Thread: New laws slow flow of professional workers

By Devona Walker
Staff Writer
As the national immigration debate wages on, many people fear increasingly restrictive policies will cripple U.S. companies and universities competing in the global marketplace, encouraging talent and capital to go abroad.


Critics who are mainly concerned with undocumented and low-skilled workers moving into the United States say increased worksite enforcement and unprecedented statewide immigration statutes are deterring illegal immigrants from crossing U.S. borders.

Others complain that the country's growing emphasis on closing the borders is keeping out needed university professors and skilled professionals.

"There are very significant shortages of available talent around the country. If you can't find the talent, you either do one of a few things: You bring the talent in from overseas; you take the work overseas or you don't get the work done,â€

In the economic sector I work in finding qualified American talent is not the problem. Being such a crass idiot that you drive off respectable potential employees is. The jobs pay well; but usually only those with a certain level of crustiness stay very long. That, I am afraid, is the whole trend of our society.

Originally Posted by kniggit

By Devona Walker
Staff Writer
As the national immigration debate wages on, many people fear increasingly restrictive policies will cripple U.S. companies and universities competing in the global marketplace, encouraging talent and capital to go abroad.

This type of propaganda was garbage when I first started to read it in 2003 and it is still garbage now.

There are plenty of Americans willing to take IT jobs. Smooth talking anti-American propaganda is not going to change that fact.

The truth is the truth.

Originally Posted by kniggit

Technological innovations such as the iPod, Microsoft Vista, search engines and virtually ever major software package unveiled in the past five years would not have come about without access to foreign-born talent, he said.

Since these innovations were created by American citizens, the above statement is a lie.

Do you have the honesty to answer this question?

When was the last time you used a piece of software created in India?

Can you free yourself from the BS and propaganda for once in your life to answer a simple question?

Didn't think so..

Originally Posted by Captainron

In the economic sector I work in finding qualified American talent is not the problem. Being such a crass idiot that you drive off respectable potential employees is. The jobs pay well; but usually only those with a certain level of crustiness stay very long. That, I am afraid, is the whole trend of our society.

Yes! Excellent point captainron!!!

Sometimes (well, many times) the IT companies are their own worst enemies. They have scared away so many American IT workers - former ones, and younger potential ones - that many people just figure it's not worth the hassle. If the IT industry wants to have a steady stream of new and ongoing interested talent - Here's what you do:

1. Allow salaries to rise (this can be done by limiting use of non-immigrant temp. workers, as a good start) - especially for lower and mid-level jobs.

2. Demonstrate that IT employers have come to the realization that workplace conditions and the treatment of workers *is* important and that substantive changes are in effect not just to HIRE employees, but to RETAIN and RETRAIN them.

If you do the above, 90% of your workforce problems will magically 'go away'. A failure to invest in your workforce would tend to suggest that the workforce is not important to you, and running a business with such a disregard for the key ingredient in it's success, is a recipe for a failed business.

I did a quick searh on Devona Walker on the web. What I canme up with in just a few minutes is that she seems to be a rolling stone. She lost instant credibility with me when I saw that she was the editoor of a Berkeley newspaper. I speed read a few of her articles and they seem to deal with illegal immigrants. She bleeds for them.

I now know to ignore everything with her name on it.

Originally Posted by PhredE

Sometimes (well, many times) the IT companies are their own worst enemies. They have scared away so many American IT workers - former ones, and younger potential ones - that many people just figure it's not worth the hassle.

I was at one IT company where the President encouraged employees to plant viruses on co-workers' computers and steal work related documents from desks in order to foul up the flow of work. It was useless to ask why this was done; you just had to live with the fact that the company president was mentally ill and did non-sensical things when she was in one of her "moods".

To solve the above problem I would make sure that I had one set of work requirements and paperwork carefully hidden away. I would then leave a copy of older and unneeded work documents on my desk so that the thieves would have something to take when they rifled through my desk. I would also play "dumb" to fellow co-workers, making them think that they had succeeded in their plan to destroy my work-flow. I would then go on about the job of doing my work and being productive. This angered many of my cooworkers who then would start to behave irrationally and sometimes get fired as a result of this. Again, why this happened was never fully clear to me, but at least I would get to keep my job while I saw dozens of coworkers lose theirs.

Later on, I would read stories about new IT workers from India who would do these type of mentally ill things to their American citizen coworkers. It was very common for an American IT worker to get up from his desk for a break and return to find someone from India sitting at it, attempting to change the password in order to lock out the American coworker.

There were no bosses you could go to to complain about this type of behavior because the "boss" was usually in on it too.

These sob stories and anecdotes about driving away brilliant people may be true in some cases but they are propaganda nevertheless. Why? Because the vast majority of foreign workers who come in on H-1B (and L-1) visas are ordinary workers not superstars. This is a smoke screen to make it look like we are losing all this talent, when what we have really done is to drive off most of our own talent through mass layoffs. Who innovated and implemented technology before the H-1B cap was raised to nearly 200K in 1999? We did. Most of our talent is still alive and well, but businesses flushed ours down the john to make room for cheaper foreign replacments that they could simple order from a contractor/bodyshop like they were ordering a pizza. The resumes were guaranteed to have all the latest buzzwords too, no matter how fanciful.

By Devona Walker
Staff Writer

Critics who are mainly concerned with undocumented and low-skilled workers moving into the United States say increased worksite enforcement and unprecedented statewide immigration statutes are deterring illegal immigrants from crossing U.S. borders.

Cry me a river Devona Walker! We wouldn't need more professors if the illegals weren't taking up space at the colleges when they get cheap educations that many Americans can't afford. This article is a bunch of crap. We already know that Gates wants skilled lower paid workers to cut his budget. There are many over educated people on unemployment now thanks to the immigrant being hired INSTEAD of the American. Go write a childrens book Devona Walker since you have a good imagination!

Back before the dot com crash I thought that I would try and get out of the construction business. I started with computers back in around 1993 and had self taught myself DOS and was able to build a few computers and network them here at home. Started taking classes at the local community college hoping that I could get a piece of paper acknowledging my abilities. After doing a little research I figured out that even with the diploma the best I could do was about $7 an hour at the entry level, needless to say that would not be able to sustain myself and my family. The ethnic makeup of those classes were almost 50% Asian/Indian, this is in the heart of Oklahoma where this is not a large population of these immigrants.


Devona Walker has written almost all of the pro-illegal articles here at the hard left leaning daily rag known as the Daily Oklahoman.