10 Articles Worth Reading
10 Articles Worth Reading
Date: Monday, November 21, 2005 2:29 PM
JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER
November 21, 2005 No. 1371
<<< COMMENTS FROM ROB >>>
The onslaught of shortage shouting continues in the mainstream press. Typically the solution to all of these alleged worker shortages is to increase the number of guest worker visas. Nobody internviewed in these articles ever suggest that employers would have fewer problems finding and retaining workers if they paid more and had better working conditions.
Article #2 is a classic. employers in Colorado are whining that they can't find workers unless they get more guest worker visas. They blame the labor shortage on the oil and gas boom in Colorado; claiming that workers are leaving their low paying jobs for better paying jobs on the oil rigs. What this article doesn't mention is that the state of Colorado is notorious for allowing cheap Chinese labor to work in their oil fields so I find it somewhat hard to believe that the oil fields are drawing that many workers away from Colorado's hotels and restaurants. In this article, several employers in Colorado were so desperate for employees they actually resorted to paying more - and it worked! Of course nobody seems to blame the shortage of workers on low pay, and the author of the article never makes the connection even though the employers that decided to pay more had no problems finding workers. Duh!
Read this link for more info on the use of Chinese workers in Colorado oil fields:
http://www.washtimes.com/business/20050710-115332-2183r.htm
Chinese labor for oil drilling eyed in Colo.
Remember the newsletter about the Chinese spy ring that was recently busted? Read Article #5 to see what Fuk Li, the wife of one of the conspirators, has been up to since then. Her name seems very appropriate for the occasion!
<<< END COMMENTARY >>>
Article 1:
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB113210508287498432-lMyQjAxMDE1MzEyNjExMDY1Wj.html
Slim Pickings
Behind 'Shortage' of Engineers: Employers Grow More Choosy
Job Hunters Face Long Lists Of Requirements as Web Brings Flood of Risumis
Two Hires From 158 Applicants
Many companies say they're facing an increasingly severe shortage of engineers. It's so bad, some executives say, that Congress must act to boost funding for engineering education. Yet unemployed engineers say there's actually a big surplus. Amid rapidly changing technology, the engineers employers want aren't necessarily the engineers who are available. And companies often create the very shortages they decry by insisting on applicants who meet every item on a detailed list of qualifications.
Article 2:
http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_3228978
Glenwood area waging uphill fight to fill jobs
The [snipped] has left many Roaring Fork Valley employers desperate for help. Several regional officials say the situation is the start of a long-term problem that must be addressed with additional affordable housing and guest-worker visas. A shortage of construction workers has been building for six months. Francis, too, has looked into bringing in foreign workers with temporary visas: "If I could get 200 more guys here, I would."
Article 3:
http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_3228978
Once-Hot Engineers Find a Cooler Market
It doesn't take a calculator, or even a slide rule (for those of a certain age), to figure out that times are tough for engineers these days. Start-ups are stopping, once-hot high-tech fields are cooling off, and big companies are aggressively getting smaller. The result is a wave of joblessness for engineers who enjoyed nonstop boom times in the 1990s.
Article 4:
http://www.economyincrisis.org/article_61.html
America Now Dependent On Others For Its Standard of Living
America is now so wholly dependent on foreign countries to finance its government, its consumption, and its production that we are becoming utterly helpless against the cohesive planned economic attack being waged by these other countries.
Article 5:
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-agent18nov18,1,3510181.story?coll=la-headlines-california
Onetime Espionage Suspect Is Arrested
After being cleared in China spy case, she's accused in an alleged marriage scam. A U.S. attorney spokesman said Fuk was free on $50,000 bond.
Article 6:
http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=57047
Southfield, Mich., Computer Staffing Firm to Pay $2.65 Million in Back Wages and Penalties for Immigration Law Violations
An investigation by the Labor Departments Wage and Hour Division found that Computech brought non-immigrant H-1B workers into the U.S., but failed to pay them the minimum required wage rates in the areas where they were employed. The investigation also disclosed that Computech frequently "benched" the workers without compensation contrary to the rules of the H-1B program.
Article 7:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/11/17/BUGB3FPGT01.DTL&type=tech
Outsourcing outrage
Indian call-center workers suffer abuse
While irate calls are a mainstay of customer service work in any country, many Indian call-center workers say they regularly face particular abuse from Americans, whose tantrums are sometimes racist and often inspired by anger over outsourcing.
Article 8:
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/living/education/13157120.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp
Districts across the nation are hiring foreign talent to overcome domestic shortages of qualified teachers. In the South Bay, the San Jose Unified school district now employs 22 foreign teachers, including a biology instructor from Germany. The Cupertino and Franklin-McKinley elementary districts have brought on 12 and 19, respectively, from Mexico, Canada, Spain and other countries. School district officials say imported teachers are filling critical classroom needs. Others argue their presence is a sad commentary on the desirability of U.S. teaching jobs. Generally, imported teachers work in the United States on H-1B temporary work or J-1 cultural exchange visas, which with renewals are good for three to six years. They come from a wide range of countries, including Turkey, South Africa, Peru and France. The Phillippines are a particularly rich source of special education teachers.
Article 9:
http://sify.com/news/fullstory.php?id=14015665
Conflicting views in US Congress on immigration
In what could be disappointing news for thousands of Indian skilled workers aspiring for a career in the US, the House of Representatives has passed its version of the budget deficit reduction bill without any proposal to increase the annual cap of H-1B visas by 30,000 as suggested by the Senate.
Article 10:
http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_1551410,00050001.htm
H1-B visa hike plan in trouble
The plan to raise the H-1B visa cap by 30,000 has run into uncertainty with the House of Representatives not going along with provisions cleared by the Senate.
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http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB113210508287498432-lMyQjAxMDE1MzEyNjExMDY1Wj.html
Slim Pickings
Behind 'Shortage' of Engineers:
Employers Grow More Choosy
Job Hunters Face Long Lists
Of Requirements as Web
Brings Flood of Risumis
Two Hires From 158 Applicants
By SHARON BEGLEY
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
November 16, 2005; Page A1
Many companies say they're facing an increasingly severe shortage of engineers. It's so bad, some executives say, that Congress must act to boost funding for engineering education.
