Posted on 08/20/2013 5:24:33 AM PDT by Kaslin
They come here and end up working at Publix
If our schools weren’t run by stupid leftists we could have Americans doing those jobs. We don’t need to import these people.
No, unimportant side issue. The battle is over shamesty and our continued failure to STOP MORE FROM WALKING ON OVER.
The CIS study is especially suspect because it simply looks at the number of graduates in these fields without considering that in many cases these are not Americans, and they aren't going to stay in this country after graduation.
The article at American [I use the word advisedly] Prospect includes a finding that the US Economy needs massively more stimulus to recover, a claim which is, in a word, preposterous. Unfortunately, that's pretty typical of the quality of their work.
Speaking as someone who's involved in filling 12-15 positions per year at the last level before hiring, I can tell you frankly that many programmers and IT support people in the market are simply not worth a crap. We typically start out with phone interviews of about 20 people (after culling 40-50 resumes) to fill one position. 6 or 7 usually pass level 1 and the next level gets that down to three candidates, and then I (a consultant) and senior IT engineers/program managers interview the final round. In many cases we pass ON ALL of the candidates, and the process starts all over again; sadly, this doesn't happen because we're all that picky. We've taken a chance on about 50% of the folks we hire in the hope they'll surprise us. They rarely do.
In IT, the skill erosion is about 25% per year. This means that after graduation you effectively have to stay in college as far as continuing education, or, after 4 years you are worth little more to an organization than someone with no training in the field. In cutting-edge science the numbers are even worse. I don't think H1B is the solution to that, but I'm very skeptical of "research" that simply takes the number of graduates per year , compares it to estimates, and then concludes that we have enough "qualified" people.
That's nonsense.
The H1B visa talk would stop very quickly if we claimed that the high wages paid to lawyers are indicative of a shortage and we need to import hundreds of thousands of foreign-born attorneys to lower the cost of legal services.
The first article I posted may have had some specious assumptions, but the others were unambiguous. Legions of STEM graduates are not able to find work in their chosen fields, and I can personally attest to many very smart students who are still struggling and taking jobs that are far below their skill set.
The old Bell Labs use to routinely rotate people into new projects that required them to learn new skills... something Ph. D. physicists are very good at doing. Now it doesn't exist. We have been outsourcing our high value-added technical jobs along with our factories. They knew that academia only went so far, and that science and high-end engineering were apprenticeships... and invested in their people.
So... who benefits when even advanced degreed people are idling? Who gains when millions of people who want work are unemployed or underemployed? Someone is setting the conditions for a massive state welfare system, perhaps?
I’ve posted about “unlimited” lawyer immigration in the past.
In 2012, I wrote that Romney should make that announcement to an Ivy League law school graduating class.
Nothing changes political opinions faster than having “your own ox gored.”
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