[ale] A nation of the immigrants, by the immigrants, for the immigrants

[Jim Philips]

On Monday 08 July 2002 07:32 pm, Arafat Mohamed wrote:
> How exactly do companies follow the law (as was posted earlier) in
> determining whether or not there are no qualified americans to fill the
> position? Is the law actually followed or is it just one of those things
> no one pays attention to?

Well, clearly a company doesn't have any absolute way to follow the law unless 
they go door to door looking for qualified applicants who are citizens.


> If the law as it stands is not being followed, will more legislation
> short of abolishing the H1-b program solve anything (I'm thinking gun
> control here)?

I think the thing that people worried about during the dot com boom was that 
corporations were:

a. looking for immigrants in the belief they were cheaper labor than 
Americans.
b. ignoring qualified Americans who were over the age of thirty.

I don't know what the law says about that now. It is nearly impossible to 
prove age discrimination in the hiring process and not exactly easy to prove 
it in a firing situation either. Corporations are too slick about it. I would 
like to see the law specify that older applicants have to go into the pool 
too and that immigrants can't be paid below industry srandards. Of course, 
all of that may be a nightmare to implement. But the last thing I would want 
to do is discourage immigrants from coming here to work. If we do that, we 
are basically voting against American business. Because immigrants played a 
huge role in the technological advances made in recent years. Take the 
startup I joined in 1995. We had two principal architects under the 
development manager: one was an immigrant from India and the other was an 
immigrant from China. Without those two, we wouldn't have had a product. 
Until the United States can do a better job of educating its students in 
science and technology, we had bloody well better hope that immigrants will 
want to work here. Otherwise, we will face the equivalent of a brain drain.



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