Yet unemployed engineers say there's actually a big surplus. "No one I know who has looked at the data with an open mind has been able to find any sign of a current shortage," says demographer Michael Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
What's really going on? Consider the case of recruiter Rich Carver. In February, he got a call from the U.S. unit of JSP Corp., a Tokyo plastic-foam maker. The company was looking for an engineer with manufacturing experience to serve as a shift supervisor at its Butler, Pa., plant, which makes automobile-bumper parts.
Within two weeks, Mr. Carver and a colleague at the Hudson Highland Group had collected more than 200 risumis. They immediately eliminated just over 100 people who didn't have the required bachelor of science degree, even though many had the kind of job experience the company wanted. A further 65 or so then fell out of the running. Some were deemed overqualified. Others lacked experience with the proper manufacturing software. JSP brought in a half-dozen candidates for an interview, and by August the company had its woman.
To JSP, taking six months to fill the position confirmed its sense that competition for top engineers is intense. Company officials "struggle to fill" openings, says human-resources manager Vicki Senko.
But for candidates facing 200-to-1 odds of getting the job, the struggle seems all on their side. "Companies are looking for a five-pound butterfly. Not finding them doesn't mean there's a shortage of butterflies," says Richard Tax, president of the American Engineering Association, which campaigns to prevent losses of engineering jobs.
Amid rapidly changing technology, the engineers employers want aren't necessarily the engineers who are available. And companies often create the very shortages they decry by insisting on applicants who meet every item on a detailed list of qualifications. With the Internet adding to the pile of risumis, company officials say a certain degree of mechanical weeding-out is unavoidable.
The dueling perceptions of engineer shortages lie behind some big policy debates in Washington, fueling emotional clashes over immigration policy and the future of well-paying jobs in America.
Under the H-1B temporary work visa program, U.S. employers are permitted to hire foreign nationals with knowledge and skills deemed to be in short supply. The visas are valid for up to six years and are currently capped at 65,000 per year. Business groups, led by the Electronic Industries Alliance, argue that they need the foreigners because they can't find enough skilled U.S. engineers and technical workers. American engineers, particularly those who are unemployed, complain that the H-1Bs take away their jobs.
At a forum on innovation and education held at the Library of Congress last April, Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said, "There just aren't as many graduates with a computer-science background. [That] creates a dilemma for us, in terms of how we get our work done." Last year the National Science Board, part of the National Science Foundation, warned that the U.S. faces "an emerging and critical problem of the science and engineering labor force."
In fact, the number of students graduating with a bachelor of science degree in computer science rose 85% from 1998 to 2004, according to figures compiled from universities by the Computing Research Association. The number of bachelor degrees in engineering rose to 72,893 in 2004 from 61,553 in 1999, according to the American Society for Engineering Education.
Unemployment among engineers was 2.5% in 2004, in line with the 2.8% rate for all professional occupations. In 2003, 4.3% of engineers were unemployed compared with 3.2% for all professionals. The figures don't include people who gave up looking for work in their profession. From 2000 to 2003 engineering employment fell 8.7%, according to an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston.
Despite the numbers, employers say they struggle to find the right person for openings. Earlier this year, Raytheon Co., Waltham, Mass., needed to find some systems engineers. Raytheon received 158 risumis. It eliminated 40 in the first pass because the applicants would not be able to get a security clearance, says senior vice president Keith Peden. Raytheon ruled out 90 more because the applicants lacked experience in the specific kinds of technology or markets the job required. That left 28. Ten dropped out because they would not relocate or had insufficient technical experience. Raytheon interviewed the remaining 18 in person, made three offers and hired two.
"What used to take two and a half to three months now takes five," says Mr. Peden. Raytheon's chief executive, William Swanson, says: "As a company, we are meeting our hiring needs. My concern is that the degree of difficulty in meeting those needs has gone up exponentially."
Some elite companies have an even higher applicants-to-jobs ratio. Microsoft received risumis from about 100,000 graduating students last year, screened 15,000 of them, interviewed 3,500 and hired 1,000, says a spokesman. The software maker receives about 60,000 risumis of every kind monthly, and currently has 2,000 openings for software-development jobs.
Filling Niches
Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, N.M., hires only people with a master's degree or doctorate for positions in electrical, mechanical and computer engineering. They all need security clearances, says Kate Rivera, manager of staffing, recruiting and relocation. "We are seeing a good supply of engineers and are able to fill our positions," she says, "though filling niche positions can be harder."
Microsoft, too, hires almost exclusively Ph.D.s for its top research positions, says Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research. "We struggle to fill positions for our most technical jobs, though last year and this the supply of Ph.D.s has been fantastic" because of the hangover from the dot-com and telecom busts, he says.
Linda Olin-Weiss, director of staffing services at Lockheed Martin Corp., says there are "pockets of niche skills where it takes longer to get that talent." Lockheed competes with Boeing Co. and other aerospace firms for the best load engineers and optical engineers, she says, "but our programs are fully staffed today and we're able to fill our engineering positions."
Companies often draw up extremely narrow job descriptions, recruiters and staffing managers say, causing searches to get drawn out. One cause: the rise of online job sites, which makes it hard for company executives to personally review every candidate. To screen out the hundreds or thousands of risumis that pour in to a posting on Monster.com or Yahoo HotJobs, companies use software filters to look for keywords. In engineering, those keywords typically describe machinery or computer fields in which expertise is sought, such as C+++, server/stepper and CAE schematic.
Exact Combination
Hiring managers often prefer to wait for the candidate who has the exact combination of attributes they seek, rather than immediately hiring someone who comes close and then giving that person time to get familiar with a new machine or software program.
Last April, Mike Sylvester got a call from Wabtec Corp., Wilmerding, Pa., which builds components for locomotives, freight cars, subway cars and buses. Wabtec needed a mechanical engineer to work on locomotive design. Mr. Sylvester, vice president of operations at AllTek Staffing & Resource Group in Pittsburgh, used his internal database as well as Monster.com to find candidates, and in two days had more than 40 risumis.
He eliminated most of them quickly because they lacked a bachelor of science degree or work experience in the right field. He called five, asking them for references, and passed three on to Wabtec. Then came the deal-breaker. Wabtec would only consider candidates who had experience with Pro/Engineer Wildfire, a new 3-D computer-aided design software package, not an earlier package called 2000i.
