Obama on H1Bs

[Deja Q]

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/26/qa-with-senator-barack-obama-on-key-technology-issues/

(Obama: ) Highly skilled immigrants have contributed significantly to our domestic technology industry. But we have a skills shortage, not a worker shortage. There are plenty of Americans who could be filling tech jobs given the proper training. I am committed to investing in communities and people who have not had an opportunity to work and participate in the Internet economy as anything other than consumers. Most H-1B new arrivals, for example, have earned a bachelor’s degree or its equivalent abroad (42.5%). They are not all PhDs. We can and should produce more Americans with bachelor’s degrees that lead to jobs in technology.

(snip)

We can do better than that and go a long way toward meeting industry’s need for skilled workers with Americans. Until we have achieved that, I will support a temporary increase in the H-1B visa program as a stopgap measure until we can reform our immigration system comprehensively. I support comprehensive immigration reform that includes improvement in our visa programs, including our legal permanent resident visa programs and temporary programs including the H-1B program, to attract some of the world’s most talented people to America. We should allow immigrants who earn their degrees in the U.S. to stay, work, and become Americans over time. As part of our comprehensive reform, we should examine our ability to replace a stopgap increase in the number of H1B visas with an increase in the number of permanent visas we issue to foreign skilled workers. I will also work to ensure immigrant workers are less dependent on their employers for their right to stay in the country and would hold accountable employers who abuse the system and their workers.

Seems a bit of well spoken spin, regarding "skills shortage" - especially these days are more and more people WITH such degrees and more are losing jobs to offshoring.

Or how helpdesk jobs paying $10/hr require a Bachelors degree. (Talk about overqualification; the usual excuse for denying people work in unrelated fields...)

Or, if nothing else, that's my current paranoia.

http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-6230-0.html?forumID=6&threadID=179848&start=0
This article gets to the point about education; we could all have such degrees, and more, and nothing would be different.

If I am suggesting anything, it's that the core problems regarding America are being ignored; supplanted by a separate, mostly tangential issue.

Especially if the "global economy" fails and the countries we're currently helping stop relying on other countries to keep their economies afloat, in favor of putting themselves first. (I wonder if this "global economy" is what was envisioned in the first place; I'm honestly not so sure.)

[ikojo]

1. What Barack Obama does not say is that

many of those who earned a bachelor's degree overseas did it at a university that is completely publicly funded. As long as students are forced to take on an onerous debt burden to pursue an education they will go to something that almost guarantees a job. Many students have gotten IT degrees only to find it difficult finding jobs in that field. Employers pursue H1B visas because they know they can pay them far less than an American of equal experience and education.

[midnight]

2. This is an important topic..... I don't favor these visas while

many of our own high tech. people have been replaced with foreign workers who will work for less. We do not have a skills issue. We have a greed issue. They started this back in the 80's in the health care industry. It was sold to the public as a not enough people working these jobs. They were able to keep salaries in check. What every happened to that supply and demand talk? O, those people develope ways to undercut the worker via visas and exporting of jobs.