGnome is a smart, industrious guy who knows a thing or two about programming."
Pretty soon, she called up to tell me to expect a call from Rochester, Detroit, Virginia, Kansas City, St. Louis, Albuquerque, Arizona, Cleveland, DC, California... I got the call. They asked me when I could fly in, what airline I preferred, what kind of plane, seating, time of day preferences, whether a sub-compact rental car was OK, and whether this or that hotel was OK. They made the arrangements, prepaid everything, and called back with reservation code numbers.
I flew in, drove around town, picked up a map, took a few pictures, read the local paper to get a feel for the place. The next morning I put on the suit. Talked with the hiring manager for a short while. He introduced me around. We talked shop. We had lunch. We talked shop some more. Then I drove back to the airport and caught the plane home. A couple weeks later, the head-hunter called to tell me to expect some unofficial voice offers to be followed by written offers in the snail. (The only variation was 2 hiring managers who drove to the airport to pick me up and take me to the hotel, and then drove me back to the airport the next evening when we were through with the interview. One place had one of their analysts me about 35 miles each way, so I could interview for a second possible position with the same outfit at their proving grounds.)
No muss. No fuss. No gotcha! trivial pursuit games. No grillings. No stress interviews. No stupid brain-teasers or human compiler games. No cattle calls. No "Are you willing to relocate yourself?", but "When we relocate you, how much stuff do you have for us to move?". No "What degrees do you have?" or "What was your GPA?". No "Do you have an active security clearance?", but "This job requires a security clearance. Are you OK with that? We'll need to get that process going as soon as you come on-board, but we'll have some training lined up and other work for you until that's completed." No "What's your rate?". Just pleasant conversations with colleagues about the nuts and bolts of the business followed by reasonable offers.
Several of us worked at national research centers, I think one signed on at the DIA, others did super-computer sys admin and analysis work for oil companies, phone companies, the earth resources satellite center, research at universities, and, of course, several of us worked for the company that made the super-computers and OS and apps. "Maybe you don't sell yourself well?"
Right. Longitudinal studies show that, historically, individual US tax-victims move from income quintile to quintile through various parts of their life-times, and different members of the same family are in different income quintiles, and don't necessarily land in the same quintiles in corresponding phases of their life-times.
It's more rapid than you depict. Even over periods of just 10 years, many people tend to move to a neighboring income quintile, and slightly lower percentages move 2 quintiles or more. Some move up; others move down.
Let's see if I can trim this down to a copyright-allowable 200 words while recommending that you read the sources cited: "Among those whose incomes were in the bottom 20% in 1979, 86% were in some higher income bracket by 1988... 14% of 'the poor' were still in the bottom quintile a decade later... 15% had risen all the way to the top quintile by 1988, & 40% of 'the poor' of 1979 were now in the top 2 quintiles... only 2.8% of the population studied were continuously 'poor'." --- Thomas Sowell 1993 "What's News?" in _Is Reality Optional?_ pg 24
"Even those in the top quintile [top 20% of annual income] are not really wealthy. Their median household net worth is less than $150K." --- Thomas J. Stanley & William D. Danko 1996 _The Millionaire Next Door_ pp 2-3
"there are 39M people in the bottom 20% of households, but 64M people in the top 20% of households..." --- Thomas Sowell 2000 _Basic Economics_ pp134-136 (Top quintile households tend to have multiple earners, so the per capita income isn't quite so high.)
"A major study at the University of Michigan has followed... tens of thousands of (individuals) over a period of decades. Among individuals who are actively in the labor force, only 5% of those who were in the bottom 20% in income in 1975 were still there in 1991... 29% of those in the bottom quintile in 1975 had risen to the top quintile by 1991. More than half of those in the bottom quintile in 1975 had been in the top quintile at some point during those years." --- Thomas Sowell 2008 _Economic Facts & Fallacies_ pp145-146 and 2010 _Intellectuals & Society_ pg38 (citing W. Michael Cox & Richard Alm "By Our Own BootStraps: Economic Opportunity & the Dynamics of Income Distribution" Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas Annual Report 1995 pp8, 14)
That's not what concerns me. What concerns me is the hundreds of thousands of bright, creative, industrious, knowledgeable US citizen STEM workers who have always engaged in continuous learning who, before H-1B (and before the explosion of F, J, L, and E-3 visas), were in the top 3 quintiles who are now in the bottom quintile, with no means to dig themselves out, while the US federal and state governments are actively working against them.
