21-Gun Salute for H-1B Visas

All of the Big Guns are firing the battle cry for increasing the numbers of H-1B visas being issued, as dictated by Bill Gates in his Committee of One testimony in front of Congress. The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New York Times, and others dutifully lined up to spout out the same, tired old high tech industry party line. (Yawn!) More foreign guest workers are needed in order to remain competitive, and American jobs will disappear if the visa cap is not raised.

Network World came up with this innovative solution for working within the current 65,000 H-1B visa cap:

One option that eliminates the need to work with immigration lawyers is rooting out potential candidates for the open position already on staff. For many hiring and IT managers, training in house technical employees on skills that are considered critical going forward is a better option that [sic] looking outside the company for talent.

"Managers can look for internal talent that may need a little more training or need to work in a different style," says Albert Porco, CIO at Kings County Medical Center in New York. "There are times when the most talented person is two or three levels down in the organization. Also at times, you don't need superstars, you need staff that can get the job done."

Talk about thinking outside the box! That ranks right up with the unusual idea of having a company set up a booth at a career fair to recruit recent college graduates!

How's this for particularly hateful commentary:

Kamal Jain, Director of Operations and Customer Service at Auraria Networks in Boxborough, Mass., agrees saying if IT hiring managers exhaust options outside of the company, then they need to look at the pool of talent already producing at the company.

"Consider career-changers who have the right attitude, intelligence, demeanor, etc. to fit your needs and then take some chances on training and development," Jain says. "It’s not a good way to get senior people, but it can bring in a great pool of talent which can free up enough experienced people to allow them to grow into the senior roles you may need filled."

I can write an entire post about this statement alone, but notice how the concept of hiring IT staff that have already reached "senior" status is completely missing.

Finally, (buckle your seat belts - you won't be ready for this one.)

Digitas' Russell says that her team and the company’s management is using a new mantra when it comes to hiring external or internal candidates that involves considering a broader range of qualified candidates.

"Management and recruiting is pushing people to consider what could be trained. If a candidate has 80% of the skills needed, we can hire them and we can teach the other 20% of skills," she says.

A company willing to look at a candidate who is not a 100% match for the position? I thought I'd never see that happening again.

The Washington Post waited a while, but they finally came up with "Visas Needed" in their Editorials section. According to Vdare, Norm Matloff at UC-Davis has put out the call to bombard the Post with letters protesting this story. He reminds us that Mrs. Bill Gates sits on the paper's board. Matloff advises us to "Let your draft sit for at least an hour, then revise it with a clearer head, before submitting."

(Phooey! I want to write it while my blood pressure is still elevated.)

Finally, here's a pretty good Op-Ed piece I found in Newsblaze that gives the other side of the H-1B story. In "The Current H-1B Visa Program Must Be Abolished or Reformed", John Wallace points out that:

The H-1B visa program was originally created to assist American employers who were having trouble finding American high-tech workers for their businesses. It allowed a fixed number of foreign workers come to the United States to "temporarily" fill those positions while the American companies and the federal government invested time and money in upgrading the training of American workers to meet the new skill levels required.

Here's how the H-1B program really works:

The H-1B work visa program was supposed to be used to bolster the U.S. economy by helping American-owned companies. Under the program, American companies can use the speciality visa to hire foreign software programmers or computer scientists with rare skills in order to encourage innovation and improving competitiveness. Instead, foreign companies such as Infosys and Wipro are using our own government program to undermine the American economy by wiping out American jobs. These foreign-owned companies are bringing low-cost workers into the U.S., training them in the offices of American business clients, and then rotating them back home after a year or two so they can provide low cost, out-sourced tech services that causes American IT workers to lose their jobs. How is this helping American workers and American businesses?

Notice how Wallace's story can only be printed in a media outlet that hardly anyone has ever heard of (as TooTruthy points out in the end of her blog post).

(Cross-posted at Carrie's Nation.)