What do the founders of Intel, Sun Microsystems and Google — Andy Grove, Andy
Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla and Sergey Brin — have in common with Albert Einstein and Wernher von Braun? All are part of America's tradition of welcoming talented immigrants who have made significant contributions to our industry.
So starts an op-ed in USA Today penned by Sun Microsystems Chairman Scott McNealy and TechNet CEO Lezlee Westine. Other exceprts...
The innovative companies they built created thousands of jobs and have a combined market cap of $250 billion. But our longstanding tradition of being an open door for innovation is at risk.
Today's broken immigration system closes the door on foreign-born innovators. With arbitrary visa limits and clogged processing, opportunity is knocking at our door and we're fumbling with the keys.
...and...
...the federal government provides 65,000 H-1B visas each year, beginning Oct. 1. Yet the visas made available last October were spoken for almost two months before that, which means our open door for innovation is temporarily closed for 14 months.
For foreign-born students graduating from a U.S. college in June, the H-1B limitations make it difficult for them to find jobs here. We're even closing the door on those with H-1Bs visas who seek permanent U.S. residency because of extended delays in a system designed largely in 1990, when our workforce and economic needs were different.
For the U.S. high-tech community, these laws present a difficult choice: Innovate or perish. If we can't find professionals to do the job here in the USA, many will simply move the job to the qualified workers overseas.
Meanwhile, the San Francisco Chronicle reports that several leading economists testified before Congress yesterday and agrued that America is better off economically by encouraging educated immigrants to work here:
Economists largely agree, however, that highly skilled immigrants benefit the economy, despite the argument that they reduce the incentive for American children to enter fields such as engineering.
(Dan) Siciliano (executive director of Stanford University's program in law, economics and business) said these workers should be invited to stay, and the United States should invest in educating native-born youth, so that "the 5-year-olds right now do end up getting the double Ph.D in electrical engineering and applied physics and go on to win the Nobel Prize. You're talking about 5-year-olds, not the 25-year-olds. We need the 25-year-olds to get an H1B (visa), have their own governments pay them to go to Stanford University, and then go on to work at Google. That's a good deal for us."
The $2,000 fee for the H1B visa is spent on science and math education and training. A survey by the National Foundation for American Policy, a nonprofit research group, found that employers have paid more than $1 billion in H1B visa fees since 1999. The fees have funded more than 40,000 scholarships and grants for U.S. students in science and math, and science programs for 75,000 middle and high school students, and provided training for 55,000 U.S. workers and teachers, the study found.
The problem is that how they describe the H1B program is NOT how it actually works! 85% of all H1Bs earn less than $50K/year( some as low as $9/hour!) - only a small percentage like 10-15% are the high paid "rare workers" they refer to. The biggest users of H1B are Indian outsourcing companies. H1B is a cheap labor programs that speeds up the exportation of jobs and drives down the wages of native Americans. BTW, Andy Grove, Andy Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla and Sergey Brin - none of them were H1Bs - no H1B has ever created orginal art patents that founded a successful tech company!
Posted by: Linux Guru | January 13, 2008 at 10:19 AM
A few as I sit at the kiosk in Coffs Harbour Palms shopping ctnere:1. Improved and more secure income support,and less demonisation and bureaucratic harassment, for the unemployed and sole parents.2. More support for young people transitioning from care.3. Suicide prevention.4. Removing unjustifiable exemptions from anti-discrimination laws.5. Subjecting all contractors for outsourced government service delivery to the same public policy requirementsand scrutiny as government agencies were/would be subject to (and returning these functions to government agencies if contractors are unable/unwilling to comply).6. More funding for higher education.7. World's best practice (i.e.Scandinavian) policy on parental leave for both parents.8. Regulating political advertising so as to eliminate the present advantages enjoyed by the top end of town vis-a-vis less cashed-up stakeholders.That'll do for one morning.
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