[Lula-biz] exporting work and the "recession"

[Christopher Smith]

On Thu, 2003-07-24 at 17:30, Steve Barnette wrote:
> I've been in the computer industry since '82 in develop and last few
> years IT.  I have never seen the need for the H1B visa program. I
> remember way back when it was ramping up, there was a lot of Americans
> to fill positions, but they cost more.  There was no shortage it was
> corporations wanting cheap help.  Corporate American greed in action,
> influencing politicians to create visa programs.

People keep assuming that the H1B program is all about getting cheaper
help. For the most part it's about getting more qualified help. Sure it
can be abused, but for the most part it tends not to be. It's also
mostly irrelevant right now because our rules for H1B's require that you
can't have laid off workers recently if you are applying for an H1B.

Let me give you 2 examples of where an H1B program makes total sense:

1) My cousin is working at i2 on an H1B (of course since they've been
laying people off she is not going to be able to renew it). She is
actually one of the highest paid people in her position. She is the one
the send in when i2 is in danger of losing an account. If she leaves i2
(or if she never had been able to work there), they will almost
certainly lose a number of accounts. Each account pays for employment
and development of dozens of i2 employees. Since she lives in the US,
she also spends a great deal of her income in the US, which helps employ
a lot of other people in the US economy. My cousin meanwhile will be
working outside of US, working for one of i2's competitors. The net
result will be that competitor will be taking in money that would have
otherwise helped to produce revenue, taxes, and jobs in the US. 

2) I work at Overture (soon to be Yahoo). We, along with Google &
Microsoft are investing millions of dollars in research and development
to make search better. Collectively the 3 companies are hiring all of
the best researchers in the field from all over the world. Nobody cares
about getting "cheaper" researchers, only about getting "good"
researchers. My group alone has researchers from half a dozen nations in
it. Most of the overseas people are here on an H1B. The cool thing about
this is that regardless of who ends up with the best search engine, it's
a fairly safe bet that that company will be in the US, employing
researchers and engineers in the US, and the revenue from these
developments will be subject to US taxes. Without the H1B, it's actually
quite likely that the next great search engine would be outside the US,
represented a substancial loss of capital and jobs from the US economy.

BTW, for both of these cases, it is terribly difficult to qualify for
the H1B. Overture is constantly having to prove that it's R&D group is
actually doing research, rather than simply employing "cheap foreign
scientists" (apparently they have no clue what we pay good researchers)
to do software development.

-- 
Christopher Smith <x at xman.org>
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