"The basic difference between Wildfire and 2000i is not that significant," says Mr. Sylvester. "I say smart people can learn sister applications, but there is reluctance among hiring managers to see that. If they use a SAP database system, they won't even look at someone with experience with a PeopleSoft system. There is a major fear of having to bring someone up a learning curve. They want them to hit the ground running."
Wabtec's vice president for human resources, Scott Wahlstrom, says the company's demands are usually less specific and it is willing to train new hires. But he says "it happens sometimes that you get in a jam, where someone left and we have a very specific search. Those are costly and time-consuming."
The detailed demands aren't confined to software jobs. Mr. Sylvester was asked to find a mechanical engineer to oversee a heating, ventilation and air-conditioning system at a hospital. "A pump is a pump and a duct is a duct, but they wouldn't even look at candidates who had HVAC experience in a mill instead of a hospital," he says.
At JSP, the plastic-foam company, Ms. Senko in human resources says it took six months to fill a process-engineer opening last year. "The hiring manager was looking for very specific technical skills and experience in plastics and injection molding," she says. "We finally persuaded him to expand the scope of the required experience."
James Murphy, 60 years old, of North Hills, Calif., sees the phenomenon from the other side. He holds a master's degree in mechanical engineering and worked for major aerospace companies doing dynamic load analysis -- figuring out what forces would cause an aircraft to break. Later he worked at Continental Airlines using computer algorithms to optimize flight scheduling. Laid off in 2001 from his position doing computerized inventory for a music wholesaler, he estimates he has sent out 10 risumis a week. He has had two job interviews in the past year, both with aircraft manufacturers. Neither led to an offer.
"There is now a string of requirements for an engineering job," says Mr. Murphy. "Years ago there would be one major requirement, with x, y and z nice to have. The worst thing about this emotionally is reading about the 'shortage' of engineers."
Pradeep Khosla, dean of engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, says that for older engineers, "there is a problem of technology moving at a very fast rate. When engineers are without jobs, it is usually because they have not kept up." Mr. Sylvester, the recruiter, puts it more bluntly: "A guy who's been working on a 15-year-old application is a dinosaur."
"Getting engineers who have the type of talent you need, quickly -- a great background, very well-educated, mobile -- has become more important over the last few years," says Jane Leipold, vice president for human resources at Tyco Electronics, Harrisburg, Pa., a unit of Tyco International Ltd. "The demands are different. The advances in technology mean you need very specific talents."
One employer demand that flummoxes many engineers is the need for "soft" skills -- working in groups, communicating and writing. In August, Cornell University hired a speaker to instruct its engineering students in "etiquette and interpersonal skills." (Hints: Don't crumble crackers into your soup or blot your underarms with the dinner napkin.)
"During the dot-com boom demand for electrical and computer engineers was so great it was enough if you could just write code," says Prof. Khosla. "Things have changed a lot."
Roller-Coaster Ride
The dot-com era is only one of many cases over the years when demand for engineers rode a roller coaster. During the Reagan military buildup in the 1980s, aerospace and the defense industry were hot. Then the Cold War ended.
Many executives who contend there's an engineer shortage today predict it will get worse over the next decade as baby boomers begin to retire. This summer a report from a business consortium called for doubling the number of science and engineering graduates by 2015 to fill a projected gap. But crystal balls about labor markets tend to be cloudy. In the mid-1980s, the National Science Foundation predicted "looming shortfalls" of some 675,000 scientists and engineers in the following two decades. They never materialized.
"Every few years there is a spurt of panic that we won't have enough engineers in five years," says Paul Kostek, a systems engineer in Seattle who recently got a job at Boeing after working as a consultant for a decade. "And I say to myself, gee, I'll still be here."
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http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_3228978
Article Last Updated: 11/18/2005 04:43 AM
Glenwood area waging uphill fight to fill jobs
By Thomas Watkins
Special to The Denver Post
DenverPost.com
Snowmass Village - Lance Burwell, vice president of operations at the Silvertree Hotel, will probably work a shift in an unusual role next week: bellboy.
He may also be serving food and drinks, checking guests in at the front desk and putting his hands to odd jobs as they arise at the 400-room slopeside hotel.
"We are just all going to be working a little bit harder," Burwell said.
The Western Slope oil and gas boom, coupled with surges in the region's retail development and construction markets, has left many Roaring Fork Valley employers desperate for help.
Businesses have cut days and hours of operation, boosted pay and offered signing bonuses to manage in the near term, but several regional officials say the situation is the start of a long-term problem that must be addressed with additional affordable housing and guest-worker visas.
In the state's northwestern region, an area comprising 12 counties including Garfield, Eagle and Pitkin, 1,985 job vacancies are forecast for this winter, compared with 1,020 last year, according to the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment. And in the past year, the region's unemployment rate dropped to 3.3 percent from 4.3 percent. The national unemployment rate was 5.1 percent in September.
In Glenwood Springs, Spagnolo's Restaurant & Pizza is so short-staffed that it is now closed Sundays, Mondays and for two hours every afternoon. The Daily Bread bakery has taken the drastic step of closing on Wednesdays and Thursdays.
Another Glenwood store - Anderson's Clothing - was so short-staffed that owner Gary Miller offered a $200 bonus to whoever could find a new employee. The store is now fully staffed, but Miller said: "Glenwood is in a borderline crisis situation."
Several factors are adding extra pressure to the valley's job market.
At the new Glenwood Meadows big-box development, Target, Petco and Lowe's, which employ more than 300 people, are all up and running. A manager at Target said there had been fewer applicants than expected and that workers had to be drafted from the Grand Junction store for the local opening.
Creating further worker demand is the region's energy boom. A record number of new drilling permits have been issued this year in Garfield County, and demand is high for mechanics and rig workers.
After the resignations of several employees, including drivers and mechanics, the Roaring Fork Transportation Authority board last week approved a 4 percent cost-of-living increase and reinstated several perks, including signing bonuses.
Some of the employees may have gone to the oil and gas fields, said the authority's chief executive, Dan Blankenship.
He said the driver shortage has gotten so bad that next year he would like to recruit seasonal workers from Australia and New Zealand to fill winter vacancies.
Tim Francis, owner of an employment service with offices in Aspen, Carbondale, Vail and Dillon, said a shortage of construction workers has been building for six months.
