When will the H-1B visa be featured on "The Real Hustle" exposing it as the scam it is? Here's how it works. Hire shills to write about a non-existent tech shortage and recruit tech CEO's to complain about access to a non-existent foreign genius pool. Also, create fake "think tanks" with fabricated "studies" on how access to cheap, foreign labor supposedly creates jobs out of thin air for American tech workers. When American Tech workers complain about it, simply hire more shills to scream even louder about how we need more foreign tech workers. If members of Congress start questioning any of this, throw some lobbying money their way to shut them up.
With this scam set up the way it is, everyone wins except American tech workers. The tech CEO's get access to cheap, foreign labor. The shills have a job based on selling out their fellow Americans and members of Congress get lobbying money to look the other way. The H-1B recipients get to come to America and learn how to do jobs they are supposedly "experts" at to begin with and then take those jobs back to the third world when the time comes.

Careful, P. Henry, you may get shut down by the pro-immigrant, legal, illegal or otherwise, Mountain View Voice editors.

On the other hand, thanks for exposing this scam.

P. Henry, I'm not sure what you're basing your information on. Even in this recession, my husband's tech company often finds it difficult to find highly qualified workers, resulting in positions in his company being open for many months, hurting the company. If his company weren't able to hire foreign workers (and many of the company's best engineers and other professionals are foreign-born) I don't know how the company would function.

If only this area had a culture of computers and higher education. Then JP's husband's company wouldn't need to look overseas. We should look into that.

In Germany they train their workers: Web Link with excellent economic results. While here Local, State, and Federal austerity has produced an ecomomy that has stalled, and may get worse when the debt deal cuts take effect. We can't pay off the national credit card without economic growth. Web Link

Financial Times article on German Economy: Web Link They've been growing at 3%.

When a person obtains an elite education in a country. Ask how does that country treat it’s lower classes? Is there a great disparity between upper and lower classes? Are the ones with access to an elite education treating the lower classes fair or are they benefiting unfairly from this disparity? In the USA we need more focus on education. Maybe pulling some funds from our nationbuilding projects abroad.

At the tech companies I have worked for over the past 10 years, growth has almost always been constrained by the number of qualified candidates.

The job candidates we're turning down after making it as far as the interview room are not poorly educated; they have the right university degrees but lack both a particular skill set and the motivation to learn those skills without being told to by their boss or sent to a training program. I've seen no evidence that American candidates are less qualified than foreigners. And even if Americans are more expensive, money has not been an issue--trying to save a few dollars on salaries makes no sense when you're trying to grow a company as quickly as possible.

Hiring H1-B candidates is indeed a nightmare--after offering someone a job it can take the better part of a year to find out whether they are allowed to work in the US. Good, you say? Well, if we make it hard enough for the really good foreigners to work here, they'll just work elsewhere--either at an American firm that opens an office outside the US, or at a foreign company that will compete with American ones.