While the lawyers are making the mega-bucks, graduates at American colleges cannot get jobs in high tech after earning degrees. Also, older (some only 30 years old!), more experienced high tech workers are routinely losing their jobs to these indentured slaves. This is with Congress and the administration's blessing.

After this article I included an article by Lars-Erik Nelson, a syndicated columnist with the New York Daily News, who passed away yesterday.

Dr. Norm Matloff paid Lars-Erik Nelson the following tribute: "Nelson was a fiercely independent writer who refused to follow his sheep-like fellow journalists. He has, over the years, written several pieces which were highly critical of the H-1B program. Sadly, Nelson had become a rare breed in today's sound-bite, formula-driven journalistic profession."

For educational purposes only

******************************** http://www.newsobserver.com/tuesday/business/Story/249591p-236736c.html

Visa work a passport to growth for law firms

By STEVE CANNON, Staff Writer

RALEIGH -- The shortage of engineers, software designers and scientists in the United States has created a lucrative niche for a Raleigh law firm that specializes in immigration law.

Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart plans to hire 26 lawyers and 84 paralegals and more than quadruple its office space to handle a growing number of cases in its immigration law department. The firm will move into a new office building being developed by Duke-Weeks Realty on Leadmine Road, north of Crabtree Valley Mall. The firm says corporations' need to navigate the U.S. immigration laws has increased as the available pool of skilled technology workers in this country has shrunk.

"We're seeing explosive growth, especially in our immigration practice," said John Burgin, head of Ogletree's Raleigh office. "The business is 95 percent driven by corporations that want to bring workers into the U.S."

Nine of the Raleigh office's 16 lawyers focus on immigration law. Burgin wants to boost the immigration practice to 28 lawyers out of a total of 42.

Of the Greenville, S.C.-based firm's 13 offices, Raleigh has the largest immigration practice because of the concentration of high-tech companies in the Triangle that are growing so fast that they often have to look overseas to fill software development positions. Burgin declined to identify Ogletree's clients in the Triangle.

The law firm estimates that it has brought about 6,000 foreign-born professionals to the Triangle in the past six years. Gaining work visas for foreign-born professionals, which once could have been done in a matter of days, now can take months, and getting a green card can take years. So, companies are increasingly turning to lawyers to do the work for them.

With a limited number of work visas available, U.S. companies are using such legal assistance as a recruiting tool to attract foreign workers, said Brian Reilly, head of Ogletree's immigration practice in Raleigh. "[Workers] will go to another company just because they know they can get a green card," Reilly said. "That's a bigger motivator than money for the workers."

Last month, Congress passed a bill that will significantly increase the number of special visas available to foreign-born workers who fill U.S. jobs. After months of wrangling and pressure from corporate America, the annual cap on the so-called H-1B visas was raised from 115,000 to 195,000. Workers looking for an H1-B must have at least the equivalent of a U.S. bachelor's degree.

Companies with big Triangle operations, including Cisco Systems, Lucent Technologies and Nortel Networks, were among the 15 largest employers of H-1B workers nationally last year. Companies with operations in other countries, including Nortel and Cisco, can avoid the H-1B cap by transferring employees within the company to U.S. offices. Julie Liptak, the human-resources director for Alcatel USA, said that about half of the foreign-born engineers at her company's Raleigh facility were transferred from other Alcatel offices throughout the world.

"It's such a competitive market for staffing that we have to look at multiple options to fill these positions," Liptak said.

Alcatel's Raleigh site uses law firms in the Triangle to get working papers for its foreign-born staff members. "The best thing the lawyer does is he has the expertise that you don't have if someone within your company isn't focusing on it all the time," Liptak said.

Other area firms also have been expanding their immigration law departments. Parker, Poe, Adams & Bernstein created a global services department this year and now has four lawyers and seven paralegals in its Raleigh and Charlotte offices devoted to immigration law.

Laura Edgerton, an attorney who joined Maupin, Taylor & Ellis four years ago to develop its immigration law department, recently hired a second lawyer devoted to immigration law. "If I could have hired two or three people for this department, I would have," she said.

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New York Daily News - Opinion Wednesday, May 3, 2000

Pols Are Going Overboard On Visa Program By Lars Erik Nelson

Here can you hire a skilled young computer programmer who will work long hours without protest and who can't quit for a better-paying job?

Import one!

Even though the country is awash in computer professionals, employers complain that after age 35 or so they are out of touch with the latest computer languages and, worse, want to stay home at nights with the wife and kids. New blood is desperately needed.

The easy solution is to bring in workers from overseas. They're willing to work for 40% less than their American counterparts, according to one headhunter, and if they quit their jobs, they face deportation.

The H-1B visa program that brings in these foreign workers helps the computer industry attract the world's talent. But it also has exposed U.S.-born and immigrant workers to unfair competition, chiefly lower wages and age discrimination.

Horror stories abound: Highly educated 43-year-old computer experts are working as telephone repairers and salesclerks because they're either "overqualified" or not conversant with a computer language they could pick up with a couple weeks' on-the-job training.

The H-1B program has become a government-aided form of job discrimination against older workers. Immigration lawyers even advise employers how to reject all American applicants for jobs so they can hire cheaper foreigners.

Despite these complaints, both Republicans and Democrats want to lift the current cap of 115,000 H-1B visas each year and let in even more foreign workers. One Republican proposal would remove the cap altogether.

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) is willing to allow in an unlimited number of foreign workers, provided they receive a minimum wage of $40,000 a year. This wage wouldn't stop the reputable computer companies from importing professionals, but it would undermine the "body shops" - the temp services that import workers under the H-1B program and lease them out at low wages.

Smith was long a foe of the H-1B program on the grounds that it hurt U.S. workers, but he was converted by lobbyists from high-tech industries complaining of a labor shortage.

"Lamar's bill would raise the numbers to infinity," complains Prof. Norman Matloff of the University of California. "And no matter what restrictions he puts on it, the employers know how to get around them."

Matloff says, furthermore, that there is no shortage of computer professionals in America, and that the abuses in the H-1B program are worse than ever.

But both Republicans and Democrats want to raise the limit. The reason is clear: The two parties have collected more than $10 million from businesses that used the H-1B program in the last year.

Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), chairman of the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, makes the link even more explicit. When asked whether Republicans should side with the computer-industry workers or the employers, he said, "This is a very important issue for the high-tech executives who give the money."

Davis is good man, but his position is enough to make you wish for a visa program to import congressmen.

-- K (infosurf@yahoo.com), November 22, 2000