07/29/2013
Clayton Cramer is a historian of gun rights and the Second Amendment, so he’s often writing about things that VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow considers off-topic. But he’s also an American software engineer … (my emphases).
PBS On "The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage"
I was actually rather surprised to see PBS taking the side of Americans:
Currently, U.S. colleges graduate far more scientists and engineers than find employment in those fields every year — about 200,000 more — while the IT industry fills about two-thirds of its entry-level positions with guest workers.At the same time, IT wages have stagnated for over a decade. We cannot expect to build a strong STEM workforce and encourage domestic innovation by developing policies that undermine the quality of STEM jobs. Before asking government to intervene in labor markets by handing out more guest worker visas and green cards to STEM graduates, we should ask for audits of shortage claims and workforce impacts as a first step toward developing evidence-based policy on this issue, an issue critical to the nation’s future.Asking domestic graduates, both native-born and immigrant, to compete with guest workers on wages is not a winning strategy for strengthening U.S. science, technology and innovation.The article points out that many of the H-1B visas are for people who are not doing cutting edge work:There may be highly innovative guest workers, but most are in jobs far away from the innovation frontier. The Economic Policy Institute’s Ron Hira found that few of the largest H-1B employers could be considered technology innovators, with most generating very low levels of patents.Theoretically, H-1B visas are supposed to be for workers with specialized job skills that could not be hired from the pool of U.S. citizens or permanent residents. I've seen quite few examples of employers advertising for H-1Bs with very generic job skills: five years of object-oriented programming, and I have worked with a few who were grossly incompetent.
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