Letters to the Editor
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Don't get into irrelevant detail, look at the freemarket concept
Most of the letter writers here are getting confused in details about information. Look at the concept of the free market instead.
It means that if goods can move anywhere in the world freely, so can services and workers. That means Indians working in America or Americans working in India. It also means H1B visas need not be increased.THEY SHOULD BE DONE AWAY WITH. Just allow any worker in the world to compete with any other worker in the world, anywhere. Visas are to labour what quotas are to import of goods.
Databases, ARPANET, we-did-it-first, we-built-the-infrastructure??? How does it matter? In business, a techie is not a superior to a carpenter or a fruit seller, unless the laws of demand and supply say so.
Do you buy a Benz because Daimler invented the motor car or do you buy a Toyota because the Japanese build them faster/better/cheaper?
If customer is king, and employers are customers in the labor market.
Er, if you disagree, ask both Democrats and Republicans to stop sale of American goods overseas. Before you discuss H1B, discuss economics. And don't talk Microsoft and IBM without talking Pepsi and Kellogg and DuPont who gave Americans the money to buy or build Microsoft products by exporting goods.
It is all business, it is all money, and if you disagree, don't ask for wages. Or do you want to suddenly abandon captialism because it does not suit you anymore? Two can play this game, and the world is big, very big.
Don't discuss information without being clear about concepts. A free market is a free market. Everybody has a right to impose restrictions if the other party also does it.
And get a life. Technology is not everything. Graduate education is not everything.
And just for a moment, think about the fact that Indians and Chinese offer more work at lower wages, and prefer the so-called slavery in US to work in India. When someone is working twice as hard for bread, don't complain that someone is stealing your marmalade. Grow up before they make you grow up.
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Global Worker Utopia
Global Worker Utipia has a name, it is called Marxism. It works to! The idea is that if the labor is reduced to its lowest common denominator, the government will just "fade away". Remember the Soviet Union? With no significant wages, huge government military expenditures, the currency will collapse and the government will cease to exist. Wonderful! A better plan would help these developing countries improve their education systems, not raid them of the limited number of educated people they have. Why can't Microsoft open an office in Mumbai? Bejing?
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Disservice to National Prosperity
outsourcing our best industries is obviously a disservice to anyone who values national prosperity and economic health. Obviously India and China, Phillipines, etc understand this, as not one of those country's has a foreign worker visa program.
While it is true there has been a late decline in the number of American's who are pursuing advanced technological degrees (quite possibly a direct result of offshoring), the answer to that is obviously NOT to reduce the wages/salary even further via what amounts to welfare programs to 3rd world nations and their corrupt governments.
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We need public campaign financing and restrictions on lobbying
I have first hand experience with this issue. I am a retired software engineer and software development manager. There is no question that the key reason high tech industry and contract houses want more H1B visas is MONEY.
I worked with many H1B engineers from India and a number from Taiwan. In many cases they had been "imported" by contract houses with work conditions not much better than identured servitude. Most were eager to get their green card to be released from their yoke. They are often asked to work long hours with no or limited vacations for much lower pay than an American engineer.
The remedy for the supposed shortage of US engineers is to reduce the influence of lobbyists and large campaign contributors to our representatives in congress. The way the system runs, the vote of software engineers as a group counts for nothing compared to the influence of big industry money and influence. Is this the democracy we really want for our country?
Public campaign financing may be the only remedy for this problem.
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And the quality sucks.
Gates is like all the rest selling out America. No, they're not OUR jobs but we sure as hell built them.
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The H-1B Visa is a "Government Subsidy"
The late Milton Friedman, a free - market advocate and Nobel Economics Laureate noted in this ComputerWorld article that H-1B Is Just Another Gov't. Subsidy by Paul Donnelly (July 22, 2002)
See: http://www.computerworld.com/careertopics/careers/labor/story/0,10801,72848,00.html
....But Nobel economist Milton Friedman scoffs at the idea of the government stocking a farm system for the likes of Microsoft and Intel. "There is no doubt," he says, "that the [H-1B] program is a benefit to their employers, enabling them to get workers at a lower wage, and to that extent, it is a subsidy."
From free-market thinker Friedman, those are devastating words. The H-1B program is a subsidy that distorts the job market for IT talent.....
How did this "government subsidy" come about? The research that I have completed suggests that there is a good mixture of corruption in the process. See this author's 2005 article on the history of the H-1B visa.
http://www.thesocialcontract.com/pdf/fifteen-three/xv-3-207.pdf
To see how bloated this government subsidy has become, the missing table at the end of the article is reproduced at this site:
http://jobdestruction.com/ShameH1B/Library/BrainSavers/H-1BVisaUsage_NIH_2003.pdf
Interested readers may learn how Microsoft spent at least $21.07 million just between 1998 and 2000 in "lobbying expenses" to assist in procuring the controversial H-1B visa increases in 1998 and 2000. Microsoft hired the Abramoff Lobbying Network to help in that process - that means Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed, and Grover Norquist, among others. Please contact the author at c0030180[at]airmail.net for a spreadsheet.