How long before the United States reforms its policies regarding skilled technical professional immigration? There is the typical lifetime salary and benefit reduction of $1 million (US) for millions of high skilled American scientists, engineers, and programmers who have been permanently displaced from the fields they trained in by cheap, pliant foreign labor, often from third-world nations, who labor under conditions of quasi-indentured servitude. Their employer-designed work visas are conditioned on the immigrants being continuously employed. Employers and immigration attorneys have praised the "remarkable loyalty" of H-1B visa holders.
The numbers are outrageous. There have been about 17.3 million visa admissions in just five high-skill visa programs between 1985 and 2002.1
A paradigm shift is mandated. While a small number of people derive economic and/or political benefits from the programs that began with the obscure 1976 Eilberg Amendment, these dangerous policies demand immediate reform, before the next 9/11.
Gene Nelson, ...
