With all due respect to the late Bob Marley, the title was "simply irresistable" given my topic for today. Whoops, ditto for the late Robert Palmer.
An "exodus" is not too dramatic a word to illustrate the latest trend in globalism, and it foretells of a grim future for the U.S. When immigration reform was pulled last year, Microsoft’s Bill Gates responded by announcing that since he couldn’t bring in the talent he needed for his U.S. operations, his big new plant would be across the border in Canada, where the government generally works WITH employers, not against them.
With this month’s same-day exhaustion of the paltry 65,000 annual H-IB professional worker visas available for U.S. fiscal year 2009 (beginning October 1, 2008), others are following suit: Oracle’s VP Robert Hoffman told the Wall Street Journal last week that after having no choice but to send jobs last year to Ireland and India when it couldn’t get enough H-1Bs, he had no choice but to look overseas for the 1000+ jobs he can’t fill domestically.
It’s not that complicated, Powers That Be: American companies go through the hassle of bringing in foreign workers because we have a dramatic shortage of healthcare, IT, and science professionals which we simply do not fill with our own U.S. workforce. Either we let these employers bring in the skilled workers they need OR they move the operation, lock, stock, and barrel full of jobs with ARE filled by U.S. workers to places where they can get the workforce mix they need.
Given the state of the economy, one would think that admitting legally-cleared, intelligent, dedicated professional workers to balance out our domestic workforce needs while protecting existing U.S. jobs and letting these good folks "work hard for the money" is a no-brainer. (Whoops, there I go again: my apologies to the still-kickin’-hard Ms. Donna Summer.)
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