"If they can walk through the door, we'll put them to work," he said. "They'll be working within 15 minutes, as long as it takes to fill out an application and safety program."
Francis, too, has looked into bringing in foreign workers with temporary visas: "If I could get 200 more guys here, I would."
The Silvertree's Burwell said he had few problems in years past getting international workers, but this year is proving a challenge.
"Last year, all the applications were approved and this year it's becoming more difficult and more costly to get the approvals through," Burwell said. "I can't explain it."
Carbondale's town manager, Tom Baker, said governments must consider acquiring more affordable homes if they want to attract new workers in the future. The city of Aspen and Pitkin County already manage about 2,400 deed-restricted or affordable homes, but Carbondale's nascent affordable-housing project has fewer than 100.
Places such as Carbondale and Glenwood Springs have long been thought to be more-affordable havens for those unable to buy homes in Aspen. But prices have been rising in those communities to the point where more people are being priced out.
Real estate broker Jack Gausnell said the median single-family house price in Carbondale for the first three quarters of 2005 was $475,000, up from $419,000 last year. In Glenwood, the median price so far this year is $349,000 compared with $336,000 in 2004.
The escalating cost of living is "a huge problem in Glenwood Springs, and we've been aware that it's coming for years and have been slow to respond," said the city's community development director, Andrew McGregor. "The oil and gas, coupled with retail sector growth, has caught us with our pants down. Now you can't go anywhere without seeing a help-wanted sign."
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http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_3228978
Once-Hot Engineers
Find a Cooler Market
By JAMES C. HYATT
It doesn't take a calculator, or even a slide rule (for those of a certain age), to figure out that times are tough for engineers these days.
Start-ups are stopping, once-hot high-tech fields are cooling off, and big companies are aggressively getting smaller. The result is a wave of joblessness for engineers who enjoyed nonstop boom times in the 1990s.
Thomas Gardner, a 32-year-old mechanical engineer, was laid off last November by start-up Codeon Corp., a Columbia, Md., maker of optical equipment for fiber-optics telecommunications companies. Codeon had hired Mr. Gardner to help scale up manufacturing, but expected orders didn't materialize. He had been there eight months, at an annual pay of $60,000.
Since then, Mr. Gardner has been sending out resumes and roaming the Internet for jobs. But he found many companies weren't hiring at year-end, and the "first quarter was hairy, because companies were waiting to see how the economy was going," he says. His worst experience: A government contractor offered him a "great job and a great salary" to help set up an engineering facility. But he hasn't heard from the company since a key contract deadline passed in April.
Job prospects for electrical engineers from Texas to Wyoming are "pretty bad," agrees Gary Johnson, Midwest employment and career-services coordinator in Austin for a unit of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a nonprofit professional association. "Layoffs are continuing and a lot of the start-ups that had been moving along are finally running out of cash."
In Austin, he says, there's no longer a demand for semiconductor-design engineers, who were sought-after just six months ago. Higher-ranking engineers (director and above category) in the Texas area "are having to move out of state to find positions."
Indeed, unemployment among engineers has more than doubled since early 2001, according to the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics. The jobless rate for all engineers, 1.5% in 2001's first quarter, reached 3.6% in the most recent first quarter. Among electrical engineers, the rate rose from 1.1% a year ago to 4.1%. And the number of engineers unemployed from January to March reached 79,000, up sharply from 32,000 a year earlier. Meanwhile, the number of employed electrical engineers fell to 690,000 in the latest first quarter from 748,000 in mid-2001.
Selective Hiring
Employers with openings are being more selective these days. Companies hiring petroleum and chemical engineers "are being very picky on what they want," reports Jim Barlow, senior technical recruiter at SPECTRA Associates, a small Laramie, Wyo., recruiting firm. These days, he finds, clients "want as close a match as possible." In other years, they'd hire someone who met 80% of the requirements. SPECTRA focuses on engineers in the $65,000-to-$100,000-plus salary range, such as project, senior project and lead-manager engineers, mainly for clients in the Midwest and West.
An ideal refinery candidate these days, Mr. Barlow says, would have three to five years of "hands-on" experience "as opposed to doing something else and deciding they want to be a process engineer." One Midwest pharmaceutical company client has a vacancy for a process engineer in the $75,000-to-$90,000-a-year range. The position has been open for two or three months, but prospects interviewed so far have been "a little light in terms of skill," Mr. Barlow says. The company is looking for someone with three to five years' experience in pharmaceutical process manufacturing.
Mr. Barlow sees resumes from higher-paid, more-tenured engineering executives -- for instance, those involved with the ChevronTexaco Corp. or Phillips Petroleum/Conoco mergers -- but most have been away from the refinery floor for a good while and aren't ideal candidates for an operational job. These days, he concedes, companies "see an engineer as more of a cost than a profit center," and haven't seen enough economic improvement to justify stepped-up hiring.
Cuts by aerospace companies may account for much of the overall decline in demand for engineers, says David Napier, research director at the Aerospace Industries Association of America. Aerospace employment (not limited to engineers) has fallen 66,000 since Sept. 11, in large part due to cutbacks by aircraft builders when airlines delayed new orders.
The Bush administration's defense buildup will reverse a slowing in federal spending on aviation-related contracts. But a lot of the defense spending won't show up until the new fiscal year beginning in October, "and it won't be until 2003 that you'll see work coming out of that," Mr. Napier says. Meanwhile, commercial-sector production will fall this year, further in 2003, "and the first year you might see an increase is 2004," he says.
Northrop Grumman Corp., Los Angeles, the big aerospace-and-defense company, is benefiting from the rise in defense spending. It currently has about 1,100 openings for engineering jobs of all sorts and experience levels. "Double E's (electrical engineers) are always in great demand," a spokesman says, as well as software engineers. Northrop Grumman will be a major contractor with Lockheed Martin Corp. on the Joint Strike Fighter contract announced last fall -- considered the largest defense contract in history. The spokesman said it expects nationwide to be hiring about 1,600 engineers to work on the Joint Strike Fighter program over the next few years. Northrop Grumman declined to discuss salary ranges, citing competitive reasons.
