The reason the United States isn't making enough "engineers" is because of a repressive educational system that being destroyed within by the bureacracy and without by... well, right-wing, tax-revolting, evangelical, vigilante nutjobs.
I suspect the unemployment rate among software engineers is at least 10 and more likely 15 percent (the national unemplyment rate is at least10% with many hidden in the no longer looking for work column). It's not the colleges and universities fault. What right thinking person would spend $100k and up for an education that leads to a $40k/yr job (about what Gates wants to pay)? Offshoring, illegal immigration, H1-B, they all have the same effect on american workers. If Gates wants engineers he should hire american and provide and any additional training needed. So any other american business.
Hi there, I also wanted to point out that many developing nations are suffering a lot from the fact that all their best and brightest emigrate to places like the US. I hear Egyptians mourn this all the time. On the one hand, they understand why a great computer engineer or brain surgeon or physicist would get fed up in their very imperfect country. On the other hand, if all the most talented young people ditch the country, it is that much less likely to improve and become more attractive to them.
Gates is of the "me" generation...I want mine...and yours, too!! He is so rich, and yet, he still wants more! Greed is NOT good.
(I am speaking as a "me" generation person, also, except I see that we all live together or die together. I am ashamed of my generation.)
Many industries benefit from the myth that American workers just won't deign to do certain jobs, so they are forced to look to immigrants, at times illegal, but almost always people who are willing to work for a lot less money under temporary or even unsafe conditions.
There are Chinese chain restaurants that pile Mexican workers into vans and shuttle them around the country, paying them a flat rate of $300/week. They rent cheap apartments for their workers as an added incentive. Bill Gates and others like him hire foreign nationals on the same principal, although they do it legally of course.
The noble intentions of immigrant rights groups that want amnesty for workers who do work Americans "won't do" play right into the greedy hands of business leaders who want to circumvent fair labor practice for their workers. The fact that Bush wants immigration reform should be a red flag. It's not because he loves Mexicans.
Ug. I feel so evil. I just applied for some Microsoft jobs the other day. (Hi, I'm an unemployed IT professional. Hire ME!) I graduated a year ago with a BA in CSci and I can't get a job anywhere because I have no experience.
Seriously, NO ONE is hiring freshly graduated geeks because they can get all the experienced geeks they need to fill the jobs. If a company needs more geeks the could get them easily by being willing to acutally make entry level IT positions available and invest a little training, there's a HUGE pool of talent out there. They just don't want to make the effort necessary to use it. Poor freakin' babies.
Dang, I didn't mean to kill the thread with my evilness...you all can make fun of me if you want? I was just admiting that my need for money has outweighed my need for any sort of self-respect or pride in my job, not defending M$ or anything...
"the noble intentions of immigrant rights groups that want amnesty for workers who do work Americans "won't do" play right into the greedy hands of business leaders who want to circumvent fair labor practice for their workers."
Elena, this makes no sense at all. (and has nothing to do with Microsoft.)
Immigrant rights groups want amnesty for immigrant workers so that employers are required to give immigrant workers their right to "fair labor practices," which would drastically reduce their ability to function as competition with American workers. Immigrants don't work at unsafe workplaces for low pay because they like it, or because they don't know any better, they do it because they have fewer rights than American workers. Increasing immigrant workers' rights can only help the situation for all workers, because they can't have more work extorted out of them due to their immigrant status.
Here's my proposal for helping immigrants - allow people on spousal visas to work. As far as I know, there are only two visa classes (F1 and J1) which allow the spouses to work. This presents a real hardship to couples who move to the US because one of them has a job offer. The spouse can suffer financially, professionally, and perhaps even mental health-wise by being forced to stay home. It certainly enforces dependency on the at-home spouse (who I would guess are predominantly, though of course, not exclusively women), which ought to be of interest to feminists as well.
antijen
Echidne: "In some ways Gates is advocating more choices for American firms at the expense of American workers. Under his scenario firms could outsource jobs or import workers, whichever turns out to be more profitable, and the U.S. workers would have to compete both at home and abroad with foreign workers."
