Yes, I agree that a complete 'open borders' policy won't work - you need an element of difficulty in entry to ensure that you deny entry to those least able to contribute to your society.
You're also correct that wages are low in those sectors where unskilled foreigners undercut natives - but are you aware of what would happen if they disappeared? The rising cost of their wages, plus the knock-on effect to the cost of all other services would send inflation through the roof - I don't see Mr. Greenspan being too happy about that. Cheap foreign labour is one of those dirty little things that people love to take shots at, but the simple fact is that most industrialised countries rely on it economically.
All that aside, the point I was trying to make in my post was mainly one that my company can't get people with my skillset from US citizens - and despite some serious efforts to encourage engineers to develop in that manner, have been fairly unsuccesful. Not because the job doesn't pay well (my field/experience is $80-100k+) but because it's hard, and business/finance/law are easier (though more tedious) and pay better. Now while you argue that if there was no foreign labour engineer wages would rise, people simply won't pay for engineering services the same way they do for bankers and lawyers. It comes back to people willing to pay the going rate - and in these cases they simply aren't.
Your last point "sunk cost of having lived here up til now" I don't think holds up. While you've probably paid more for your education (mine was 'free', thanks to the taxpaying of my parents etc), what you should remember, that most people here take for granted, is *that you were born an American (and probably middle class) and that gives you massive advantages and opportunities most people in the world will never see*. An American co-worker of mine brings this up all the time - Americans wasting the opportunities afforded them by chance of birth, while some foreigners will sweat blood to get those opportunities, and the best response the US can come up with is to deny entry to the foreigners rather than improve their own attitude.
My final point about racism is one I'm not sure about myself. There certainly is an element of it, since I seem to be an 'acceptable foreigner' due to my skin colour, first language English, and being from a nation with the closest cultural ties to the US outside North American continent (ouch, that's a putdown for any culture!) - while Indians of equal caliber are often the butt of jokes from people that find me acceptable. If all H1Bs were like me, do you think there'd be the same problem?
And a final point - if these people really are talented and want to work here, aren't you better off with them doing it in the US at a comparable salary, rather than staying at home and charging 10% the going US rate for work contracted out to them?
While I know the article is aimed at programming jobs, people need to be aware that not all H1B workers are in programming - some are in other fields too. I'm an H1B from the UK employed in engineering - consultancy in design and simulation of systems involving wave propagation (waveguides for example). It's a small company, I get along well with everyone, like the work and they treat me well, and pay above the minimum required for an H1B (yes, there is a minimum that's a decent amount, which isn't mentioned in this topic often).
So why didn't my company get in a US worker to do the job I do? Simple - there isn't anyone with the skills required available. How do I know this? Because I work with all the people in the US that have this skill set (other companies) and they aren't available - and there's not a lot of them either.
My company has worked closely with several US universities over the last few years, supporting at minimal costs research groups and teaching courses, in an attempt to foster skill sets in the next generation of engineers in our field. What happens? The US students don't carry on in engineering, because it's too hard. They can make more money with less effort in business and law. The people that do run with the ball are either the 'very focussed' or the foreign students (either here or in their native countries).
And don't slam the H1B people for lowering your salary - that's a government restriction and with a loosening of those the bargaining power increases, and so do your wages. I find it amusing that in the land of the free market, people are advocating restricting trade (the selling of skills). Things need to be more free, not more regulated. I pay a lot of tax, a lot of social security I'll likely never see and contribute to the bottom line of my company in a big way.
Also, while there will always be stories about the crap foreign worker who couldn't do what he claimed, remember that most H1Bs are talented people in their field with the 'get up and go' to move halfway around the world. You're likely getting the benefits of someone who's in the top few % of ability in their own country, and has been educated at zero cost to you (talk about a bargain!). I suppose that's quite something to compete with, so maybe you'd just better keep them out so you don't have to.
This whole topic smacks to me of the racism I saw at home when the economy took a downturn - 'damn foreigners coming in here and stealing our jobs', when these were the people doing the jobs natives wouldn't do (clean toilets, sweep streets) or providing services everyone else wants (24 hour shops), working damn hard for not much money. While there are genuine concerns about abuses of the system (abusive companies need to be the target, not H1Bs) - don't let man's 'baser insticts' and fear rule attitudes.
While you may deny there is racism in any way here, look at some of the phrasing of sentences talking about Indians and eastern Europeans. 'These damn Indians taking a job from an honest hard-working American!'. Try replacing Indian with 'Jew' or 'Black' and see how it sounds. And I doubt you realise how often otherwise liberal people say this sort of thing - I've been in groups of educated Americans as they bitch about foreign workers and how they're just leeches etc - I pipe up with 'damn foreigners throw them all out of our country' and they agree. Only a few realise the irony that I'm a foreigner too. Why? Because I'm white and English is my first language.
