CHICAGO – While H-1B job quotas are being talked about again, do we really need to look outside our borders for workers? Are H-1B workers better educated and better workers or are they just cheaper to pay?

“133,000 H-1B Visa Applications Submitted in Two Days” was the cover story of this week’s Information Week. It’s interesting how so many people lost jobs in the last couple years and could never get anything close to what they were earning while many companies claimed they couldn’t find anyone. Many people in the Midwest were cut from good jobs and never had a chance to return

This is from an AP article last week:

To the dismay of technology companies that rely on the visas to hire skilled foreign workers, U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services says it reached its limit for 2008 H-1B visa petitions in a single day and will not accept any more.

The agency began accepting petitions [on April 2] for the fiscal year starting Oct. 1 and said it received about 150,000 applications by mid-afternoon.

There is finally a Senate bill that says an American worker can apply for these jobs. The bill is co-sponsored by Sen. Grassley in Iowa and Sen. Durbin in Illinois. While this will hopefully be a starting point for IT job reform, I think it’s too late.

While there were people in the job market for several years, many companies didn’t want to pay their market rate. Instead, they artificially created a new fractional rate by introducing many H-1B jobs. Salaries for database administrators in some cases went from $80,000 to $90,000 a year to $40,000 by the introduction of H-1B workers eager to work in the U.S.

Where was the mainstream media spotlight on this issue? I wrote columns about this dating back to 2002.

Wake Up, Chicago Executive Says

Discussing this with others in the Chicago area, here is what the president of a Chicago company said who disagrees with the perspective of Oracle’s Hoffman.

The real problem in the U.S. is our lack of focus and attention on our grade school and high school children in terms of their lack of discipline in math and the sciences. The U.S. will continue to get its head handed to it due to our laziness in the education systems. Our main support structure – the parents of these children – need to start demanding excellence from their kids.

How competitive the U.S. is in the future is not a function of the threshold of H-1B visas. This is an absolute scapegoat of an excuse. Certainly increasing this threshold further exacerbates our laziness. We need to wake up.

I couldn’t disagree more with Oracle’s Hoffman stating: “Our broken visa policies for highly educated foreign professionals are not only counterproductive [but] they are anti-competitive and detrimental to America’s long-term economic competitiveness.” This is utter lunacy and is somewhat the root cause of our problem.

We have captains of industry running high-tech companies like Oracle who are hinging our competitiveness on the number of H-1B visas we allow in the U.S. These companies should be fueling our educational systems with the right support structure in math and the sciences and offering programs, scholarships and seminars within our schools.

Our high-tech companies are looking to the H-1B programs as a quick fix to solve today’s problems. Similar to the desperation tactics of a junkie, they’re just grabbing H-1B employees when needing their next fix. This is not a Band-Aid covering a superficial wound. This is more like taking two aspirin for someone with blunt head trauma. Again, we need to wake up.

Our ability to compete in the future is a function of many things (how visionary we are, how innovative and entrepreneurial we are, etc.). If we don’t set our children in the right direction today in terms of needing sound math and science skills, we are in for a rude awakening.

I am coaching my grade school and high school kids to have a firm grip in these areas. As a safety net, I also want them to learn Mandarin just in case.

The education programs in this country are way off kilter. This topic could fill a whole book. When you have administrators focused on political correctness instead of global competitiveness, it’s time to make radical changes.

H-1B Process is Easy, But Not For U.S. Workers

Everything in finding and streamlining the H-1B job process is out there (from general questions to streamlining the process).

If only there was something this good for U.S. citizens who have been spinning around in menial jobs for the last six years maybe more people would have found better jobs.

Don’t kid yourself. The overall economy has suffered because of this. The media and all the economic pundits don’t seem to see the correlation that many white-collar and technical jobs have evaporated. With that, the buying power from those jobs has also evaporated.

If you don’t think so, ask yourself this question: How many H-1Bs are buying new Fords, GMs and Chryslers? How many are buying houses? They send their money home, stimulate the economy back there and don’t buy into what used to be the American dream of buying a house and a new car.

Check out this graph along with this graph (both courtesy of Gene Nelson) showing more than 25 million jobs transferred to non-U.S. citizens. That’s a huge amount of purchasing power. It doesn’t take someone with a doctorate to see the effects on our economy.

Many IT people who used to buy new cars have changed their consumer habits drastically. A friend laid off from a $90,000 project manager job at Motorola in 2001 is looking at trying to keep his 2000 Japanese luxury car working as he tries to juggle a mortgage and other expenses in a job that pays significantly less.

If he ever buys anything else, it will be a used Japanese car and he swears he will never buy a Motorola product again. Is he and thousands of other people still bitter about Motorola’s job-slashing strategy?

It’s funny how the backlash of not buying a former employer’s products or services after a bitter layoff is never factored in when looking at slumping sales. How many former Motorola employees go out of their way to buy Samsung, LG and Nokia cell phones today?

More important, how many of their friends are also influenced by them? That would be an interesting study and also something for HR experts to look at when they caution individuals about “not burning their bridges” and giving two week’s notice when leaving a company.

The same goes for a friend formerly with United Airlines who recently bought a used Lexus and has no intention of ever buying an American car again. If money isn’t coming in as it used to, the common concern I have heard from many people seems to be that they can’t take a chance on buying an inferior product that won’t last as long.

The longer the mainstream media don’t put an objective spotlight on these issues and the real impact on the American economy, the more people will turn to other media outlets to get their news. They don’t trust someone saying the economy is great while they are trying to figure out how they don’t lose their home.

Carlinism: When you replace people, you also replace or reduce their buying power.

James Carlini is an adjunct professor at Northwestern University. He is also president of Carlini & Associates. Carlini can be reached at james.carlini@sbcglobal.net or 773-370-1888.
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