Neal, I agree with you on just about everything, but this is one issue where you are sorely ignorant - mean that you are either misinformed or not at all.

My father came out of the Marines in the mid-to-late 60s and went to work for IBM where he learned 8 computer languages in 7 weeks. At one point he was one of the country's top experts in certain programming languages. He had over 40 years of experience when he was forced into retirement by these H-1B aliens.

My father was a contract worker with several different companies on the Y2K "problem" starting around 1995-6 (He also knew from the very beginning that there was no problem nor would there be). On one of those jobs he was forced to work with an entire team of H-1Bs (5 in all). One was from Sri Lanka, one was from Egypt and the other three were from India. The first two were nice enough guys, but the whole lot didn't have the knowledge my father did. The three from India had no work ethic. They chose to "work" later in the day so the boss wouldn't have eyes on them. They would go out for 3-hour lunches and never clock out, so don't tell me about their wonderful work ethic.

He was working a contract in New Jersey at the time of the September 11th attacks, and he was working in a building with over 30 IT workers 2 of whom were American. After the attacks the company decided it needed to release some of the contractors, and in the end only 2 were released. Care to guess which two?

I'm sure you're going to say that my father and the other American weren't as qualified... and you would be wrong. As the IT expanded and grew, my father grew as well. He was always attending classes and seminars to keep up to speed.

This H-1B visa issue is soley about Bill Gates getting cheap labor. I can't fault the man for wanting to save on employee's benefits, but contractors don't get them anyway.

My father used to harass John Linder at each of his town hall meetings about this very issue because he saw many of his colleagues fall by the wayside. Linder's explanations were, as usual, that there was a shortage of IT personnel. What he was really saying was that there was a shortage of CHEAP IT personnel.

If there are Americans who can do the job then the Americans should get the job. But why pay the going rate of a highly qualified American when you can get 3 foreigners for less money and with less qulifications?

I'll tell you how. They do it just like the rest of us. The degree is worthless as soon as it's earned. In technical careers, within 18 months, nothing you studied in college is worth a damn. H1B'ers do it the same way we all do it. We get on the job and bust our butts learning it!

The difference is this guy's butt comes with a whole support team of other butts at half the price.

And don't get me started about how corporate America has taken what is really a relatively simple task (data processing) and turned it into a completely unnecessarily complex and unruly nightmare. That's only more fuel for the fire.

Ugh. I have to get back to work. I don't even have time to proof this. Hope there aren't too many tpyos.

First: If Neal wishes to suggest that because something is "required by law", that a company will therefore assuredly act according to the law, then would he please quit complaining about Tom Dashcle and Eric Holder? K? I'm just sayin...

Second: As a contract tech worker, I've worked in a LOT of large corporations. I've seen the H1B visa worker in action. Here's often how it goes (and I've seen this at MORE THAN ONE company).

I'll come in late in the evening responding to a pager call for a failed device or a tape backup warning of some sort. I get there at 10pm, maybe even 11pm.

In the cubicle where the ONE H1B employee sits (for this department), there are SIX guys all piled in the place, sitting on the desk, the floor, the file cabinet, anywhere a flat place can be found, basically.

And this is how it works: All of them know that all of them depend on the sucess of all of them, therefore they all chip-in to assure that. Great work ethic, I grant you, and I admire them for their willingness to help each other.

But here's the problem. These guys come from a whole team, only a small part of which is actually in America. They work on it as best they can, alone, until 5pm. Then they "gang-up" on it until, say, midnight-ish.

And even then, it does not end. They email the rest of their team back in India with their tech challenges for the day, and their Eastern team work on it all night while he sleeps, and send him the work back again in the morning. Because, as you know, when it's 2:00am in Chicago, it's mid afternoon in Calcutta.

And mid-afternoon in Calcutta is stuffed to the gills with guys who are making even less than their "front man" in the states - if they are earning anything at all - because many of them work for nothing more than a chance to be the next one on a plane headed to America with an H1B visa in his hand; to be the front-man in America for his own Indian team back home.

An American worker cannot compete with that. We don't have relatives in far away time zones to carry the ball while we rest. We don't have time to spend doing our co-workers jobs and our own, unless we are willing sacrifice not just HALF our income but also ALL of our disposable family time to a job. They can. And they do.