Mr. Napier adds that the industry is likely to see a shortage of engineers as many older engineers hired years ago to develop the space program reach retirement age. Nowadays, increasing numbers of students studying engineering are foreign, "and foreign students are less employable in the aerospace industry" due to security-clearance issues, he says. And, Mr. Napier notes, young people in general aren't joining the aerospace industry. The percentage of workers aged 25 to 34 in the aerospace industry (not just engineers) has fallen to 17% from 27% in 1992, according to Mr. Napier.
Where the Jobs Are
In the construction sector, "demand is strong," reports Jim Vockley, executive vice president of Kimmel & Associates, an Asheville, N.C., search firm. "Specialties like mechanical and electrical engineers are in very high demand," while civil and structural engineering demand is somewhat less robust. "Right now the public-sector and government work seems to be lagging behind."
In geographic terms, "the Southeast is very strong," he adds, while New England is the lowest area. Kimmel's searches typically average in the $100,000-$150,000 range for upper-level managers and executives. Most of the current assignments reflect expansion rather than replacement hiring, he adds. He's currently searching for a branch manager with about 15 years' experience for a design-build firm in the Pacific Northwest for a position paying $100,000 per year.
Mr. Vockley says an attractive candidate these days might be around 50 years old, with a half dozen or so jobs on the resume, but a "solid pattern of staying long enough to have an impact on an organization." Prospective employers are interested in past results: "Are candidates profitable? What fees have they generated, or changes in staff or policy changes implemented?"
Mr. Vockley says private companies often can be more creative and flexible in fashioning compensation packages. "Large companies may be at the mercy of salary caps, but if a midsize private owner wants somebody badly enough, he can get creative."
Job Hoppers Need Not Apply
Some parts of the engineering job scene "are starting to look better," says Mike DeLaney, a partner with engineering search firm Global Network Recruiting in Rochester, N.Y. While the communications sector remains very soft, in his practice analog-chip-design engineers, sought by semiconductor makers, "are always in demand. And there's a good deal of activity in the defense sector," he says, particularly for systems engineers looking forward to designing new systems rather than upgrading or retrofitting work. The ideal candidate would have seven or more years' experience in the defense industry and a bachelor's degree or better.
"Two or three years ago, companies were looking for a body. Today they want someone who can hit the ground running," which tends to rule out job-hopping engineers without skills very specific to a product or industry. Such candidates can earn $85,000 or more, and expect a 7% to 12% pay increase, Mr. DeLaney says.
Texas Instruments Inc., Dallas, the big semiconductor company, currently has 460 job openings, including about 300 for engineers, primarily designers of analog circuits "at all experience levels from fresh graduates to multiple years," a spokeswoman says. The starting salary for a well-qualified graduate from a good college is about $60,000.
Less-glamorous engineering jobs aren't easy to fill. Bill R. Lindley III, vice president of engineering at W & W Steel Co., Oklahoma City, says he and his competitors report a general shortage of structural engineers. "They're not coming out of the universities," he reports. "High-tech [degrees] have taken over at the university level."
His company, which employs about 300, fabricates long-span trusses for buildings such as aircraft-maintenance hangers, arenas, and convention centers. He employs five engineers, and has posted an entry-level engineering position for which he expects to pay around $45,000 a year. He received a dozen or so e-mails one recent day after the position had been posted about a week. He's also contacted "steel-oriented professors" at three universities, although better students seem more interested in East Coast jobs.
Mr. Lindley says lack of trained structural engineers has prompted his industry to raise funds for Oklahoma State University to encourage research into structural engineering. "The structural lab at the University of Oklahoma has gone to the environmentalists," he says.
Not every jobless engineer is hitting the panic button. Jonathan Moore, 25, recently quit a job in California in order to move to Boston with his girlfriend. "I got tired of the freeways and the shopping centers," he says. He'd also lived on a boat for 18 months and had been able to save some money from his $50,000 a year field-applications engineering job at Orthodyne Electronics, Irvine, Calif.
Mr. Moore has gone to some job fairs in the Boston area and has noticed that a lot of out-of-work engineers "are extremely qualified. A lot of smart people out there don't have a job right now." Still, he says, "most of them are upbeat. Everyone is talking about the 'turnaround' that they expect soon." Most interesting jobs these days require five years of experience, he adds. So he's currently "just exploring and checking out Boston. But call me back in 10 months and I'll be sweating bullets" if a job hasn't turned up.
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http://www.economyincrisis.org/article_61.html
America Now Dependent On Others For Its Standard of Living
America is now so wholly dependent on foreign countries to finance its government, its consumption, and its production that we are becoming utterly helpless against the cohesive planned economic attack being waged by these other countries. The result of this is the buying out of our critical industries and resources and the crippling many of our remaining American owned industries.
Total Foreign Control
Foreign countries own as much as 53% of our Government debt (Fed Reserve, Dec 2004) and are on pace to take control of over $700 Billion of US assets in 2005 alone (current pace of US trade deficit with rest of the world through first 5 months of 2005). On average, the IRS calculates that $1 in $4 spent in America on manufactured goods goes immediately to imports. Certain key chokepoint industries in this country are almost totally controlled by foreign countries (Cement Industry 81% - Movie Industry 70% - TV Industry 100%).
Buying Us Out With Our Own Money
As former Assistant Treasury Secretary under President Reagan, Paul Craig Roberts writes, the "result of many years of persistent trade surpluses with the United States, the Japanese government holds dollar reserves of $1 Trillion. China's accumulation of dollars is approximately $600 Billion. South Korea holds about $200 Billion."
These dollars are returning to this country to buy us out and to exert influence over our ability to control our future.
How does this happen?
1. Other countries use cheap labor, subsidized loan programs, and advanced technology to make and sell us goods cheaper than we can make here in America.
2. Free trade policies allow these countries collectively to target specific industries here in America and sell below cost. US manufacturers object but US consumers extol the ability to buy cheap foreign imports and temporarily improve their individual standard of living.
3. Facing subsidized foreign competitors who themselves are protected in their home markets, US manufacturers go bankrupt or are forced to outsource to survive (e.g. Boeing's new 7E7 is 52% designed and manufactured by Japan, Italy, and other countries, General Motors routinely uses Honda engines in several lines).
4. US loses its manufacturing base through the aforementioned bankruptcy or acquisition and this increases the dependence on foreign producers.
5. Foreign countries use the American dollars earned from selling us foreign consumer goods to invest in US Treasuries and to buyout our remaining industry.
