Comment Re:The truth (Score 1) 523
It's dual-intent in the sense that staying home is dual-intent because they could apply for a visa, or being a citizen is dual-intent because you could renounce your citizenship. (Granted that unlike some visas applying for permanent residency doesn't void it, but that doesn't mean it's any faster road to permanent residency than its absence.)
If we compare job levels during irrationally exuberant boom times of 1999 to job levels during the recession of 2002, we'll find "unemployment insurance" running out not only among programmers but among every other field.
In how many other fields where unemployment insurance (no need for sneer-quotes, that's the official name) was running out were there simultaneously calls for importing workers in those fields because of a "desperate labor shortage"?
So let's have such requirements in IT too and let's see how many of the 100,000 unemployed actually can make it through. Most IT jobs are highly skilled and anyone with half a brain who wishes to be in IT shouldn't be able to just because he wants to.
A lot of people in the profession would like such a barrier to entry. How would you implement it? Unlike lawyers, we don't make the laws; unlike doctors and professional engineers we can't appeal to "public safety"; and by our nature and the nature of our employers and the current era forming a trade union is not likely.
What would be the requirements? Many who are in the field today got their undergraduate degrees (or didn't get them) before there were computer science or computer engineering degrees. Good practices are learned on the job, and particular languages and other implementation skills are a very fast moving target.
I can't speak for the other 99,999 unemployed engineers, but I was buzzword-compliant as to education, training, skills and experience. There are similar claims in various articles that Americans don't have necessary skills, but this is rarely backed up by "Here is this job, it needs these skills, I will pay relocation and offer $125,000/year for an American who has these skills or who can become current in them in 3 months time."
H1-B is not about brilliancy! It's about run-of-the-mill programmers paid "prevailing" rates which are considerably less than the market rate for good programmers.
It IS about brilliancy, when thousands of candidates from the rest of the world compete for 65,000 visas only the brilliant few can get them.
Do you have any evidence that there is skills-based competition?
Advanced degrees are only a surrogate measure, both foreign and domestic, but apparently the H1-B exemption allowing 20,000 more visas for those holding US advanced degrees is going unfilled.
There may be some who do run-of-the-mill programming jobs but that doesn't discount them as run-of-the-mill, its the visa program that ties them to an employer and doesn't give them an opportunity to go for cutting-edge jobs. They can't change employers as projects change. Disconnect the visa from the employer and you won't see many of them doing run-of-the-mill jobs at "prewailing" rates. There may still be some who come through contacts but the market will take care of such low quality workers.
There are good strategic reasons to offer protectionism for domestic high-tech workers, but I'd get off the bandwagon at that point, where the playing field has been leveled by making H1-B workers no more indentured or otherwise disadvantaged (and thus cheaper) than domestic workers. Here we are in complete agreement.