If they relocate the worker from India, they should just as eagerly relocate the worker from Sopchoppy. If they give an internship to the student from Ghana, they should just as eagerly give internships to students from Chillicothe or Massapequa. If they fly in someone from IIT to an interview, they should be just as likely to fly someone in from Virginia Tech.
Even new immigrants like Sona Shah, suddenly have had employers and recruiters refuse to talk with them once they were naturalized. She had the good fortune to have the opportunity to demonstrate it to congressional staffers.
"The sad fact is that in a level world, American workers at all levels will have to compete without any artificial barriers. What is wrong with that?"
Yes, it is evil when an executive says there's a "talent shortage" when there is not one; when, on the contrary, there is a great deal of evidence that there's been a surplus for several decades (well, only in the sense that one could say there's either, because the markets have been distorted).
Yes, it is evil for a recruiter to say that an able and willing US citizen job candidate is "unqualified".
Yes, it is evil for a recruiter to generate false pretexts on which to declare an able and willing US citizen candidate to be "unqualified".
Yes, it is evil to demand, at below-market prices, a mathematician/ physicist/ engineer/ software developer, and then whine about it instead of ponying up to hire a mathematician, physicist, engineer, and software developer at market prices to do the work together.
Yes, it is evil to remove moderate and high quality products from retail shelves and replace them with over-priced cheap garbage, and fraudulently representing it as being as good as the higher-quality products that are no longer available to US consumers.
Yes, it is evil to try to deceive US citizen students into investing time and effort into preparation for a "life-long career" in a field which dumps people at age 30 or 35, when you've already publicly confessed that you're out to drive down compensation.
Be honest. Confess. Repent. Sin no more, neither by initiating force nor fraud.
"Economics in a global age isn't about dividing up the current pie, it is about making new pies."
Remember that cross-border bodyshopping got its big boost after the B-school bozos had been ignoring our advice about date formats for a couple decades, and then went into a panic. They looked around and we refused to pull their cans out of the fire they'd made. But then they found a bunch of people in India, who'd been handicapped for decades using obsolete COBOL on obsolete computers, and this gave them the chance to stick with their obsolete ways a little longer instead of reforming. While we (the general plural US STEM worker) had gone from unstructured, to structured to object-oriented design and programming they'd stuck with ways and tools that were obsolete in the early 1970s.
But it gave them a foot in the door with the B-school bozos. And they were cheap, and very pliant, extremely willing to nod and go along with whatever insanity was proposed. So, the B-school bozos thought, "Hey! Having more of these yes-men would be great! And they're cheap!"
Meanwhile, we (the general plural US STEM worker) were learning our 10th or 14th programming language, and our 4th or 5th DBMS, on our 11th or 12th operating system, using the 4th or 5th methodological approach. But we were declared "unqualified". Go figure!
That's just it. We're not proles (from pro+olescere, to grow from, i.e. progeny, child). Most of us are gifted; quite a few are geniuses (unless the statistical distribution has shifted drastically downward over the last couple decades). We're the sort who would drop out of HS to jump into 3rd-year university classes, and take classes beyond the rigid degree requirements, while doing additional study on our own.
Many of us have or did have decent jobs without BS. Before H-1B there wasn't so much hyper-credentialism. If you were good, they were happy to fly you in for an interview, hire you, relocate you (sometimes even buying your old house and helping you find a house or apartment in your new location), pay you a local cost of living differential, and invest in a more or less steady stream of training (a 2-12 weeks per year). If you had degrees or certificates, that was just frosting.
And, once again, we did/do great work in science, engineering, utilities, defense, nuclear power, fusion research -- not the lame garbage (CRM, social networking, ERP, web-weaving, "supply chain management"...) we see in job ads, today.
