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Why Is the United States Telling Immigrant Geniuses to Get Lost?
The Atlantic ^ | 06/15/2012 | Jordan Weissmann

Posted on 06/15/2012 4:19:10 AM PDT by SeekAndFind

Are you an immigrant genius who wants to come flex your skills at a company here in the United States? Too bad. Go away! We don't want you.

The U.S. just hit its annual cap on visas for educated immigrants, a.k.a.: the H1-B, which means that for the rest of the year, we're in the business of telling smart people from around the world that we don't have a place for them.

Here's how this ridiculous system works: Starting each April, the federal government distributes a limited supply of 85,000 of H1-B visas. Companies go on a mad charge to snap up as many as they need, and those who come up short are left to scheme up other, roundabout ways of getting their workers into the country. It's a silly dance we do each year, when instead we could just welcome more smart, skilled professionals to come and work here.

To get a visual sense of just how rapidly demand for these visas outstrips supply, here's a graph from the Brookings Institute. Each year is marked off starting in April. The blue represents the amount of time before companies hit the cap. The hotter the economy, the faster the visas usually go. This year, it took just ten weeks, compared to 33 in 2011.

(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Education; Society
KEYWORDS: aliens; h1b; immigration
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1 posted on 06/15/2012 4:19:22 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
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To: SeekAndFind
I thought we wanted the abused H1B VISA system curtailed?
2 posted on 06/15/2012 4:22:45 AM PDT by knarf (I say things that are true ... I have no proof ... but they're true)
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To: SeekAndFind

Not letting educated foreigners in may sound bad on the surface, but it is the right thing to do. I personally know in excess of twenty or more engineers and scientists who are out of work. I can’t see letting foreigners take high hech jobs that should go to American scientists and engineers.


3 posted on 06/15/2012 4:24:54 AM PDT by BuffaloJack (End the racist, anti-capitalist Obama War On Freedom.)
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To: knarf

easiest way to spot the progressives is when they start talking H1Bs.

everything to undermine American at every turn. that’s their motto


4 posted on 06/15/2012 4:25:56 AM PDT by sten (fighting tyranny never goes out of style)
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To: SeekAndFind

Because the conspirators want only dependent sheep thay can fit into poverty and keep them thier for thier base. NAACP and the black caucus have been doing this to thier own since thier inception. The liberal progressive, now add communist socialist radicals need a base to feed on or they cannot exist.


5 posted on 06/15/2012 4:27:29 AM PDT by ronnie raygun (B B)
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To: SeekAndFind

I’m not sure what to think about this.

There are a lot of considerations behind this. I read articles about how the US is educating too many PhDs, and that there are too few jobs for PhD level scientists, forcing many to skip from postdoc to postdoc. On the other hand, our primary education system is becoming progressively worse, so that many of the PhDs we are training aren’t US citizens. This article also provides no break-down on the type and level of education of these immigrants—both of which would be valuable data for policymakers trying to work out where education reform efforts should be directed.

Foreign countries, especially those trying to put themselves in a position to compete with the US, send students here to get advanced degrees, and also recruit highly educated Americans.


6 posted on 06/15/2012 4:30:05 AM PDT by exDemMom (Now that I've finally accepted that I'm living a bad hair life, I'm more at peace with the world.)
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To: BuffaloJack

There’s no incentive to create more skilled and technical workers if we can just import them.


7 posted on 06/15/2012 4:31:44 AM PDT by cripplecreek (What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul?)
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To: SeekAndFind
Are you an immigrant genius who wants to come flex your skills at a company here in the United States? Too bad. Go away! We don't want you.

Good news for once. End the whole stinking program. Labor markets react to supply and demand just like any other commodity. If wages for the "hard sciences" go up more students wil stop partying and start studying/ Also there is a not a shortage of technical people in this country, it is all a matter of price-demand.

8 posted on 06/15/2012 4:33:15 AM PDT by central_va ( I won't be reconstructed and I do not give a damn.)
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To: BuffaloJack
Not letting educated foreigners in may sound bad on the surface, but it is the right thing to do. I personally know in excess of twenty or more engineers and scientists who are out of work. I can’t see letting foreigners take high hech jobs that should go to American scientists and engineers.

Boy this is a tough one for me as many that come here may have more of the American Dream type Spirit than 2nd or 3rd generation types here. 2nd-ly, they tend to cause brain-drains in their former countries, so is a Pakistan Engineer better off staying at home making is country a better place? Perhaps..

A tangent question is where is the massive Corp Tax Code (Flat, low rate, 100% expense right-off 1st year etc,) Redesign so Companies stay here and others want to come back.

9 posted on 06/15/2012 4:33:24 AM PDT by taildragger (( Palin / Mulally 2012 ))
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To: SeekAndFind
"Why Is the United States Telling Immigrant Geniuses to Get Lost?"

Because people of such intelligence would never vote for someone like Obama?

