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>While I agree, that H-1B should be used to bring really >skilled people in It is becoming impossible to do academic collaborations with the US - you can't sen

>While I agree, that H-1B should be used to bring really >skilled people in It is becoming impossible to do academic collaborations with the US - you can't send postdocs/professors to work on US telescopes, particle accelerators etc because they can't get H1B visas. Initially this is great, other coutries part fund the projects but only americans can work on them. the trouble is that the next round of instruments won't be in the US, Cern was built in Switzerland for this reason, ITER is in France.

geebee 18y ago
That's terrible. Those researchers should be able to get visas easily. However, I disagree with the notion that we should solve this problem by just awarding more visas. Doesn't it strike you as strange (and genuinely horrible) that universities can't get visas while outsourcing companies are gobbling up these visas by the tens of thousands? Doesn't it strike you as strange that Microsoft claims it can't bring in super high paid developers because we've hit the visa cap, yet some of these visas have been going to firms that pay the "critical worker that couldn't be found in the US" $12/hr? (sorry, no cite on that, I heard it in an interview with Ron Hira, a professor of public policy... I'll try to dig it up). The H1B lobby loves the example you gave, because they get to claim that the H1B detractors are "opposed to letting researchers into the US for innovative collaborations." Uh, no. We've taken hundreds of thousands, maybe even over a million H1B workers into the US (the dept of labor doesn't keep exact numbers). Maybe one of these visas could have gone to the researcher, rather than some average dude who read the Oracle manual? This program is in desperate need of a fix, no question about that. But to me, fixing it by just removing the cap, or setting an extremely high cap, is unacceptable. I don't need a fire hose to blow out my birthday candles.
poimnu 18y ago
It's even becoming hard to hold academic conferences in the USA. You can't be sure that invited speakers from countries other than Europe/Japan will be allowed in. Then there are the cases of people being arrested for speaking at computer security conferences, people working on eg. stem cell research outside the USA are worried that they might be next.

geebee 18y ago

That's terrible. Those researchers should be able to get visas easily. However, I disagree with the notion that we should solve this problem by just awarding more visas. Doesn't it strike you as strange (and genuinely horrible) that universities can't get visas while outsourcing companies are gobbling up these visas by the tens of thousands? Doesn't it strike you as strange that Microsoft claims it can't bring in super high paid developers because we've hit the visa cap, yet some of these visas have been going to firms that pay the "critical worker that couldn't be found in the US" $12/hr? (sorry, no cite on that, I heard it in an interview with Ron Hira, a professor of public policy... I'll try to dig it up). The H1B lobby loves the example you gave, because they get to claim that the H1B detractors are "opposed to letting researchers into the US for innovative collaborations." Uh, no. We've taken hundreds of thousands, maybe even over a million H1B workers into the US (the dept of labor doesn't keep exact numbers). Maybe one of these visas could have gone to the researcher, rather than some average dude who read the Oracle manual? This program is in desperate need of a fix, no question about that. But to me, fixing it by just removing the cap, or setting an extremely high cap, is unacceptable. I don't need a fire hose to blow out my birthday candles.

poimnu 18y ago

It's even becoming hard to hold academic conferences in the USA. You can't be sure that invited speakers from countries other than Europe/Japan will be allowed in. Then there are the cases of people being arrested for speaking at computer security conferences, people working on eg. stem cell research outside the USA are worried that they might be next.