Thanks to this lawsuit, and other such brain dead actions by the anti-immigration lobby, US high tech has started to hemorrhage jobs.

These engineers and scientists are not going to vanish from the face of this earth just by denying them a job in the US. When they go back to their home countries, they are not going to start flipping hamburgers !

They are going to work for the offshore divisions of Google, MicroSoft, Intel, AMD, Nokia, Qualcomm.. !!

I work in a fortune 500 company, thats been consistently rated in the top-10 list of places to work in for several years now. We had 20 open reqs, that took forever to fill even with six figure salaries, and the requirement was only that the engineer know C really well, and that he/she had at least some experience (college projects counted) of working in the embedded space. These positions went a-begging for months !

Now, management has decided that they will go where the engineers are, and have setup an offshore testing center to begin with, but its not going to remain "just a testing center" for long.. I give it 2 years before the center morphs into a development center, with new jobs being created in India rather than the Bay area. The management tried for months and months to get engineers in the US, but failed.. Its just 4 testing positions now, but itll scale up fast.

Thanks to programmers guild, numbers USA and other Kuklux wannabes. Congratulations ! You cut your nose to spite your face.

Employers complain that they can't find people to fill jobs and whine and complain to the government that they need more H-1b. Yet Americans are out of jobs and have trouble finding jobs in todays economic upheaval.

Our government helps everyone else BUT their own! Out government helps out the Corporate coffers at the exspense of their citizens! If corporations complain about the educational system then maybe they should chip in and help fix it rather than complain about it and do nothing! It is cheaper to place a bandaid over the problem than actually fixing the TRUE issue - THAT would take money that they do NOT want to spend!

In reality the fix is in ... low wages! Instead of bring the world up to our living standards they are bring OURS DOWN!

This is the dumbest move ever. They should be on the plane back to their country of origin the day after graduation, and should be banned from getting H1B Visas for at least the first 10 years of their work experience after finishing college. That way their own countries can get the advantage and help from their education, the way it should be.

The H1B Visa cap should be more restrictive. It should have caps based on the TRUE unemployment rate in the US. With the TRUE unemployment rate (ppl 18 and over, not working, not in school or the military, under 65) at a whopping 65% now, we should not be allowing ANY H1B Visa's at all.

I have mixed feelings about this suit. First, it's important to remember that more than 50% of all graduates in master's and Ph.D. degree programs in science, math, technology and engineering in the United States are foreign nationals. I don't doubt that their home countries would like to have them and their new skills back, but the flip side is that immigration is politically sensitive and US companies are increasingly looking to offshoring instead of bringing in foreign workers.

Absent a sea change in US trade law, it's going to be highly difficult to stop US companies from offshoring jobs. It started with manufacturing and it's now proceeding with worrisome speed through engineering, accounting, software development, even radiology and biotech (India is big on biotech right now).

The United States is taking big chances by paying for the expertise of other countries using borrowed money. At least with the foreign workers here they contribute their skills, income taxes and knowledge as trainers and coworkers to US workers. If they go home and the job goes with them, they pay income taxes at home, shop at home, and ultimately influence the infrastructure and knowledge/training of other workers at home.

The risk to the United States (and I'm not suggesting that immigration is the answer, mind you) is that it could become a poor backwater saddled with a lot of debt and a population that knows how to sell things, but not much else. Think about it, powerful groups in the United States are trying to push "intelligent design" to be taught in schools. In just 10 or 20 years American universities may teach religious engineering where instead of learning math, you pray to god to help you solve your engineering problem.

There are a lot of risks to the continued prosperity of the United States. The most important of these is an arrogance among many Americans who believe that China, India and other countries can't innovate and merely do the grunt work for smart folks in the United States. That is increasingly not true and when you apply global wage arbitrage to skilled labor, the impact here could be very harsh. Imagine Americans suddenly paying $20 for a loaf of bread as the dollar heads ever lower from the ridiculous trade deficit since Americans hardly make anything here anymore. Imagine software engineers in the United States competing with better educated ones in India who are willing to work long hours and do good work and not complain for $18,000 a year. The US infrastructure is obscenely inefficient with Americans using twice as much energy as Europeans. The point of that infrastructure is to profit by having a bunch of stupid folks here borrow lots of money to buy houses in the sticks at top dollar and then drive 40 miles to work. As energy prices rise, the US will be hit much harder than Europe, Japan, China and India which are all much more energy efficient than the US. But our politicians keep saying that the key is to drill in ANWR or to devise new technologies to find oil! They are liars trying to hold off big changes because their campaign contributors like automakers and big oil/Saudi/Kuwait will not like that.

Things are changing fast. It's important to think about where this is going before advocating policy changes. Is the law going to encourage bringing foreign workers in, or is it going to encourage offshoring? Could tariffs and trade barriers reduce the offshoring trend?

This isn't just about one industry, this is about the future viability of the United States. We're at a serious turning point and this is a time to be humble, cautious and creative in mapping out our future. The knee jerk reaction of many Americans is going to be "close the borders" to save our jobs. The reality of it is that Americans have grown so accustomed to cheap foreign skill and production that they couldn't even imagine what life would be like without it. Imagine if with a real US dollar exchange rate that reflected all of the toxic consumer and government debt here and all of the dollars abroad - imagine making what you make now, but having to pay $20 for a loaf of bread, or $3,500 for a modest new laptop, or $45,000 for a compact car? Nix cheap labor and those are the prices you're looking at. It wouldn't be all bad, but it would cause a massive repricing of the Dow/NASDAQ/Dollar/etc. It would hammer corporate profits and probably result in higher unemployment here. Most Americans don't design and build laptops, they work at Best Buy selling them. If they cost $3,500 because Americans were designing and building them, I imagine that it would be a lot harder to sell them and many of those Best Buy jobs would disappear.

We've got to be careful figuring this out.

Ok Scott and KT, you dont want foreigners working in STEM fields.
What about YOU take his places on the fire line in Irak? or washing dishes at the restaurants???

Just a few days a ago, in May, Oracle laid off 500 Software Engineers and staff from a Silicon Valley office.

I had a chance to interview two of these software engineers.

Both had Masters Degrees.

Both had done extensive Web 2.0 work for the company that Oracle acquired (BEA).

Both candidates are living in the heart of Silicon Valley, in Santa Clara.

Both had applied to several dozen companies, over the last few months, with no luck finding a new job. I asked them about this, they said they had advanced notice their positions would be eliminated.

There is a serious, merger related, recession in Software Engineering in Silicon Valley right now.

Companies are laying off the best and the brightest right and left, we need to concentrate on keeping our talented U.S. citizen Software Engineers employed.

Sadly, we can only hire one of these candidates.

Clearly, Oracle doesn't need any more Visas for software engineers, if they are throwing away such excellent U.S. Software Engineers.