6. American government becomes so dependent on foreign Treasury buyers that it can not object when foreign countries seek to buy out our core companies.
7. American consumers feel no effects in the short-term because foreign purchases of US Treasury bonds keeps interest rates low and the money supply high.
8. Meanwhile, very low savings, high borrowing and debt, and the hollowing out of American industry is leaving us with a very dim future.
Faced With Uncertainty
We need our leaders to immediately recognize the true state of our dependence on foreign money and foreign goods. We are fast losing our ability to take corrective action by failing to admit that there is a problem. Please write your congressperson and the President your thoughts and suggestions.
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http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-agent18nov18,1,3510181.story?coll=la-headlines-california
Onetime Espionage Suspect Is Arrested
After being cleared in China spy case, she's accused in an alleged marriage scam.
By H.G. Reza
Times Staff Writer
November 18, 2005
A woman cleared this week of multiple charges of conspiring to steal U.S. military secrets for China has been arrested again by FBI agents, this time for allegedly engaging in a marriage fraud scheme.
Fuk Heung Li of Alhambra was named in a criminal complaint filed Tuesday, the same day she was cleared of the previous accusations. According to an FBI affidavit, Fuk admitted she was involved with a company that paid U.S. citizens thousands of dollars to travel to China and enter into fraudulent marriages with people wanting to immigrate to America.
A search of Fuk's trash and home revealed numerous documents in Chinese and English that investigators said were blank marriage contracts. One partially filled contract calls for payment of $25,000 by the immigrant, authorities said.
Fuk's husband, Tai Wang Mak, 56, was indicted Tuesday on a charge of failing to register as an agent of a foreign government. Tai Mak's brother, Chi Mak, 65, was also named in the indictment along with his wife, Rebecca Laiwah Chiu, 62.
The Maks and Chiu face up to 10 years in prison if convicted. They and Fuk, 48, had been accused of theft of government property, conspiracy, transporting stolen goods and aiding and abetting when federal agents arrested them Oct. 28, but those charges were dropped after prosecutors determined the information they had wasn't classified.
Chi Mak, a Downey resident, is the lead project engineer on a contract to develop a quiet electric-drive propulsion system for U.S. Navy submarines at Paragon Power in Anaheim. Authorities said he transferred sensitive information about the propulsion system to his home computer. According to an FBI affidavit, Tai Mak and Fuk allegedly planned to carry a CD encrypted with that information to China.
The FBI affidavit unsealed Thursday suggests that federal agents began conducting surveillance of Fuk and the others in April 2004.
A U.S. attorney spokesman said Fuk was free on $50,000 bond.
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http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=57047
Southfield, Mich., Computer Staffing Firm to Pay $2.65 Million in Back Wages and Penalties for Immigration Law Violations
11/21/2005 2:04:00 PM
Contact: Brad Mitchell of the U.S. Department of Labor, 312-353-6976
DETROIT, Nov. 21 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Computech Inc., a Southfield, Mich., firm that places computer professionals at locations throughout the United States has agreed to pay $2,250,000 in back wages to 232 computer professionals and a $400,000 fine to settle immigration law violations, the U.S. Labor Department announced today.
An investigation by the Labor Departments Wage and Hour Division found that Computech brought non-immigrant H-1B workers into the U.S., but failed to pay them the minimum required wage rates in the areas where they were employed. The investigation also disclosed that Computech frequently "benched" the workers without compensation contrary to the rules of the H-1B program.
"The Department of Labor aggressively enforces the law to ensure that temporary foreign workers are compensated fully and fairly," said Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao. "Abuse of the temporary foreign worker program is not tolerated and violators, as this case shows, are vigorously pursued."
The settlement, approved by a U.S. Labor Department administrative law judge, orders the company to pay $2,250,000 to 232 foreign workers and a $400,000 fine in addition to the back wages. The company is also prohibited from participation in the H- 1B visa program for 18 months.
The H-1B visa program allows foreign workers to enter and work temporarily in the United States in professional level jobs such as computer programmers, engineers, medical doctors and teachers. H-1B workers must be paid at least the same wage rates and benefits as those paid to U.S. workers already doing the same job in the same area.
Computech contracts with other firms to supply computer professionals who work on the premises of those firms. It has customers across the U.S., with the largest numbers of its workers in Michigan, Illinois, California, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas and Minnesota.
The Wage and Hour Division enforces the H-1B wage provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act, in addition to other federal laws pertaining to wage payments. For more information please visit http://www.dol.gov or call toll free 866-4-USA-DOL.
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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/11/17/BUGB3FPGT01.DTL&type=tech
Outsourcing outrage
Indian call-center workers suffer abuse
- Mike McPhate, Chronicle Foreign Service
Thursday, November 17, 2005
Noida, India -- While irate calls are a mainstay of customer service work in any country, many Indian call-center workers say they regularly face particular abuse from Americans, whose tantrums are sometimes racist and often inspired by anger over outsourcing.
This vitriol has fueled a "searing anger" among the Indian employees, says Vinod Shetty, a Bombay lawyer who has formed a collective for call-center workers. "A lot of trauma is caused."
Debalina Das, 22, a computer help-line agent in the city of Hyderabad in south India, punched the button last winter for a call from the United States.
The caller greeted her with a torrent of racial and sexual slurs, accused her of "roaming about naked without food and clothes" and asked, "What do you know about computers?"
The diatribe ended with the comment:"This company is just saving money by outsourcing to Third World countries like yours."
Such telephone tirades are fueled by outrage over outsourcing, which is expected to move 3.4 million U.S. service-sector jobs overseas by 2015, according to the consultancy Forrester. Most of the work comes to India, where young, low-cost employees now handle a range of American tasks -- they draw cartoons, interpret heart scans, adjudicate insurance claims, reserve flights and chase debtors.
Das, who quit the job after four months, said she learned to dislike Americans. "Rarely, there are people who are good," she said by e-mail, "but then others remind me that all they believe in is cursing, and they don't have respect for others."
Her opinion is not uncommon among many workers in India's burgeoning call-center industry.
Relations between India and the United States have grown closer in recent years. India now sends more students to American colleges than any other country.
Indians form the wealthiest and one of the fastest-growing immigrant groups in the United States. And in the last decade, American companies have increasingly sought Indian customers and employees.
