[ale] H1B -- What To Do
Bao C. Ha
baoha at sensoria.com
Tue Jul 9 15:09:21 EDT 2002
I have tried to stay away from this discussion.
Unfortunately, I don't think it is a good idea
to blame everything on the H1B Visa holders.
This economy has hit everybody hard. I beleive
the H1B people are affected as much as many of
us. There may be a few who still have their
jobs, because of their skills. Don't assume that
we can easily find people to fill in those jobs
if we kick all of the H1B out of the country.
The Information Technology has changed significantly
since about a couple of years ago. The Y2K and the
Internet bubble had skewed the IT skillset toward
business/service orientation, where there was a
large demand for systems administration/management
expertises. They had come and gone. Companies are
now struggling to produce something, if they have
any hopes to survive. There is a very high demand
of highly-skilled developers, but not many can be
found. I define a developer as having two types of
skillsets: (1) programming skills, like c/c++/java,
and (2) expert domain knowledge, like networking
(tcp/ip stacks, snmp, sockets, IPC, ...), kernel/
drivers, database (data model/ERD/normalization,
...), etc ...
There has been a paradigm shift in the demand of IT
skills. It requires less people but with a much
deeper skillset in the expert domain knowledge. Many
of our current IT personnel don't have marketable
skillsets. Plus there are so many "IT" people being
produced by "trade" schools for the "new" economy
that was busted even before it was started.
I believe the solution now, is to retrain ourselves
and to wait for the economy to pick up. I don't
think we can reverse the trend due the globalization
nature of our economy. And our government has proven
itself to be quite inept in the management of
technologies.
Just two-share worth of Worldcom stocks. :-(
Bao
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bob Evans [mailto:bobevans19 at yahoo.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, July 09, 2002 6:44 AM
> To: ALE
> Cc: discuss @charlug.org
> Subject: [ale] H1B -- What To Do
>
>
> You might want to send this to your friends.
>
> The Good News about H-1B? You Can Fight Back
>
> What to Do
>
> 1. Send in your petition to abolish the H1-B visa.
> http://www.zazona.com/h1bpetition/P/petition.html
>
> 2. Be a pest. Call your congressmen. They don't know
> how you feel unless you tell them. Use these links to
> find your representatives' contact information.
> http://www.house.gov/htbin/wrep_findrep
>
> http://www.senate.gov/
>
> http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/
>
> Call your congressmen and ask to speak to someone to
> express an opinion. Tell them what happened with your
> job or your friend's job, or that you got your tech
> education and can't find a job in the field, and how
> angry you are that our government enacted laws that
> favor business and foreign workers over American
> citizens. Tell them how you feel. Say whatever you
> want to say, but let them hear from you. The more of
> these calls you make, the easier they get, and the
> more the congressmen notice
> there's something going on out there.
>
> 3. Email your congressmen. And send them faxes.
> Consider faxing or mailing your congressmen, the White
> House, The Secretary of Labor and the Secretary of
> Commerce weekly with an educational letter. This only
> has to be a few lines of letter bites. "Letter bites"
> are short anecdotes or quotes from news articles or
> from information you find on the H-1B Hall of Fame
> site. Snail mail works if they read it. I've had at
> least one snail mail
> mistakenly shredded, so I've taken to sending faxes.
> It does help to contact these
> people. I've had them call me back to discuss the
> issues. If they hear from
> enough of you, they will start to worry about losing
> votes.
>
> Example of educational info taken from H-1B Hall of
> Shame website and mailed to
> my congressmen and the White House within the context
> of a letter I wrote
> outlining my own situation:
>
> The United States Department of Labor Office of
> Inspector General (OIG) admitted in the year 2000 that
> the fraud and abuse continues. This is after a major
> report in 1996 outlined numerous instances of fraud.
> Nothing has improved:
>
> The OIG continues to identify fraud in the labor
> certification program, particularly in the H-1B
> temporary work visa program. A year-long joint INS and
> Department of State initiative found that 45 percent
> of the 3,247 work experience claims made to the INS
> were fraudulent.
>
> 4. Contact Congressmen such as Representative Tom
> Tancredo of Colorado who wants to sponsor a bill
> abolishing the H1-B visa. Tell him what happened to
> your job. Tell him about any other job losses you know
> about due to H1-B or about your difficulties finding a
> job. If you want to send
> a fax to his
> office: 202-226-4623. This would be especially
> valuable because if Rep. Tancredo hears from a number
> of you, he will have ammunition to present his bill.
> Thank him for his stance against H1-B
>
> 5. Call, write or email the White House, the US
> Department of Labor and the US Department of Commerce.
> Explain what happened to your job.
>
> President George W. Bush
>
> The White House
>
> 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
>
> Washington, DC 20500
>
> Comments: 202-456-1111
>
> Fax: 202-456-2461
>
> Email: president at whitehouse.gov
>
> vice.president at whitehouse.gov
>
> Elaine Chao
>
> Secretary of Labor
>
> U.S. Dept. of Labor
>
> 200 Constitution Ave., NW
>
> Washington, DC 20210
>
> Phone: 202-693-6000
>
> Donald L. Evans
>
> Secretary of Commerce
>
> Email: devans at doc.gov
>
> Phone: 202-482-2000
>
> 6. Get on Dr. Matloff's H1-B list or the H-1B email
> newsletter. They will send you links to new articles
> on H1-B, high tech job losses, etc. Read the articles
> and then respond by email to the papers and magazines
> that print the articles. Letters to papers and
> magazines are very effective in getting our story out
> there.
>
> http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html
> (Dr. Matloff's site)
>
> 7. Any time you see an article by a congressman from
> any state where the congressman supports worker's
> rights, contact them and thank them and tell them your
> story.
>
> 8. Join the programmers guild.
> http://www.colosseumbuilders.com/american.htm
> (Programmers Guild)
>
> 9. If you want to fax a petition to abolish H1-B go to
>
> http://www.numbersusa.org/index has
> free faxes on matters of interest to all American
> workers, such as extending unemployment benefits and
> fighting H-1B.
>
> 10. Ask your family and friends to join you in
> supporting our efforts to get Congress to treat us
> fairly.
>
> 11. If you can, make donations to the organizations
> that run the
> sites you use to fight H-1B.
>
> Remember, if you don't protest now, things will get
> much worse. And you will have only yourself to blame.
> Information prepared by
> Linda Evans (writer and wife of programmer replaced by
> H-1B's). Contact me at
> linda19 at linuxmail.org
> The above methods are working. I've had letters
> published in papers all over
> the country and an op-ed published locally. I've
> gotten calls from congressmen's
> offices and from reporters. We have to get the word
> out. I hope you will join
> our fight - the job you save may be your own or that
> of your children.
>
>
>
>
> =====
> Bob Evans http://carolinux.com
> bobevans19 at yahoo.com Providing economical
> 704 882-6214 (w) computer solutions
> 704 562-7166 (m) to the Carolinas...
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Sign up for SBC Yahoo! Dial - First Month Free
> http://sbc.yahoo.com
>
> ---
> This message has been sent through the ALE general discussion list.
> See http://www.ale.org/mailing-lists.shtml for more info.
> Problems should be
> sent to listmaster at ale dot org.
>
>
---
This message has been sent through the ALE general discussion list.
See http://www.ale.org/mailing-lists.shtml for more info. Problems should be
sent to listmaster at ale dot org.
More information about the Ale
mailing list