We use 1.2GHz Athlon machines at my work for Finite Element calculations - essentially computer simulations of various engineering systems, and that extra 10% is important to us. When a calculation takes 22 hours as opposed to 24 hours, that's 2 hours of engineer's time at ~$100 per hour, compared to an extra $100 in machine cost - paid for in one day. We pretty much see a linear increase with clock speed for many of our runs and on top of the 50% - 100% performance gain we see over the PIII 1GHZ (20% to 33% in clock speed times 25% to 45% in IPC, in boxes that cost a hell of a lot less) that's a lot. A P4 gives us about 40% less IPC than the PIII and only equals the 1GHz PIII due to faster clock rate - it doesn't look like SSE2 buys us much with current compilers, and the P4 x87 unit is a piece of crap only issuing a result every 2nd cycle.
We've just bought 8 of them, and plan on buying about 20 more for setting up in a parallel environment. While we support all major platforms including Alpha, Sun, SGI etc, for price/performance these AMD boxes can't be beaten. While we can buy Alpha systems etc, you pay a hell of a premium for them and they'll be outdated quickly. This way we can update these machines regularly, shifting them onto other projects when faster stuff comes along. Since we're dealing with $1000 hardware as opposed to $100,000, there's no 'guilt' about getting rid of them later, and means we can bid lower on contracts than competitors using expensive equipment.
As soon as we can get our hands on decent AMD dual boxes, we'll buy a load of them too.
Paul
cnbr28@yahoo.com
Speed of sound in air ~340 m/s Speed of sound in water ~1500 m/s Speed of sound in Steel ~5900 m/s So if you were travelling at 2500 m/s then even without the cavitation that will prevent usefulness of SONAR you'd still be blind - you'd get to your target before it's imaged. Of course if you start pinging earlier and use prior pulses, add predicitive software, or rely on your target not moving much between launch and impact it's feasible. It's useful for torpedoes, useless for manned travel.
This would work well for torpedoes, but given that submarines 'see' by SONAR, and that the cavitation will completely screw that up - then they'll be 'flying blind', at high speeds. Not good.
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Yes, I agree that a complete 'open borders' policy won't work - you need an element of difficulty in entry to ensure that you deny entry to those least able to contribute to your society.
You're also correct that wages are low in those sectors where unskilled foreigners undercut natives - but are you aware of what would happen if they disappeared? The rising cost of their wages, plus the knock-on effect to the cost of all other services would send inflation through the roof - I don't see Mr. Greenspan being too happy about that. Cheap foreign labour is one of those dirty little things that people love to take shots at, but the simple fact is that most industrialised countries rely on it economically.
All that aside, the point I was trying to make in my post was mainly one that my company can't get people with my skillset from US citizens - and despite some serious efforts to encourage engineers to develop in that manner, have been fairly unsuccesful. Not because the job doesn't pay well (my field/experience is $80-100k+) but because it's hard, and business/finance/law are easier (though more tedious) and pay better. Now while you argue that if there was no foreign labour engineer wages would rise, people simply won't pay for engineering services the same way they do for bankers and lawyers. It comes back to people willing to pay the going rate - and in these cases they simply aren't.
Your last point "sunk cost of having lived here up til now" I don't think holds up. While you've probably paid more for your education (mine was 'free', thanks to the taxpaying of my parents etc), what you should remember, that most people here take for granted, is *that you were born an American (and probably middle class) and that gives you massive advantages and opportunities most people in the world will never see*. An American co-worker of mine brings this up all the time - Americans wasting the opportunities afforded them by chance of birth, while some foreigners will sweat blood to get those opportunities, and the best response the US can come up with is to deny entry to the foreigners rather than improve their own attitude.
My final point about racism is one I'm not sure about myself. There certainly is an element of it, since I seem to be an 'acceptable foreigner' due to my skin colour, first language English, and being from a nation with the closest cultural ties to the US outside North American continent (ouch, that's a putdown for any culture!) - while Indians of equal caliber are often the butt of jokes from people that find me acceptable. If all H1Bs were like me, do you think there'd be the same problem?
And a final point - if these people really are talented and want to work here, aren't you better off with them doing it in the US at a comparable salary, rather than staying at home and charging 10% the going US rate for work contracted out to them?
