Thanks for the correction. Here is my normal rant...

The primary objective of my feedback here is the importance for the focus regarding the H1B Guest Worker Visa program to be on ensuring severe limitations on the H1B Visa Cap… currently 65,000 per year and preferrably decreasing the Cap by 10,000 per year in the coming years until the cap of 0, ZERO is achieved.

ADVERSE AFFECTS OF H1B VISAs: Please be aware that the H-1B Visa program has adversely affected hundreds of thousands of American Technology Workers who have been repeatedly denied and deprived Equal Employment Opportunities.

Read the Wirtz Report http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/2006/E6-13138.htm
which recognizes the high rates of unemployment among older workers in the USA.

To deny employment to qualified American Workers and hire less qualified H1B Visa workers is discrimination based on National Origin and also age if the American Worker is over 40.

Civil Rights Complaints for Failure to Hire based on Age and National Origin may be filed at state level…

• Departments of Human Rights, example: http://www.state.il.us/dhr or

• The Federal EEOC http://www.eeoc.gov or

• The Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Office of Special Counsel for Immigration-Related Unfair Employment Practices http://www.usdoj.gov/crt/osc

The Civil Right Act of 1964, page 2, prohibits hiring based on National Origin yet there are many examples of this in the IT Industry. It is also discrimination when job advertisements recruit for H-1B or Green Card Citizenship status or based on National Origin and violators Shall be reported to the DOJ-OSC http://www.usdoj.gov/crt/osc/pdf/engfrm.pdf .

Technology companies (nor their staffing companies) advertise jobs to the available local talent pool of candidates. Just look in the news paper section under engineering … hardly anything there. Go online to CareerBuilder or Monster and search for a Software Engineering or Electrical Engineering position. Tell me… what do you see? What you see is third party firms advertising 3 month contract jobs… Attempting to turn the American Workers into temporary workers. This technique is well known for its intent and purpose… to discriminate and deny and deprive Equal Employment Opportunities to qualified local candidates. To learn more, read the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967. http://www.access.gpo.gov/nara/cfr/waisidx06/29cfr162506.html

For more information, see… http://www.aea.org
http://www.competeamerica.us
http://www.toraw.org
http://www.h1b.info
http://www.techsunite.org
http://www.programmersguild.org
http://www.zazona.com
http://www.outsourcecongress.org/pictures/video

THE H1B GUEST WORKER PROGRAM: Monitoring and enforcement have failed. Things are so bad at USCIS, Citizenship and Immigration Services, has demonstrated itself as not even having the capability to count how many visas are granted… and granted 20,000 visas above and beyond what the law specified. The H1B Visa Guest Worker Program has, in many ways, proved itself to be untrustworthy. Expending citizen tax dollars enforcement & monitoring has proved itself to perform poorly. Even as the US entered recession in year 2000, Congress was asleep at the wheel and left the cap at 195,000 per year for years to come. This is totally unacceptable.

I can also assure you that the H1B visa program has nothing to do with skills. A recent Duke University study, http://www.issues.org/23.3/wadhwa.html , indicates...

• In an analysis of salary and employment data, we did not find any indication of a shortage of engineers in the United States.

• Nearly one-half of the respondents had acceptance rates of 60% or higher. Twenty-one percent reported acceptance rates of 80 to 100%, and 26% of respondents reported 60 to 79% acceptance rates. 88% of respondents to our survey did not offer signing bonuses to potential engineering employees.

• U.S. corporations engaged in outsourcing engineering jobs said they did not mandate that job candidates possess a four-year engineering degree.

• Forty percent hired engineers with two- or three-year degrees, and an additional 17% said they would hire similar applicants if they had additional training or experience.

• Quality of Chinese Degrees: Some MoE information is available online, but detailed data, including the production of engineering masters and PhD graduates, are published only in the ministry’s Educational Statistical Yearbooks. These yearbooks generally are not permitted to leave China. In addition, the data are presented a year at a time and, in some cases, are available only in Chinese.

• In Beijing, with the help of local students, we combed government libraries and bookstores, searching for these publications.

• Quality of Indian Degrees: An added complication with Indian masters degree data is that students can pursue two different masters degrees within engineering, but graduates are often counted together. The first is a traditional technical masters degree in engineering, computer science, or information technology. These degrees, which require two years of study, are similar in structure to masters degree offerings in the United States and China. The second is a masters of computer application (MCA) degree, a three-year degree that offers a foundation in computer science to individuals who previously had received a bachelors degree in a different field. Most MCA recipients receive an education equivalent to a bachelors degree in computer science.

• Also, we obtained anecdotal evidence from business executives doing business in India and China that indicated that those were the countries with shortages.

Colleen