Thread: More on Hillary pandering for H-1B and globalization

SFGate.com

Graduates celebrate India's clout
They recall how technology institute prepared many for their roles in America

Tom Abate, Chronicle Staff Writer

Saturday, July 7, 2007

Several thousand graduates of India's elite university system gathered at the Santa Clara Convention Center Friday for an event that celebrated the growing economic and political clout of that nation's expatriates and touched on issues stemming from the increasing globalization of talent and innovation.

The conference, which ends Sunday, brings together graduates of the Indian Institute of Technology. This network of technology schools, founded in the 1950s shortly after India achieved independence, has maintained its elite status by admitting just a few thousand students each year based on a competitive, nationwide exam.

Rajat Gupta, a senior partner in the McKinsey & Co. consulting firm, and Dilip Venkatachari, who runs Google's mobile products division, described IIT as a university system that has graduated about 100,000 people in the past half century. About 25,000, like themselves, eventually immigrated to America and climbed the corporate and entrepreneurial ladders.

Opening the event, Gupta recalled how this global gathering started five years ago with a meeting of 25 alumni at Stanford. "From those humble beginnings it is gratifying to have nearly 4,000 IITians gathered here in such a short time," Gupta said.

To the extent this was a coming-out party for the Indian American lobby, its impact was somewhat tarnished by the last-minute decision of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton -- originally due to appear in person -- to address the group by satellite instead. During her 15-minute remarks, Clinton said she favors globalization and immigration, but suggested that Americans are getting short shrift from trends like outsourcing and the ever-widening trade deficit.

"Americans are concerned about outsourcing and I think they're right to be," said Clinton, who argued for strengthening the education system to get more people, particularly women and minorities, into fields like engineering. At the same time, Clinton said, she favors the H-1B program that allows high-tech companies to hire college-educated foreigners and would support an increase in the number that U.S. firms are allowed to hire.

The politics of immigration surfaced again in an afternoon news conference when reporters asked Indian American business and academic leaders to react to the congressional deadlock over immigration.

"The day this country limits the reasonably free flow of skilled immigrants is the day we start going downhill," said Pradeep Khosla, dean of the college of engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.

General Electric chief executive Jeffrey Immelt discussed the promise and perils of globalization -- and also played to the crowd. "I'm here today because I am a big consumer of the product, which is you," said Immelt, noting that GE employs about 1,500 graduates of the prestigious system. "Thirty-five of the top 600 people in GE are IIT grads."

Arguing that "business in the 21st century is really the intersection between globalization and technology," Immelt spoke about the strength of the Indian economy and took a swipe at the political process. "The economy has now gotten to a point in India where the government can't screw it up," he said to applause.

He also acknowledged the controversy that surrounds the growing integration of world economies. "I'm a globalist, you're a globalist," Immelt told his audience, saying the real question is whether the process would be slowed or stopped by political backlash.

"If you put globalization up for a vote in the U.S., it would lose 60-40," he said, attributing this margin in part to "misinformation" but also because "the bottom 25 percent of the U.S. has suffered from a wealth standpoint."

Immelt posed this challenge for his audience: "Can the standard of living of Indians grow one hundred-fold, which should be your goal, without the standard of living of Americans going down?"

E-mail Tom Abate at tabate@sfchronicle.com.

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Immelt posed this challenge for his audience: "Can the standard of living of Indians grow one hundred-fold, which should be your goal, without the standard of living of Americans going down?"

NO, it's not possible!! There is not that much prosperity in the US anymore.

I heard a radio show the other day that asked the question, "Is ours the last generation of Americans who will do better than their parents did?"
I say yes! For myself and my husband, in spite of much higher education levels that our parents, we are definitely doing much worse than they did! And much of it has to do with illegal immigration and outsourcing!!

Thanks for posting, ceelynn!!

GE was the first company to start the Indian Hi Tec Wave... It has gotten to the point where you have to ask yourself if college is worth the effort as the money pay back is not there....

It has gotten to the point where you have to ask yourself if college is worth the effort as the money pay back is not there....

I know what you mean. Our son just graduated from high school and has no desire to go to college (at least not now anyway) in part because he sees his dad who has a BSME and an MBA working in an unskilled blue collar job.

I can't help believing the H-1B situation contributed.