While I know the article is aimed at programming jobs, people need to be aware that not all H1B workers are in programming - some are in other fields too. I'm an H1B from the UK employed in engineering - consultancy in design and simulation of systems involving wave propagation (waveguides for example). It's a small company, I get along well with everyone, like the work and they treat me well, and pay above the minimum required for an H1B (yes, there is a minimum that's a decent amount, which isn't mentioned in this topic often).
So why didn't my company get in a US worker to do the job I do? Simple - there isn't anyone with the skills required available. How do I know this? Because I work with all the people in the US that have this skill set (other companies) and they aren't available - and there's not a lot of them either.
My company has worked closely with several US universities over the last few years, supporting at minimal costs research groups and teaching courses, in an attempt to foster skill sets in the next generation of engineers in our field. What happens? The US students don't carry on in engineering, because it's too hard. They can make more money with less effort in business and law. The people that do run with the ball are either the 'very focussed' or the foreign students (either here or in their native countries).
And don't slam the H1B people for lowering your salary - that's a government restriction and with a loosening of those the bargaining power increases, and so do your wages. I find it amusing that in the land of the free market, people are advocating restricting trade (the selling of skills). Things need to be more free, not more regulated. I pay a lot of tax, a lot of social security I'll likely never see and contribute to the bottom line of my company in a big way.
Also, while there will always be stories about the crap foreign worker who couldn't do what he claimed, remember that most H1Bs are talented people in their field with the 'get up and go' to move halfway around the world. You're likely getting the benefits of someone who's in the top few % of ability in their own country, and has been educated at zero cost to you (talk about a bargain!). I suppose that's quite something to compete with, so maybe you'd just better keep them out so you don't have to.
This whole topic smacks to me of the racism I saw at home when the economy took a downturn - 'damn foreigners coming in here and stealing our jobs', when these were the people doing the jobs natives wouldn't do (clean toilets, sweep streets) or providing services everyone else wants (24 hour shops), working damn hard for not much money. While there are genuine concerns about abuses of the system (abusive companies need to be the target, not H1Bs) - don't let man's 'baser insticts' and fear rule attitudes.
While you may deny there is racism in any way here, look at some of the phrasing of sentences talking about Indians and eastern Europeans. 'These damn Indians taking a job from an honest hard-working American!'. Try replacing Indian with 'Jew' or 'Black' and see how it sounds. And I doubt you realise how often otherwise liberal people say this sort of thing - I've been in groups of educated Americans as they bitch about foreign workers and how they're just leeches etc - I pipe up with 'damn foreigners throw them all out of our country' and they agree. Only a few realise the irony that I'm a foreigner too. Why? Because I'm white and English is my first language.
We use 1.2GHz Athlon machines at my work for Finite Element calculations - essentially computer simulations of various engineering systems, and that extra 10% is important to us. When a calculation takes 22 hours as opposed to 24 hours, that's 2 hours of engineer's time at ~$100 per hour, compared to an extra $100 in machine cost - paid for in one day. We pretty much see a linear increase with clock speed for many of our runs and on top of the 50% - 100% performance gain we see over the PIII 1GHZ (20% to 33% in clock speed times 25% to 45% in IPC, in boxes that cost a hell of a lot less) that's a lot. A P4 gives us about 40% less IPC than the PIII and only equals the 1GHz PIII due to faster clock rate - it doesn't look like SSE2 buys us much with current compilers, and the P4 x87 unit is a piece of crap only issuing a result every 2nd cycle. We've just bought 8 of them, and plan on buying about 20 more for setting up in a parallel environment. While we support all major platforms including Alpha, Sun, SGI etc, for price/performance these AMD boxes can't be beaten. While we can buy Alpha systems etc, you pay a hell of a premium for them and they'll be outdated quickly. This way we can update these machines regularly, shifting them onto other projects when faster stuff comes along. Since we're dealing with $1000 hardware as opposed to $100,000, there's no 'guilt' about getting rid of them later, and means we can bid lower on contracts than competitors using expensive equipment. As soon as we can get our hands on decent AMD dual boxes, we'll buy a load of them too. Paul cnbr28@yahoo.com
Speed of sound in air ~340 m/s Speed of sound in water ~1500 m/s Speed of sound in Steel ~5900 m/s So if you were travelling at 2500 m/s then even without the cavitation that will prevent usefulness of SONAR you'd still be blind - you'd get to your target before it's imaged. Of course if you start pinging earlier and use prior pulses, add predicitive software, or rely on your target not moving much between launch and impact it's feasible. It's useful for torpedoes, useless for manned travel.
This would work well for torpedoes, but given that submarines 'see' by SONAR, and that the cavitation will completely screw that up - then they'll be 'flying blind', at high speeds. Not good.