But I wonder why I should care about the condition of American workers specifically rather than the condition of workers as a whole. I mean, yes, relaxing immigration restrictions does cut into the benefits that American IT workers enjoy by bringing more non-American qualified professionals into the labor market. But so what? That represents a net gain for Indian workers (for example), and I don't think the fact that they're Indian makes their well-being less important to me.
I'm also not sure what the traditional worries about globalization and authoritarian regimes (e.g., the effects of "competition" with literal slave labor or labor in countries with widespread government repression of workers) have to do with Gates's proposals in particular. I mean, yeah, there may be reasons to worry about that when we talk about offshoring of textile production, but (1) it's not at all clear this is much of a problem in the IT sector, and (2) H-1B visas don't have anything to do with offshoring anyway; the workers they bring to the United States enjoy all of the labor standards prevalent in the United States (they do get treated poorly by the immigration bureaucracy, but that's La Migra's fault, not the boss's, and the answer there is surely liberalization rather than restriction).
ken melvin: "What right thinking person would spend $100k and up for an education that leads to a $40k/yr job (about what Gates wants to pay)? Offshoring, illegal immigration, H1-B, they all have the same effect on american workers."
I try hard to resist the urge to simply paint IT protectionists as a bunch of pampered crybabies, but it's hard not to when you see things like this. There are a lot of people in the United States, let alone in the developing world, who would kill for a $40,000 / year salary, particularly if that salary came with a white-collar work environment. Even if the cost of making that were $100,000 spread out over 4-5 years. You'd have made your money back within 3 years. That's assuming that you were the one actually paying the $100,000, which kids going to $25k - $35k / year schools almost never are (most of the money generally comes from a combination of scholarships and funds provided by mommy and daddy).
I don't think that immigration restriction is ever the appropriate response to labor problems, no matter what industry we're talking about, but the attempt to lump IT professionals in with industrial workers and minimum-wage service workers (for whom unemployment and wage cuts may make the difference between having or not having a roof over their heads or healthcare for their kids) and say that their situations are all of a piece is frankly ridiculous.
Elena: "There are Chinese chain restaurants that pile Mexican workers into vans and shuttle them around the country, paying them a flat rate of $300/week. They rent cheap apartments for their workers as an added incentive."
Well, good for them. $300 / week is decent pay if your employer is also covering your rent as a benefit. It's very good pay compared to what the workers would be making if they stayed back in Mexico. I mean, look, there are lots of reasons to think that employers hiring undocumented immigrants are often sleazebags. They often are. But the fact that they pay them and provide housing for them is not among them.
Elena, again: "The noble intentions of immigrant rights groups that want amnesty for workers who do work Americans "won't do" play right into the greedy hands of business leaders who want to circumvent fair labor practice for their workers. The fact that Bush wants immigration reform should be a red flag. It's not because he loves Mexicans."
I could say just as easily that the noble intentions of those who want protectionism and immigration restriction for the sake of labor are playing right into the hands of the nativist hard Right and the abusive immigration bureaucracy. But the interesting question isn't who does or does not happen to share your policy conclusions; it's which conclusions are true and what policies we have good reasons to adopt. So what reason is there to think that escalating the immigration cops' assault on immigrant workers, or even leaving it in its present state, is going to do any good for immigrant workers? Or, if you think that it won't do good for them but it will do good for American workers, what reason is there to think that American workers' lives and livelihoods are more important than (say) Mexican and Central American workers'?
Some good points there, Rad Geek. Let me try to answer a few of them (I have to go for a haircut in a few minutes):
Re my comment: I am not saying that there wouldn't be benefits for Indian workers who come into the U.S., for example. Whether there are benefits from this on the overall level depends on things like how you judge the importance of brain drain from India to the U.S.. and whether the people and jobs are best matched this way.
The American government does provide all sorts of benefits to the firms here and these are ultimately paid for from U.S. tax revenues. This means that the U.S. workers are subsidising the firms in certain ways and so I think it is fair to ask the question whether these workers benefit or not.
