It's the business, stupid

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Tag(s): Border Security; Bush Admin; Business Small; Business-Industry; Congress; Immigration Deportation; Immigration Employment Illegal
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July 1, 2007 at 13:50:46

It's the business, stupid

by sameh abdelaziz Page 1 of 1 page(s)

http://www.opednews.com

The sickly immigration bill is dead. Therefore, it is time for George W. to look for glory elsewhere, while the law enforcement lovers and the love your brother believers in Congress can search for a new fight. However, for you and me we are stuck with the problem of immigration. But is it really immigration?

The controversial bill attempted to address three serious and real challenges. It calls for increasing the number of (H1B) visas awarded annually to businesses. These none immigrant visas allow US employers to seek temporary help from highly skilled foreigners. The immigration bill also calls for creating a similar worker program for unskilled foreigners. The third and final measure is an attempt to resolve the problem of illegal immigration through several actions including providing a path to citizenship while building a fence on the Mexican American border.

I hate to break the news to all the debaters and their representatives. We have no immigration problem. We have two serious and unique business challenges that require leadership and courage.

In my day-to-day job as an Information Technology executive I work with many engineers some of them born in this country some born elsewhere. I also work extensively with one of the top national research institutions in advance and experimental computing. A high percentage of engineers, scientists, and doctorate candidates working and studying in our country are foreign born. The typical individual in these groups earn a college degree from their own country in the top one percent of their class, before coming to America. After earning a graduate degree many businesses are interested but prevented from hiring the new scientists and engineers because of the limited number of visas awarded annually. The limitation on this specific type of temporary visas (H1B) forces businesses to send some of their strategic and advanced work abroad where resources are available. This action in return results in further loss of jobs, missed tax revenues, and more importantly deteriorating the accumulated knowledge that comes from the learning process.

In today’s global economy many industrialized nations are more than happy to open their doors and their checkbooks to the young scientists and engineers that we turn away. The whole argument regarding foreign born hired locally lowering the standard of living for their American counterparts does not apply to highly skilled workers. I hired many engineers over the years and the compensation always based on the individual’s experience, and not their citizenship status.

In my opinion, hiring professionals is a pure business decision and not a political one. There should not be artificial quotas on skilled visa category (H1B) a business is willing to hire the individuals. At the mean time, the penalty for evading labor certificate rules that guarantee the skill uniqueness of the hired individual should be extreme.

The second topic addressed by the immigration bill has nothing to do with the first one. I will be more than happy to support the deportation of twelve and half million illegal immigrants if any of the screaming heads filling the airwaves with angry rhetoric have a plan. Or can answer questions such as How to round up twelve and half million people? What impact deporting illegal immigrants will have on millions of small businesses? How the congress will fund building a fence across the Mexican American border to prevent further penetration? Where can we locate enough cheap labor to build the fence? Will illegal immigrants be allowed to work on that project?

So until the so called media experts figure out the answers for these and many more questions let us try to understand the problem. The only reason there are illegal immigrants in our country is we have jobs that sustains them. At an environment with unemployment rate at all time low, we simply do not have enough work force to do certain types of jobs.

It is indispensable for any civilized nation to preserve and respect the rule of law. Regrettably, until there is a work force willing to do low skilled jobs at a minimum wage it is a supply and demand question not a law enforcement one. The fact that people cross the border illegally to get to these jobs is the symptom and not the disease.

To address illegal immigration as a business problem we need to invest simultaneously in allocating a substitute work force and appropriating funds for border control. Providing a path to legalize millions that are already in the country is a sound business decision especially considering that we have no means to deport them, and we as a nation are dependent on their manual labor. The creation of a low skills worker program will eliminate the incentives for crossing the border illegally.

The legalized workers will pay penalty and income taxes; this additional revenue stream should fund a robust border control.

Until Congress and the political establishment have the courage and the vision to call things by their names, we can all keep shouting at each other while hiring more illegal immigrants. Also, let us continue sending the strategic and advanced work that makes us a super power to India and China.

I am an Egyptian American born in Alexandria. I immigrated to the US in the late eighties, during this time lived in many places in US and Europe. I work as an IT manager and love it. I love to travel, it makes me feel young, and it awakes in me sense of adventure and curiosity. I love knowing people from different cultures; it never fails to amaze me how we all live in our little worlds that never meet. History is my second amazement, it always differ depending on who is winning, that leads me to my third hobby, politics is it history or human nature that is the culprit?

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3 comments

Longtime Libertarian. 46 year old computer programmer from California
ARichardWatsonLongtime Libertarian. 46 year old computer programmer from California

H!b Visas Depress IT Wages!

I beg to differ with you, but H1b Visa holders do dpress high tech wages. That is why Microsoft and IBM and SUN etc. all want more, despite just laying off thousands of workers. In fact they have voracious appetite for them. I too have been an IT manager and there is no question that the H1b visa holder will work more hours for less money. I mean jeez if he doesn't he gets deported!!!! If H1b visa workers did not help the IT robber barons and their bottom line so much then why did all 115,000 of these visas continue to get snatched up during the years following the 2000 dotcom flameout? All the statistics show that American IT workers were suffering large unemployment numbers. Domestic coders out of work all over the place, yet businesses continue to hire the foreign H1b visa holder.