Last time I checked, MicroSoft was a global company whose products are used worldwide.

The fact that Microsoft chooses to keep some foriegn workers over US workers points out two things. 1. H-1B workers are willing to work for less. 2. The US is falling behind in producing properly educated and trained workforce members.

Let's face it, most of our stundents would rather sit and play on the Xbox or Wii than study and then when by some miracle they do graduate from a Gummint school, they expect a fortune for the meager knowledge they managed to maintain. Don't get me started about work ethic differences...

that would not allow the Fair Tax to be brought out of the Ways and Means Committee for an up and down vote when Republicans had control of Congress and the Presidency. This was the best chance the Fair Tax ever had to date of being passed and he sat on it.
Had he passed it, Microsoft would be hiring, not laying off as our economy flourished.
You have to laugh when politicians start preaching what is moral. What a joke?

Microsoft claims it needs to hire foreign talent because local talent isn't being produced. We know the latter is true.

Check out this article (warning: liberal ahead) to see Microsoft lament on how hard govt makes it to retain foreign talent:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070226-8924.html

You are wrong on the H1B visas. H1B's were created to get around the free-market for jobs. Companies claim that there is a "shortage" of a certain type of worker. We all know that a "shortage" is simply an unwillingness to pay the going price defined by supply & demand. H1B's are a way to bypass the normal immigration process and create a temporary work permit. In order to establish an H1B permit, the company must show that no US citizen was qualified for the job (at the price they are willing to pay). Since the H1B's were created for "shortages" they should be eliminated first during a "surplus".

You cannot "prove" your ideology that Microsoft has no responsibility to anyone other than its shareholders anymore than the Senator can proves his ideology that Microsoft has an obligation to the American people. There are two differences, however, between your views and Senator Grassley's. Senator Grassley's ideas are better for the nation as a whole and are much more palatable (not that you care about what is best for the nation). More importantly, however, Senator Grassley has direct influence in the federal government and you don't.

If companies, like Microsoft, actually laid off people with marginal performance, I would probably agree. People I work with, including me, know who the marginal ones are, and yet they are still around. So let's be honest, it's not about work ability, it's about the bottom line.

I am so tired of stupid politicians working at opportunities to garner favor with voters. This idiot is a Republican? In times like these, you keep the best talent and the most productive workers. You do not select by demographic, skin color, ethnicity or anything else. Diversity is stupidity and this guy is a panderer.

Just another corporation benefitting from cheap labor at the cost of American workers. No, there's no moral obligation for Bill Gates to provide Americans with jobs. But our elected leaders have a moral obligation to set laws that level the playing field for American workers. I would propose a tax on foreign labor = to 80 - 90% of the difference between the going foreign labor rates and domestic labor rates.

Or, our elected officials can just keep the laws like they are and continue increasing the number of jobs leaving American workers. That would be great! We can be a nation of CEO's, restaurant workers, landscapers, and realestate agents. Why would we want to increase technology skills at home when we can hand it off to India?

We just need to put restrictions on companies that use foreign labor in the form of taxes, etc. and then we wouldn't need to worry about the "moral obligation" of CEO's. There's a reason CEO's aren't outsourced themselves and it has nothing to do with lack of talent globally either. Think about that.

Grassley lives in a glass house. Check out his voting record here:

http://profiles.numbersusa.com/improfile.php3?DistSend=IA&VIPID=235

You are right. It is not Microsoft's responsibility to see that Americans are treated fairly. If it is legal to import and hire Indians for almost nothing and then fire the Americans who where previously doing the job, then they will. (I am retired from a high tech company and actually have seen it done many times.)
But you are wrong about it not being the business of our government to protect us from these practices. We already have 300 million people in our country. There are damned few jobs that you can't find one of the 300 million to do. We don't need to be importing more people, especially at a time when we are approaching 10% unemployment rate. Besides that, the H1B visa is highly abused. I have seen many cases where H1B visas were used to import people to do rather mundane work while pretending it was high tech. They were only brought in because they would work more cheaply.

I think they should bring in a lady from Bangladesh on an H1B visa to do Belinda's job for $1.17 per hour!