Not everyone is happy about the growing ties between the two nations. An anti-outsourcing movement has drawn wide support as layoffs continue to mount at such U.S. companies as IBM, which is cutting 13,000 jobs in Europe and the United States and adding 14,000 in India, according to the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers.
In the first three months of this year, state legislators proposed 112 bills to stanch the exodus of American jobs, according to the National Foundation for American Policy.
Some opponents of outsourcing, often fired workers themselves, have rechanneled their rage at job-slashing CEOs toward India. On the Web forum Is Your Job Going Offshore? (isyourjobgoingoffshore.com/forums/) contributors variously describe India as depraved, as a haven for terrorists, a "giant leech" and a nation of "back-stabbing cowards."
It is this kind of commentary that has shaped a perception among India's customer-care workers that Americans are intolerant. "Everybody thinks like that," said Samik Chowdhury, assistant manager at an IBM office in northern India. "Every time, it's racism only."
This attitude is not typical of most urban Indians, who tend to admire the United States for its strength and entrepreneurial spirit. In a recent 16-country Pew poll, India had the highest percentage of citizens with a favorable opinion of the United States, 71 percent.
The less favorable view, though, is beginning to seep into Indian popular culture. The scripts for a new sitcom called "The Call Center," scheduled to air this winter on the leading channel NDTV, depict Westerners as arrogant, immoral and comically rude.
The show's villain, the Indian manager of a call center, is an India-bashing blowhard, a disposition he picked up at an Ivy League business school in the United States.
One of the episodes recreates a real-life exchange that occurred in January between an American and an Indian agent that has become notorious among the call center crowd here. On the Philadelphia radio show "Star and Buc Wild," host Troi Terrain phoned an Indian call center pretending to order hair beads for his daughter. The call quickly turned vicious.
"Listen to me, you dirty rat eater," Terrain growled, to muffled laughter in the studio. "I'll come out there and choke the -- out of you. You're a filthy rat eater. I'm calling about my American 6-year-old white girl. How dare you outsource my call?"
Indian offices have taken measures to thwart such attacks: Agents typically adopt anglicized names, undergo "accent neutralization" and U.S. cultural training, and sometimes claim to be located in the United States. They are taught to suffer attacks politely and try to calm customers. Failing that, many offices now offer callers the option to be transferred to agents in the United States.
These humiliations, say observers, are tolerated by a labor force that savors the opportunity to join India's growing middle class. With monthly incomes of about $200, call-center employees live well in a country where many are poverty-stricken.
"They feel like it is their duty" to swallow insults, says labor researcher Babu Remesh.
Sumit Bhasin, a 25-year-old call-center worker for HCL BPO Technologies in the northern Indian city of Noida, says American customers tend to have an "egoistic, bossy kind of attitude." When he was young, he said, he used to dream of traveling to the United States, as many Indians do, but after working in call centers for several years, he is not so sure anymore.
However, he loves his job, because he makes $440 a month and gets to learn about high technology like routers, modems and concepts of networking.
But for others, the abuse is taking its toll.
A group of SBC call-center workers, also in Noida, sat recently on the clipped grass in front of the silver-glassed office building where they field Americans' Web connection problems. Callers often dismiss them the moment they detect their Indian accents, they say.
"A whole lot of the time, people are yelling," says Kapil Chawla, 23. "They just want to talk to an American."
Saurabh Jha, a 22-year-old in blue jeans, says a woman phoned from Texas recently and told him that, thanks to outsourcing, "You are getting money, food, shelter. You should be starving."
She berated him for 12 minutes before she finally allowed him to offer advice that promptly fixed her problem: to unplug her computer and plug it back in.
"I was speechless," he says. "She didn't even give me a chance."
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http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/living/education/13157120.htm?
Posted on Sun, Nov. 13, 2005
Schools look abroad to find needed teachers
PRACTICE EXPECTED TO GROW NATIONWIDE AS DISTRICTS STRUGGLE TO FILL OPENINGS
By Maya Suryaraman
Mercury News
Hiring teachers from overseas wasn't something the San Mateo-Foster City school district had considered -- until last year, when six positions went vacant for nine months.
The district advertised in Bay Area newspapers, solicited at job fairs in California and New York, and posted classifieds on craigslist and edjoin.org, a statewide database of education job openings. No luck. Out of options, San Mateo-Foster City turned to the Philippines, where a math teacher and seven special education teachers and speech therapists -- all licensed -- were recruited and hired.
Over in Canada, Susan Dodds had been teaching French as a foreign language for about a year when she applied for an opening in Cupertino that she saw online. Her risumi: a bachelor's degree in education and another with honors in French, a language she had been studying since kindergarten.
She landed the job at Hyde Middle School, where she now teaches French, as well as English for immigrant students. Her principal ``likes the fact that I am completely fluent in French,'' Dodds said.
Districts across the nation are hiring foreign talent to overcome domestic shortages of qualified teachers. In the South Bay, the San Jose Unified school district now employs 22 foreign teachers, including a biology instructor from Germany. The Cupertino and Franklin-McKinley elementary districts have brought on 12 and 19, respectively, from Mexico, Canada, Spain and other countries.
Nationally, as many as 15,000 elementary, middle and high school teachers from abroad now work in the United States on temporary work visas. And their ranks are swelling at the rate of 20 percent a year, according to the National Education Association, the country's largest teachers' union.
Over the next decade, the pressure on schools to hire from abroad is expected to intensify as teachers from the baby boom generation retire en masse -- and as campuses scramble to comply with the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which tightens teacher competency requirements starting in 2006.
Sad commentary?
School district officials say imported teachers are filling critical classroom needs. Others argue their presence is a sad commentary on the desirability of U.S. teaching jobs.
``If we need to recruit teachers from overseas, that says something about the state of the profession here in the United States,'' said Donald Washington, a program analyst in the NEA's teacher quality department. ``We need to raise salaries, improve working conditions and do more to retain teachers.''
In California, more than 3,000 preliminary credentials have been issued since 2000 to people trained in other countries, according to the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing.
Local school district administrators say that licensed special education, math, science and bilingual Spanish instructors are among the most sought-after internationally, because qualified teachers are in short supply in these areas. In math, for instance, about one in five California teachers is inadequately trained, according to the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning in Santa Cruz.