A second point: Your arguments about Ken Melvin's comments fail to take into account the fact that the 100,000 dollar (say) investment isn't bringing the person 40,000 per year. It's only bringing some increase over and above what that person would earn without the training, so the true benefits are much smaller and could take a very long time to get back.
More later...
Geek,
Echidne handled the return on investment so mine will be to more to the political and economic effects of globalization. First, there is no real difference in off shoring and bringing in cheap labor whether or not this labor be here legally. All three bring down the standard of living for working Americans. While off shoring might conceivably improve the lot of the average citizen of a country such as China and add to that nations industrial capacity, imported cheap labor probably doesn't and, in fact, only forestalls real solution of the emigrant' nations problems. The argument can be made that Mexico's problem might have long been solved if the US hadn't provided relief. Let's assume that you work for a living. Whatever you do for wage is subject to the effect of globalization be it factory work. construction, janitor,, programming, office, engineering, law, medicine, . . . If it hasn't already been effected, it will be. Now, here in the SF Bay Area, illegal Mexicans work construction for $10/hr cash. They live 8 to a one bedroom apartment and send most of what they earn home. Asian immigrant labor, legal or illegal work for as little and much less with similar housing. To compete, to run in this race to the bottom, a US citizen could nothing different. Not I you say? The grandfather worked for GM making $30/hr. His grandson's only job is at Burger King where he competes with illegal Mexicans for $8/hr. If America needed gast arbeiten it would be different, but we don't. Due automation and off shoring, engineering has been decimated. Manufacturing, as already spoken to. Programmers? Probably 20% unemployed. There are some 15-20million Americans needing work. Next? Doctors and lawyers. When its level, our economy will be that of China, India, . . .
What right thinking person would spend $100k and up for an education that leads to a $40k/yr job (about what Gates wants to pay)?
Well, I guess that most liberal arts students (certainly at any private college) are going to spend this much and, for English majors and the like, have nothing close to 40k as a salary guarantee. ("Fries with that?" anyone?) Heck, I got out and then earned $15k for another 7 years in graduate school, before then moving up to a whopping $30k as a postdoc... and this was in *biomedical research*, which is relatively well-funded.
So, whatever the merits of the other arguments here, investment in college education gives IT workers no special claim to sympathy here.
I'm a day late to this party, so no one may ever see this comment. My cousin's husband works at Microsoft. They have been laying people off.
So if they have been laying people off Gates's statement seems even more likely to be untrue.
The point of criminalizing immigration is that the capitalists can threaten workers with deportation if they try to resist their own exploitation.
Amnesty for all immigrants would make it easier for undocumented immigrants to organize themselves to resist their own exploitation. This would also strengthen the position of non-immigrant workers, because it would lessen the chance of immigrant workers being set against them, and would create upward pressure on wages.
here's what I posted to the Information Week discussion on this:
Undergraduates aren't stupid. They can see the programming jobs going to India/E. Europe/anywhere that's cheap.
"growing opportunities in India and China have meant that fewer foreign students come to the United States to study, and many of those who do return home to work once they graduate. "
Whose fault is that ? Could it be because MS is outsourcing so many of its jobs to India and China? Mr Gates has a beam in his own eye..
There's no career path in IT, and very few over-50 workers in IT. Age and experience are a handicap in this 'career', really just a job. During the dotcom bubble, high salaries for all obscured these basics.
The 'education' canard has been bandied around since the 1983 "A Nation at Risk" report by the Dept. of Education. It was pretty much nonsense then, and still is. If our education system is so bad, how was all the innovation of the 80's and 90's achieved ?
H1-Bs are indentured workers, no more and no less: slave labor for the 21st century. That they are willing slaves does not exculpate the employers. Distorting the market through floods of cheap slave labor, by raising the H1-B cap, won't do much to encourage IT workers in the US. See Dr Matloff's web pages for details on this:
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.html
There is no shortage of skilled workers. There is a shortage of people who worked hard for their degrees, and won't put up with low salaries, 80-hour work weeks, and job insecurity. I love programming, but if I had to do it again, I'd study law or medicine.
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