I was a boy scout, straight A student through college (engineering), and I don’t buy this “free trade” “no borders” guff for a second. I believe in the American dream and of human rights. Everything that businesses want is antithetical to this.

Wake up and stop parroting industry talking points. There never has been a shortage of high tech workers. Do your homework and research. You’ll find that visas like the H1-B were designed solely to undercut the wages of high educated workers.

Man you are pedestrian.

I have a job that didn’t exist before I was offered it. I was connected to the company through a mutual acquaintance, and was introduced to the CEO in an accidental twist of fate. I am almost certainly not the best qualified person for this job (and I work remotely so mobility doesn’t matter), but I was somehow the one that prompted the CEO to create the position.

That’s how the part of Silicon Valley that gets all of the accolades works. But it’s not how most are used to looking for a job. Employers want to have a personal investment in the candidate, and the ability of both employer and candidate to create that connection is poor.

Everyone from skilled tradesman to retail workers to professionals to employers have to increasing view the job/candidate search as a social experiment, and I simply don’t think that the vast majority of us are equipped to do so.

Prerejection is common in IT and especially in Silicon Valley. A common ground for prerejection is being unemployed or over 35.

These are all the things that give most people meaning and make most people happy. In times past with much higher fertility, people would start a new life somewhere and soon enough have their own clan but these days people are so atomized that great mobility means further isolation in a country that already has huge problems with this.

What planet do these people live on ??

We have NO shortage of qualified people looking for work in Silicon Valley. A more apt description would be thousands and thousands and thousands of qualified people looking for work.

If jobs were really scarce then we would be seeing jobs with signing bonuses of thousands of dollars instead of offers of free lunch along with paid relocation.

I have never struggled to find talent. Maybe that’s because people want to work for my company? Or maybe it is because I’m not fixated with hiring the cheapest labor available on the world market?

The US is filled with smart people who are ready and willing to work hard in business. The trouble is, large companies want cheap labor so they hire professional lobbyists to produce a fiction that the US has a “desperate labor shortage in technology” while capable workers can’t find jobs.

A few years ago, the US Government gave Sri Lanka several million dollars to teach people the Java programming language and improve their English. One mother in the US commented at the time that her daughter, a fresh college grad who was struggling to find a programming job, would love to get paid by the US to learn Java and she already knew English!

Sure, the above paragraph may make me sound xenophobic. That’s nonsense. I grew up in NYC and love people of all walks of life from anywhere in the world. What I dislike is the manufactured fiction that the US suffers from a desperate labor shortage in technology. It is time to begin actively refuting such damaging fictions.

In a nutshell

I want YOU to train YOUR H1B replacement.

Or as said by more than one exec :

Americans as a condition of receiving their severance working proudly together training their Indian H1B replacements to export jobs.

This should be a no brainer : If you have to choose more foreigners coming to the US versus the job going overseas then we are all much better off for the job to go overseas as the American is not getting the job in the first place.

Most IT is just labor. If I don’t like the fact that I can’t find a good plumber then I pay more money to get one. I don’t like the quality of the American workforce then go out and pay more money.

IT is not theoretical physics with increasing salaries not solving your labor shortage. Theoretical physics unlike software engineering is a field justifying allowing the few solitary geniuses.

Importing millions of H1Bs over the past couple of decades just was for cost.

Oh, wait: here it is, a post by none other than up-and-coming neoliberal soothsayer Matthew Yglesias on Aug 21, 2011 at 12:30 pm, lauding global labor mobility as a response to unfettered global capitalisms ability to direct capital anywhere in the world on a whim.

Was there a neoliberal apologist dinner that everybody went to and decided what to post about?

Dreadfully facile and condescending article.

(1) Move with WHAT? Moving takes money – quite a lot of money as in at least 4 figures.

(2) Move to WHERE? Jobs for the bottom 75% (paying less than $50,000) aren’t exactly the sort of job that an employer will keep open while the employee arranges a move of a thousand miles or more and can’t start work for a couple months or more. They can’t just pack up and move and hope to find a job because of (3) below.

(3) Live WHERE if they just move to hunt for a job? No one will rent to them if they don’t have a job in the new area. They can’t get a mortgage in a new area if they don’t have job or if they haven’t held the job that long. So where do they live while they look for a new job? In a tent? Under a bridge?

(4) And what happens to the spouse who still has a job where they live? Quit? Move off with the unemployed spouse/partner who is going to relocate to look for work? And if the unemployed partner/spouse finds a job hundreds or thousands of miles away does does the employed spouse/partner do? Stay behind and split up the marriage? QUit to go along and hope they can find something – so now you still have 1 who is unemployed?

Employers do not offer relocation assistance to any employees except the very top 5-10% in an organization. They certainly won’t help the spouse who had to quit their job to move with the unemployed partner.

Getting rid of the house is far less a problem – sell it, rent it, walk away – than the problem of the 2 earner household.

And then there is the problem of extended family responsibilites – elderly parents, etc. DO they take them along to live in a tent while the unemployed person looks for a job in a new area and the one who was employed has quit their job?

Stupid and facile nonsense that assumes that there is only 1 wage earner in a household and that all the unemployed are looking for jobs where the employer will wait for them to move or help them move and that they have the money in hand to move.

Try dealing with the real world.

It is hard work that would be better spent on an activity with a higher return on investment. I am willing to bet that none of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, or Larry Ellison ever memorized a single log tables. In fact, all of them are college dropouts.

So, we have labor mobility in the form of outsourcing and immigrant farm labor, while people who live in disadvantaged places are more or less stuck unless they can move ( a low mobility solution ) or tap into a stream set up for the advantage of capital.

Focusing on H1-B I think misses the big picture. I do think those who focus on anti-immigration measures are overlooking a historical trend, which is that periods in which immigration is suppressed over fears about jobs tend to coincide with extended periods of stagnation – the immigration itself is a growth driver, and when you suppress immigration in hopes of protecting local jobs during a period of stagnation, that doesn’t do anything to put a floor under the macroeconomy.

As for productivity driving growth when population is flat- that’s correct – but if all the gains are going to capital and our biggest problem in the federal government is ‘the deficit’ – while the biggest problem in the rest of the economy is that it is serving only the top 1/4 of 1% well and leaving 15% or so of the population that should be working idle while constraining the options and incomes of another 70% – kind of obvious that a solution which doesn’t significantly drag down the idea of upward mobility and a breadth of participation has to realign the structure of business. If Pepsi isn’t managing to correct some of the US based imbalances with its international strategy, then the nation’s interests lie in changing the way the company thinks and acts.