Experts attribute teacher shortages to low pay, inadequate capacity in teacher training programs and lack of support for rookies who then flee the profession.
Generally, imported teachers work in the United States on H-1B temporary work or J-1 cultural exchange visas, which with renewals are good for three to six years. They come from a wide range of countries, including Turkey, South Africa, Peru and France. The Phillippines are a particularly rich source of special education teachers.
``They have outstanding education programs in place for special education,'' said Tiffany Bettencourt, a spokeswoman for the San Diego-based Amity Institute, one of many agencies that place overseas teachers with U.S. school districts.
School district administrators say that overseas hires typically have stronger risumis than domestic applicants, and even hold doctorates in their fields.
``You really get very qualified people this way,'' said Michael Gallagher, a human resources director with the Cupertino Union School District.
Cupertino does not recruit internationally. But if someone from another country applies and is the best-qualified for a job, the district will apply for an H-1B visa on the teacher's behalf. Cupertino now employs 12 teachers on such visas, with specialties in math, music, special education, elementary education, Mandarin, Japanese and French.
In California, foreign educators typically enter the classroom with the same preliminary credential most entry-level teachers hold. To get this credential, they must possess college degrees and certifications that are equivalent to what would be required in the United States. Like the state's rookie teachers, they then have five years to earn a permanent credential.
Four local districts -- Franklin-McKinley and San Mateo-Foster City elementary, and San Jose and West Contra Costa unified -- said they pay foreign teachers the same as other teachers in the district with equivalent qualifications. And district officials -- rather than some middleman agency -- act as the imported teachers' employers and visa sponsors. According to a 2003 NEA report, school districts nationally have the same general practices.
Not problem-free
But the importing of teachers from abroad is not without its problems. Districts can come under fire for the expense of recruitment trips abroad, as the Ravenswood school district did in 2001 when the Mercury News reported on a pattern of excessive travel spending there. Foreign teachers lack the due-process rights of U.S. teachers, and if English isn't their first language, classroom communication can be awkward.
Cultural differences must be overcome on both sides.
Rogelio Calimag, a 31-year-old math teacher from the Philippines assigned to San Mateo's Bayside Middle School, says he is adjusting to the fact that students here are more socially outspoken, while at the same time less willing to participate in class academically than in the Philippines.
``To get them to explain their work, I have to push them more,'' Calimag said. ``In the Philippines, they would, even if they were nervous about it.''
Calimag taught mostly math in the Philippines for 12 years. He has a bachelor's degree in education with a specialization in math, has taken graduate courses in math, and is working on a thesis for a master's degree in education.
One of Calimag's algebra students, Eva McAvoy, says that her teacher's accented English makes him difficult to understand. At the same time, she appreciates the extra cultural dimension that he brings to the classroom.
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http://sify.com/news/fullstory.php?id=14015665
Conflicting views in US Congress on immigration
Sunday, 20 November , 2005, 12:10
Washington: In what could be disappointing news for thousands of Indian skilled workers aspiring for a career in the US, the House of Representatives has passed its version of the budget deficit reduction bill without any proposal to increase the annual cap of H-1B visas by 30,000 as suggested by the Senate.
The Bill approved by the US Senate earlier this month had proposed an increase of 30,000 in the annual cap of 65,000 non-immigrant H-1B visas, reissuing of unused employment-based immigration visas, and increase in visa application fee, among other things.
The House of Representatives, which passed its version of the Bill on Friday by a 217 to 215 margin, on the other hand, remained silent on raising the H-1B visa cap and instead introduced a proposal increasing the fee for the intra-company L-1 visa by $1,500.
L-1 is a non-immigrant visa which allows companies operating both in the US and abroad to transfer certain classes of employees from its foreign operations to the US operations for up to seven years.
The fate of thousands of aspiring workers from abroad will now depend on the common bill which will have to be prepared before it can be sent to the US President for his sanction. In the coming weeks, the reconciliation process will witness intense lobbying by pro-immigration and anti-immigration groups with US lawmakers.
The original purpose of the current legislative exercise by the two arms of the Congress was to reduce budget deficit. The Congress had mandated a $300 million five-year saving target from 2006-10, as part of its budget resolution for the 2006 fiscal.
As part of meeting its deficit reduction target, the Senate went along with its Judiciary Committee recommendations that added some 90,000 employment-based green cards and raised the fee by $500 netting the government some $250 million.
The Senate also went along with the other recommendation of increasing the cap on H-1B visas by 30,000, which would add another $75 million by way of fee collection.
The Senates version of the Bill also contained proposals to enable legal immigration to increase from 2,40,000 people a year on an annual basis.
The House of Representatives, however, did not increase the number of visas to bring additional revenues but proposed an increase in L-1 visa fee to $1,500.
Between now and the time the members iron out the differences, there will be tremendous activity privately by interested groups that will include those who are against having any increase for the H-1B visas on the grounds that they are being abused.
But there is a larger issue as well - there are members in the House and Senate who do not wish to see any immigration or visa provisions tagged to this budget deficit cutting bill, rather they would like for changes come about in a separate bill next year.
"We dont expect there to be any immigration provisions in the reconciliation. This is not the time or place for controversial immigration provisions," Republican Congressman Lamar Smith from Texas recently said.
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http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_1551410,00050001.htm
H1-B visa hike plan in trouble
S Rajagopalan
The plan to raise the H-1B visa cap by 30,000 has run into uncertainty with the House of Representatives not going along with provisions cleared by the Senate.
In a development, not entirely unexpected, the House on Friday passed its own version of a budget bill, without any provision to raise the existing annual H-1B limit of 65,000 visas.
The only hope now is negotiations between the two chambers to reconcile differences on a number of facets including the visa issue and come up with a common bill that could be passed and sent to the president for assent.
But this exercise, set to spill over to December, is up against heavy odds, largely because some other components of the bill dealing with spending cuts are far more controversial than the H-1B plan.
The Senate version of the bill, passed a fortnight ago, provided for 30,000 more of this coveted work visa in what was projected as a measure to "recapture" unused visas from previous years.
According to the US's IT industry, which has been lobbying for a H-1B step-up, 310,000 of sanctioned visas have remained unused over the last 15 years.
The only immigration provision in the House bill relates to another category of visas (L-1) -- not about revising the numbers, but raising the fee for it by $1,500.
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