The Cohen & Grigsby video is about going from an F, H-1B, J, or L to a green card, while keeping the job market closed to US candidates.
It's about being dishonest with the visa system.
It's about putting on a charade (as the immigration lawyers association admitted), pretending to do one thing while actually doing something else.
It's about barely complying with the statute, but still avoidign and rejecting able and willing US applicants.
It's about setting the pay below US local market levels so that US job-seekers won't be "interested" (and thus driving down the local market compensation).
It's about placing ads in media where able and willing US applicants aren't likely to find them, and placing them for the minimal required time, and artificially creating other barriers to the members of the US STEM talent pool.
It's about not opening up and reaching out to the available talent pool but using dodges to place them with 3 extremely local outlets of 1 or 2 firms.
It's about exaggerating requirements and the amount of new-hire training that would be necessary for a US candidate whose experience, credentials, etc., don't exactly match those of the pre-selected foreign employee, regardless of whether they are actually necessary to do the job well.
It's about setting up additional gauntlets for able and willing US candiates to be put though if they pass all of the initial barriers, in order to manufacture pretexts on which to declare them "unqualified".
The same techniques are used by firms that are supposed to comply with the even weaker requirements for "H-1B dependent employers" and H-1B employers who have already been caught scamming. Before H-1B, batteries of telephone pre-screening "trivial pursuit" or "human compiler" quizzes were unheard of and interview discussions centered around knowledge and work experience rather than irrelevant pretexts on which to thin the ranks of applicants.
It already has. It's driven down opportunity, pay, and career prospects. The flood of cheap, pliant labor has also driven down the standards of professional ethics, allowing projects that would not have seen the light of day be developed despite their ethical questionability.
When the "enterprises" created by the immigrants (and guest-workers) are examined, it's clear that many of them are merely more bodyshops. They're not inventing great new products. They're not employing US citizens or even indirectly creating cutting-edge opportunities for former US citizen STEM workers.
Opportunities for US citizen STEM workers to do great things -- plentiful in the 1980s (before H-1B) -- are extremely rare, now. The career ladder has been totally disrupted. Young US citizen students used to have many opportunities for employment while they developed their knowledge and skills, and they could look forward to a full and ever-improving career into their 70s. Now, bright Americans have a hard time getting internships, graduate assistantships, new-grad employment, and they're dumped once they reach the age of 35.
We'll welcome the brilliant foreigners when we begin to see some. We certainly don't need 98% of the not-brilliant H-1Bs we've been getting over the last 2 decades. For the "best and brightest" claims to hold up statistically, the list would have to be in the hundreds of thousands of names, and the products/inventions would have to be a lot better. Since the US government has been admitting over 100K "best and brightest" people on H-1B visas each year, year after year, there should be a couple million staggeringly brilliant superstars to list instead of a few dozen milquetoasts.
In the 1980s, the total cost to employ a person was about twice their pre-extortion salary. In this case that'd be $60K+$60K, for a total cost of $120K... thus giving yet another demonstration that one of the effects of bodyshopping, including cross-border bodyshopping, has been to drive down total compensation.
"No offence, but the Dakotas, are not exactly a tech hot-spot."
They were showing some metaphorical hot tech sparks a couple decades ago. Some of them relocated, but even they aren't what they were.
Route 128 (Digital Equipment Corp., Data General...), Minneapolis-St. Paul (a couple medical product firms, Control Data Corp., Unisys, and CDC spin-offs Cray, MPI, ICEM Inc., Citigroup), Dayton (NCR), the NC Research Triangle, Cincinnati (Milacron, SDRC, Wright/GE), Columbus, Cleveland (SOHIO super-computing center now part of BP), Kansas City (United, Sprint, Bendix/Allied Signal), St. Louis (lots of small engineering firms), Chicago, Rochester, Atlanta (remember GT STRUDL?, Scientific Atlanta, Marconi Avionics), Houston, Hampton, Indianapolis, Tampa, and a lot of other locations that were showing some tech promise in the 1980s are essentially dead, now.
