Skilled Worker Visas Limit Reached

[Khephra]

WASHINGTON -- The federal government won't accept any more applications for a popular visa program that provides skilled foreign labor to U.S. companies, the office of Citizenship and Immigration Services said Tuesday.

Less than five months into the fiscal year there already are enough applications to fill all 65,000 slots for H1-B visas, said Chris Bentley, a spokesman for the agency, a division of the Department of Homeland Security.

The office planned to stop accepting applications at the end of the day Tuesday. No new applications will be accepted until April and no additional visas will be issued until Oct. 1, when the next fiscal year begins.

The H1-B visa program is controversial. Critics say it allows businesses to fill jobs with cheap foreign labor rather than hiring Americans at higher wages. The high-tech industry and other businesses that use the program to fill jobs say they can't find enough qualified Americans to do the kind of work they need.

more................

http://www.newsday.com/news/politics/wire/sns-ap-high-tech-visas,0,1274378.story?coll=sns-ap-politics-headlines

[POed_Ex_Repub]

1. They don't need to fill anymore

Not when the jobs are being exported.

[Robb]

2. Something you may not know:

Colorado ski resorts eat up a lot of H1-Bs. To my experience it's been for the super-accredited ski instructors, of which there really aren't enough in the US. These are the people who ski in that other hemisphere half the year to get the experience they need.

[central scrutinizer]

3. nice synergy of posts today

There is another post stating that 61% of Americans believe the universe was literally created in 6 days. So, it should not be surprising that we can't find enough Americans educated enough to fill high tech jobs.

[The_Casual_Observer]

4. Wages aren't low enough yet

So lets raise the limit!

Who would want to go into a scientific/ technical field anymore?
Those careers are dominated by foreigner people willing to work for practically nothing.

[tom2kpro]

5. And if we don't let them come here, our corps will go to them!

And if we don't let them come here, our corporations will go to them where they are! (In Bangalore, for example). We can't win.

I cannot really see how to stop it. I guess we could pass laws requiring that all work for governments be done stateside (including buying only products with US product support services), but I don't know how practical that last part is.

Some people who support this outsourcing try to make it sound like it is outsourcing only the lower paid work (I read some stuff like this in the WSJ), and keeping the highly skilled work here, but that is just not true. Indian engineers in Bangalore are likely to be just as good or better than their American counterparts who NEED to make a lot more because of the higher cost of living in the US.

I do not relish the prospect of wage equalization throughout the world. There might be a certain irony if social justice goals of more equal wages worldwide were furthered by free trade gone wild, but do you really want your house to lose half its value over the next ten years as wages equalize worldwide. If this makes me sound like a selfish protectionist, then so be it.