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No Easy Visa's

I think the H1Bs are only part of the problem. I think they are simply being abused. The visas are for companies who have tried and cannot find American workers to fill roles. Here in Australia there is a similar visa, but there is much more rigour attached to it. There have been case where the Immigration Department have demanded lists of other Australian applicants and compared resumes and even telephones those applicants to ask why they were rejected.

I think the simple solution to the H1B issue is make it expensive. If a company employs over 15% of its workforce with H1B's than there should be a cost increase per issuance of an H1B for that company to some ridiculous figure, $100k or something. It would suddenly become alot more cost effective to hire Americans.

The other issue is American companies simply placing the jobs in other countries. The classic example are the HP Call Centres in Bangalore. They just opened the centre in India and they were on their way. Subsequent to that decision, our company has left HP as our sole hardware provider and moved to Dell who have their call centre locally here in Australia. Just yesterday we had an old HP tape drive fall over and it took something in the range of 45 minutes for the HP call centre in India to even log the call. As part of our business agreement with Dell, if they move the call centre operations out of Australia, they know they will immediately lose our business.

Personally, I just think it is wrong for those good tech jobs to go overseas. When the Canadian and US governments signed up for NAFTA and so many people in textiles lost their jobs, the politicians said those were low skill jobs that people in Mexico or Chile could do cheaper. While everyone hated to see their neighbour lose their job, people understood it was a low skill position and generally just accepted it. I don't think that same position applies now. Programming jobs are high skill jobs that more often than not require a university education. Pushing those over to India or China because it is cheaper is not going to see the same passive response from the voter. It is only a matter of time before a candidate realises that and latches on to it.

Posted by: SuperSean   Posted on: 01/19/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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