H1Bs (was Re: Overqualified?!?!)

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

rob writes:
| We still don't have any ideas on what to do with the
| several hundred thousand unemployed IT workers here in
| the USA.

Well, actually, the businessmen running the country have a very  good
idea.   If  you don't need people, you let them go.  They're on their
own, and no responsibility of yours.  This is the  way  business  has
always  worked.  Very few businessmen have ever been able to see past
the needs of the current fiscal year.  And the US now has a president
who  in all seriousness calls himself "America's CEO".  So we've seen
pretty much all of how they intend to handle the situation.   There's
not much help there.

| The network which the temporary alien Indian immigrants
| have developed is rather impressive.

There's  a  long  history  of  this.   The  dominant  white  American
population  has  always  had  an  "every  man  for himself" attitude.
Various immigrant groups have historically had a much greater  social
cohesion  and  willingness to help each other.  This is how immigrant
groups pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.  Those  who  don't
find themselves permanently at the bottom.

Also, an important part of American labor history is the way that the
employers  have  been able to use racism and anti-immigrant attitudes
to block effective organizing.  People want  "something  done"  about
"those  people"  who are stealing jobs from white Americans.  What is
done is to pass  laws  that  are  on  their  face  anti-immigrant  or
anti-black or just anti-poor. But their actual effect is to victimize
all the workers the same way.

The American population has always been  suckers  for  this  sort  of
ruse, much more so than in many other countries.


This is especially obvious in the anti-education measures  in  recent
years.   They  get passed because people don't want their tax dollars
spent educating the children of "those people".  The actual effect is
to hurt all public education everywhere.

What's especially dangerous  about  this  attitude  is  that  if  you
prevent  your  taxes  from  going to educate poor kids, most of those
kids are going to grow up, and some of them are very smart. They will
survive.  You might not like how they do it.