10 posted on 06/15/2012 4:45:36 AM PDT by ETL (ALL (most?) of the Obama-commie connections at my FR Home page: http://www.freerepublic.com/~etl/)
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To: ETL

RE: Because people of such intelligence would never vote for someone like Obama?

I believe both Bill Gates Jr and Senior AND Warren Buffet voted for Obama. Not sure if Steve Jobs did but I won’t be surprised if he did.


11 posted on 06/15/2012 4:47:05 AM PDT by SeekAndFind (bOTRT)
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To: SeekAndFind

Their “intelligence” is obviously limited to a very narrow area.


12 posted on 06/15/2012 5:03:47 AM PDT by ETL (ALL (most?) of the Obama-commie connections at my FR Home page: http://www.freerepublic.com/~etl/)
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To: SeekAndFind

Not every H-1B Visa goes to a genius. In fact, most go to entirely run-of-the-mill engineers and scientists, who’s only virtue is that they work cheap.

There is no shortage of engineering and scientific talent right here in the United States. Why should we be importing third-world pay scales to these shores?


13 posted on 06/15/2012 5:08:33 AM PDT by Haiku Guy ("The problem with Internet Quotes is that you never know if they are real" -- Abraham Lincoln)
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To: SeekAndFind
Because the H1B system never made any real effort to separate the foreign genius from the crowd of Visual Basic code monkeys. Bump up the charge for the visa to $50,000 and you will only have companies applying for top line researchers instead of just a bunch of cheap programmers.

Are the running out of slots now in June? Before the crash they would hit the annual quota in the first week.

14 posted on 06/15/2012 5:09:05 AM PDT by KarlInOhio (You only have three billion heartbeats in a lifetime.How many does the government claim as its own?)
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To: BuffaloJack

All you’re doing by keeping the talented, educated immigrants out is two things:

1) ensuring that those immigrants we do take in are in sum less educated and less able than our current population, dragging the country down, and

2) speeding the move to more offshoring and even completely moving offshore of the kind of high tech industry we need to support our current lifestyle and expectations.

I’m for turning off the uneducated spigots and letting the highly educated in.


15 posted on 06/15/2012 5:25:08 AM PDT by 9YearLurker
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To: sten
easiest way to spot the progressives is when they start talking H1Bs.

everything to undermine American at every turn. that’s their motto


You are so correct.

H-1B's are far from the 'brightest and the best', OTH they are quite CHEAP and serve to enable off-shoring where workers are even cheaper.

The Most Generous Nation in the World... at Giving Jobs Away

H-1Bs: Still Not the Best and the Brightest

How Record Immigration Levels Robbed American High-Tech Workers of $10 Trillion






16 posted on 06/15/2012 5:25:37 AM PDT by khelus
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To: central_va

That strategy would work okay if we operated within a local, rather than global economy.

But as it is, our overall standard of living is sufficiently high that among our talented young workers many would prefer to forego more salary for technical work to express themselves in other fields. Sure, there’s some response to marginally better salaries, but the valued-added in high tech world doesn’t support financier salaries for its rank and file, there’s a limit to how much you can boost tech salaries which is tied to the actual value added.


17 posted on 06/15/2012 5:29:52 AM PDT by 9YearLurker
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To: 9YearLurker
But as it is, our overall standard of living is sufficiently high that among our talented young workers many would prefer to forego more salary for technical work to express themselves in other fields. Sure, there’s some response to marginally better salaries, but the valued-added in high tech world doesn’t support financier salaries for its rank and file, there’s a limit to how much you can boost tech salaries which is tied to the actual value added.

Bullsh1t post of the day.

So where is the value added? What are our young people supposed to do for a living? A say this as a father of a teen about to go to college. It is hard to look him in the face knowing his fellow citizens like you are stabbing him in the back.

18 posted on 06/15/2012 5:57:52 AM PDT by central_va ( I won't be reconstructed and I do not give a damn.)
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To: Haiku Guy
There is no shortage of engineering and scientific talent right here in the United States. Why should we be importing third-world pay scales to these shores?

My guess is our in-house Free Republic gloBULList Free Traitors have been brain washed by listening to talk radio and Rush Limbaugh who is totally wrong about this issue. An no, being a protectionist does NOT make me pro union. Most engineers/scientist do not belong to a union. They need their fellow Americans to look out for them as they are the ones who make the economy work.

19 posted on 06/15/2012 6:05:45 AM PDT by central_va ( I won't be reconstructed and I do not give a damn.)
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To: central_va

If your teen is talented and he(she) majors in a technical field, he’ll be in good shape.

If he’s not, there’s only so much that he can be paid beyond the value he brings to his employer even as a technical major—whether or not you look at the reality of competition in a global economy.

In other words, crappy programmers are crappy programmers and you’d have to live in a fascist, Obama society to force companies to pay them more than they’re worth.


20 posted on 06/15/2012 6:34:08 AM PDT by 9YearLurker
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