> By official data, currently more than 100,000 U.S. programmers are
> unemployed. Many more are underemployed, technically employed
> working in nonprofessional jobs such as bus driver, real estate
> appraiser, and so on. The un- and underemployed easily total a half
> million workers. Meanwhile 463,000 H-1Bs are employed in the field.
> The National Research Council report, commissioned by Congress,
Building A Workforce For The Information Economy, http://www.nap.edu/catalog/9830.html
> pointed out that H-1Bs have an adverse impact on overall wage
> levels.
kj khoo Fri, 4 Jul 2003 01:16:17 +0800
> Happened to just look at the BLS analysis of its 1988-2000
> occupation projections, and it turned out that their projections for
> electrical and electronics engineers was way off. There was an
> absolute decline in the number of electrical and electronics
> engineers in 2000 compared to 1988, and way off from their
> projection of a huge increase.
> Now surely H1-B visa holders would be included in that count of e&e
> in 2000? If so, then this blaming of cheaper immigrants can't be
> correct.
Really? What part of this reasoning would you attack: during some recent period (e.g. 1998-2003)
0 Employment in engineering in the US has declined in absolute terms.
1 Per-capita compensation of US engineers has declined in real terms.
2 Large numbers of foreign engineers have been brought in under
technical visas (esp H1-B and L-1).
3 Those non-citizen engineers earn less than citizen engineers.
(Worse yet, aspect of the visa programs tend to produce indentured servitude, much as with other US labor-importation programs. See http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html#tth_sEc2.1 )
4 One may reasonably conclude that engineering labor imported into the
US reduces compensation to engineers in the US.
Seems like pretty straightforward supply-and-demand. Am I missing something?