Sorry, but there is clear evidence of the IT industry using H1b visas to browbeat American workers and take advantage of the visa holder.

Yours very truly,

~aw

by ARichardWatson (5 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 16 comments) on Monday, July 2, 2007 at 8:32:01 AM

I am a retired physicist and a progressive. I loathe GWB and the neocons. It is time to impeach him and purge the pseudo government of all neocons. Their ideas are treasonous.
Jerry LobdillI am a retired physicist and a progressive. I loathe GWB and the neocons. It is time to impeach him and purge the pseudo government of all neocons. Their ideas are treasonous.

It's Greed, Stupid

Excuse me, but if you had lived here longer and experienced the prosperity we once had, you wouldn't be singing this tune. What gives your naivete away is your use of the phrase, "In this global economy...". That is the frame of the greedy multinational quarterly bottom-liners who think economics is the study of how to maximize profits while externalizing as many costs as possible.

I doubt if you have any reasonable answers for why it is that the American middle class is sinking, why it is that most US colleges are full of foreign students while American middle class students can no longer afford to go to college, why it is that American manufacturing is dying, etc.

This nation was prosperous before corporations got the upper hand. It was prosperous in my lifetime--but no more. Globalization is simply an Orwellian scheme to drive down labor costs to the level of the lowest bidder world-wide.

An economy that exports its capital (built on the backs of its labor), exports its jobs to low wage countries, ceases to manufacture anything, borrows the money to pay for imports it previously manufactured, subsidizes the education of foreigners in its universities while raising tuition to exclude its own bright children, imports (both legally and illegally) foreign labor to work at wages Americans cannot afford to accept, is an economy that has a terminal illness.

I look at your picture, and I wonder, what is this man so happy about? You don't understand what is happening. That's the answer.

by Jerry Lobdill (6 articles, 0 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 19 comments) on Monday, July 2, 2007 at 4:57:10 PM

An easterner living in the west for so many years, striving not to abandon the good eastern values, while hanging on to the decent western traits; a tough mix?, not necessarily; challenging at times?, you bet !. But what's a life without challenges.
Never will be just a part of the crowd, will always use the intellect to dialogue and for the coming generation will strive to pass on the better of the two worlds.
Islam is my religion, Egypt and Canada are my lands and Engineering is my...

to see more of bio, click on member name
waelsmAn easterner living in the west for so many years, striving not to abandon the good eastern values, while hanging on to the decent western traits; a tough mix?, not necessarily; challenging at times?, you bet !. But what's a life without challenges.
Never will be just a part of the crowd, will always use the intellect to dialogue and for the coming generation will strive to pass on the better of the two worlds.
Islam is my religion, Egypt and Canada are my lands and Engineering is my...

to see more of bio, click on member name

Dreams, Truths and Cheap Talk

Excellent article and interesting comments.Mr. Abdelaziz, you nailed some good points that raise valid questions the american people and government should be looking hard for answers to. The airwaves are filled with conservative talk shows hosts celebrating the defeat of the immigration bill by the will of the people. That is really nice, but did they solve the problem?. No. Will they solve the "real" problems in the near future. I doubt it. ARichardWatson, I'm not sue if you noticed or not but the salaries in the IT sector have come down dramatically from the inflated levels of the dot.com era simply because there is no more start-ups appearing everyday hungry for capital and talent and no more sense of urgency with the big players to compete for talent to keep pace with the start-ups innovative products and services, so claiming that H1B holders are to blame for salary reductions is an overstatement. We all know what happened after the internet bubble bursted, unemployment ran high among all IT workers and while the american workers stay in the US to be counted in the statistics, H1B workers leave the country and do not count. lobdillj, so you say we did not see the prosperity you once have!. Remind me of any older generation patronizing the new one and claiming how beautiful the past was and how ugly the future will be!. You ask Mr. Abdelaziz questions that I doubt you or anyone knows the answers to, in your career as a physicist, I hope you were not always coming up with the problem and stop short of providing solutions or worse yet come up with the wrong answers otherwise I assume it was a really a painful career for you sir!. Your sentence "subsidizes the education of foreigners in its universities while raising tuition to exclude its own bright children" says a lot about your way of thinking or lack thereof. Foreign students do not get a break from tuition raises and they compete equally with their US counterparts for merit based "grants and scholarships. If the US kids are not on par with the foreign ones in science and math, go hold your secretary of education accountable. Another sentence "legal foreign labor to work at wages Americans cannot afford to accept" show a great disconnect. I'm not sure if you notice or not but many of those H1B visa holders earn much more than the US median gross income. The truth is sir, this legal workforce -in the most part- does work not enough americans cannot do intellectually. You want to discuss economy, memorize this: I do not live in isolation, in a global economy, I have to compete intelligently to stay a super power and if this includes attracting talents from around the world until I fix my education system, I will happily do so!.

Finally, you ask why this man is so happy about? and you conclude that he doesn't understand what is happening. Well Sir, you did not write any meaningful information that shows you understand either!.

by waelsm (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 3 comments) on Wednesday, July 4, 2007 at 12:57:59 PM