Austin and Dallas, which struggled from the early 1980s through the 1990s to fan the sparks into flame, seem to be barely hanging on but with more net destruction than creation.
San Diego was showing a little promise, in the 1980s and late 1990s, in software, embedded software/hardware, biotech, web-weavers, but that was smashed by the cross-border bodyshopping and off-shoring. We've had certified geniuses struggling to hang on, teaching the guest-workers for several years, now.
"Services", consulting, contracting, temping, etc., is tread-mill work. You tot up your tasks accomplished for the day, and maybe you took care of 20 or 200 tasks today instead of 5 or 100 yesterday, but you're not really moving forward; they're the same kinds of things you did yesterday. And worse, your work isn't fully appreciated, regardless of how good you become at it.
When you develop a software product, you just keep on making it better (well, unless you're MSFT). You build on the value you've already created. You engage in experimentation, R&D.
Analogously with your line of thought, you can pour your heart into designing and making a great piece of software or a movie, and then offer it up to the public where hundreds or thousands or millions pay what it's worth to them. With "services", temping, etc., you're in one dungeon this month and a different dungeon the next month, but your'e still walking in circles, doing very little that's new and exciting and worthwhile. At worst, you're merely facilitating privacy and other rights violations (cloud services, social networking, ERP, CRM, digitizing medical records...).
The problem is that they've been rubber-stamping too many visa applications instead of conscientiously investigating claims of sponsors of applicants, considering whether the application truly is outstanding, whether the applicant does or does not have knowledge and skills which are not readily available among the US citizen population, and examining whether the applicant is likely to initiate force or fraud, respect or violate patents and copyrights, leak intellectual property, cheat on tests, etc.
If he's one of the rare, truly brilliant, creative, and nice, peaceable individuals who respects the rights of others, then the door should be open.
Instead, the government has been handing out over 100K H-1B visas every year, the vast majority of applicants are not above-average, and the government is not running background investigations on any of them.
The executives in business and academia just want an unlimited supply of cheap, pliant labor, apparently regardless of any other consideration. If they spent half the money and effort on relocation and training of US citizen candidates that they've been putting into manufacturing pretexts on which to reject all US applicants, 200 H-1B + F with OPT + L + J + E-3 visas per year would be more than enough.
It's slow. It's poorly designed from a work-flow standpoint. I could handle scores of usenet messages in NewsWatcher and dozens of e-mail messages in Eudora (even back when I had a 1200 baud dial-up) in the time it took to handle 1 or 2 HotMail messages (over DSL). (Of course, in Eudora, with a higher speed line, I could down-load a few hundred messages in a minute or two, handle them off-line, and send replies in a minute or less.)
Over time MSFT broke HotMail, making it worse and worse until it was totaly unusable. First, I noticed objects on the screen started stepping over each other and it went down-hill from there; sending attachments became hit or miss, requiring a couple tries through the loop of screens; clicking on the right spot to get it to display message contents became more difficult; buttons were painted off-screen and you couldn't just use the scroll-bar controls to bring them in reach.
There was no H-1B visa in the 1970s, and the STEM job markets were good in the 1970s and up to the stock market crash in 1987. There was an H visa for agricultural workers, created in 1952. H-1B was created in 1990, but the first visas weren't issued until fiscal year 1992.
I worked with genuine temporary guest-workers who had specialized knowledge back in the 1980s. They came, made their contributions, maybe did a little tourism while they were here, and then went back home within 2-3 months. The guy who developed ICEM Surf is a good example. He worked with our firm as a field analyst working with engineers at VW in Germany, developed Surf while riding the commuter train, he said, but it was riddled with bugs. He came over and we worked with him for a couple months to pound it into shape. We had a very few other field analysts from Germany, France, Israel... who came over for a couple months mainly to check whether their customers' most important wish-list features and bug fixes were taken care of. They'd all worked for our firm for several years and continued working for our firm afterwards, helping to support and sell our software products. There weren't thousands of them. Though before they arrived, several of them seemed to have thought Americans weren't industrious and didn't put in enough hours, they quickly learned that the opposite was the case and weren't able to keep up the pace. I think only one, a manager already, ended up getting a green card or citizenship.
