Open the gates or keep them slightly ajar?

No, the Losers will be the AMERICAN CITIZENS - the new graduates forced to compete with a flood of H-1b workers for entry-level jobs because they are willing to work for lower pay for an opportunity to "work in America." The losers will be AMERICAN CITIZENS over age 35, with BS or higher degrees in technology and several years of experience, but passed over because the companies owned by the richest men in the world are too cheap to hire them and allow them a month or two to come up to speed, and provide a week or so of intensive training.

Congress should not be in the business of interfering with the free labor market by selecting certain professions to be flooded by cheap labor.

Please see www.hireamericansfirst.org for hundreds of testimonials of CITIZENS harmed by H-1b.

Here's a novel idea: Congress revise H-1b to direct DOL to only approve H-1b applications after the employer has made a good faith recruiting effort to fill the AMERICAN jobs with an AMERICAN. Then the 65,000 cap would not even be reached.

Currently employers can discard the resumes of 100 qualified Americans and hire the foreign worker. Seven of the top 10 users of H-1b are Indian consulting firms, and that is exactly what they do.

Judi: Please defend that practice!

Well, if student and guest-work visas are supposed to be for the "best and brightest" with knowledge and talent not available anywhere in the USA, the numbers of visas should be reduced by at least 90%.

This is especially true in light of research from RAND Corp., Sloan Foundation, Urban Institute, Duke, Georgetown, Rochester Institute of Technology, UC Davis, and Harvard, and the easily accessible NCES data on degrees earned by US citizens and BLS projections of demand for STEM workers, all indicating that we've been producing far more bright, well-educated STEM workers than we've been employing.
http://www.kermitrose.com/jgoEconData.html

Look, the real losers here are the Department of Labor -- which is incompetent and incapable of running this program in a manner that makes sense for the American workers and the corporations. There would be no mad rush, and no shortage of visas for technical corporations if they would just auction off a prorated portion of the visas each and every week to the highest salaried positions, and kept the visas out of the hands of the low-wage outsourcing slave masters that underprice technical resources each and every day.

There's nothing to prevent the DOL from running the program this way, but they prefer to mismanage it -- in the hope that their dismal performance will cause the lobbyists to bleat for more visas.

Sometimes, I think this is nothing more than a virtuous economic circle, where the immigration lawyers make out by filing multiple copies of applications, charging whether the visa is granted or not; the DOL by collecting larger fees; Congress by having more lobbyists come to them and ply them with campaign funds; and lobbyists by having corporations hire their staff.

It's a dirty system -- that only gets dirtier by adding more visas to the mix.

The scope of this immigration and outsourcing issue is becoming huge and the US economy is tanking as a result of it. As more and more US workers are un or underemployed due to offshoring of jobs, unrestricted L1 visa abuse, h1bs and the flood of other immigrants taking whats left of the lower skilled jobs - what are the poor in the US to do but stay on government programs paid for by a shrinking middle class - do you see the catch 22 here? Tax revenue will continue to decline as more and more people earn less money.

And it isn't just the tech industry either. The offshoring of manufacturing work is draining a limited supply of oil as we ship raw materials to foreign countries then ship them back as products and truck them all over the US. Talk about oil conservation.

There are hidden costs to the US economy which evidently are not being dealt with by management and government. We may have cheap products from China but its costing dearly in oil and jobs.

http://www.madnamerica.com

While gurus and techies debate the merits of H1, the visas are sure to vanish on day one for the new quota year
http://www.garamchai.com/index.php?p=413

I have finally found full-time permanent employment after FOUR YEARS of looking for a software engineering position. I have certainly been discriminated against during this search, both on the basis of national origin and age (including one time in writing! An no, I did not sue, I want a job, not a probably very small settlement).

H1B needs to be changed from a lottery to a bidding system, where the 65,000 applications with the highest salary out of all applications are the ones that are granted. This makes sure that the best and brightest 65,000 are the ones that are hired, not the 65,000 that are willing to work the cheapest for the chance to live in America.

It is a fraudulent system that provides some short term reduction in labor expense for American business. The end result however is the decline of the American workforce, and the social engineering of the public to believe that we are no longer capable of fulfilling intellectually based jobs.

While that sounds dark, it is true. Pundits continue to foster this lie with continued calls for increases in the visa limits to fill the shortage. Sad.

Oh, I left out lowered expectations for quality and higher defect rates in anything created hard or soft by those same companies who are concerned with short term numbers. . .

There is no tech worker shortage. Shame on this and every outlet that perpetuates this lie.