1705-05-12: "An Act for the Naturalization of Phillippe De Richbourg, Francis Ribut, Peter Faure, James Champagne and others". The point being that it required a special act of the legislature; it was a big deal.
INA1952 - Immigration & Nationality Act; McCarran-Walter; effective 1952-12-24; Truman's veto was over-ridden (created H visa); 66 Stat. 163, 8 USC 1101 et seq.
IMMACT1990 - Kennedy-d'Amato-Dodd-Moynihan-Simpson Immigration Act of 1990; PL101-649; 104 Stat. 4978, 5019-5022; effective 1991-10-01 or 1991-11-29; (created H-1B visa requiring only "specialized knowledge" and H-1B3 fashion models.)
The problem is that the US under-class, coming from countries and cultures that do not value academic achievement, drags down the averages. Even worse, the illfare state and political correctness have dragged down the standards for and achievements of US citizen blacks who used to do much better before the "Great Society" program of LBJ.
But what you say regarding burger-flipping applies to being a grad student. NSF wanted to drive down compensation to those with graduate degrees in STEM fields, and they knew the resultant reduction in pay and employment security would drive out US citizens as the expected compensation fell below costs. Indeed, some scholars have said that the life-time incease in compensation for a STEM PhD is below the opportunity costs of being paid below market levels for 3-10 additional years (thus, going for the extra degree actually costs you in the long-run).
Between 2000 and 2008, US citizens earned 487,480 additional CS degrees (bachelor's + master's + doctor's), and 2,397,446 additional STEM degrees (according to the US DoEd, NCES, Digest of Education Statistics), about 702K additional US citizens developed their computer wrangling skills to the professional level, and some 858K developed professional skills for engineering (based on NCES and NSF figures). Yet, employment of production workers in software (commercial off-the-shelf, shrink-wrap, software publishing) product firms (REAL software development employment as opposed to being bodyshopped) has remained flat under 220K in that period. IOW, we'd be able to replace all of the real positions every 3-4 years, just from US citizens.
We should put in place some reasonable standards. If you're not at least in the top 0.5 percentile (5/1000) as compared to US citizens, then you're not "best" or "brightest", and hence not eligible for an H-1B visa. If you're not in the top 0.0002 percentile (2/million), then you're not eligible for an O visa.
And if you don't pass a proper background investigation you're not eligible for any kind of visa (business, student, guest-work, exchange, ambassador...). We've had far more than enough Khalid Sheik Mohammeds and Faisal Shahzads.
The fact is that many US citizens who don't even have high school diplomas, and US citizens with degrees in music, psychology, classical languages, and other non-CS fields, have developed excellent software products, designed massive data-warehouses, administered sytems and networks, etc.
"You have come to the conclusion that qualified applicants are not willing to work for the prevailing wage. I have come to the opposite conclusion, which is that your company is not offering the prevailing wage for qualified applicants."
Right. Consider also the nature of the work. Is it new, exciting, cutting edge? Will it lead to new, exciting, cutting edge work? No. Web weaving is trodding well-known ground, so well-trod that, even focusing on the Java world, the technology has already gone through several waves of framework development aimed at just such applications.
I'd also do a reality check on the meaning of "qualified" in your context. Most experienced programmers could pick up Java in a few hours, and the specific frameworks needed within a few weeks. If you'd offered market compensation, reasonable relocation, and new-hire training, those new employees would be productive by now.
But I understand. You don't think you've got that much money to invest. So, you don't have enough money to pay for what you want. Period. As much as I'd like, I don't have money to get every new Mac or iPad that's released, cars, pizza, land, house... That's life. Live with it. Stop demanding that everyone else put aside their priorities, goals, and dreams to artificially subsidize yours.
http://www.kermitrose.com/econSummaryAnalysis.html summary analysis of the history and effects of the expansion of the F visas, creation of the H-1B, abuse of the J and L visas.