Scott Allan’s World

What is more worrisome?  Letting illegal immigrants remain in the country and contribute to our economy? Or that we are still outsourcing, or as I like to say, deporting our high-tech jobs overseas mainly to India?  It’s one thing when we were exporting our low paying, manufacturing jobs to Mexico or China, but why do we think it’s a good idea to also export our high paying, highly skilled jobs as well?  Someone still has to buy those sneakers. Apparently we still have enough low skill jobs available or people would not still be sneaking into the country by the thousands every day.

Sure to a high tech C.F.O. it makes short term sense to boost profits so he can retire with his $10 million bonus, but there are billions of people around the world willing to do our work for much, much less and there always will be.  Projecting this out into the future, pretty soon there will be no middle class here to buy those sneakers from China.  To have a job in the U.S. you’ll have to be born with a silver spoon and be the person who hires the offshore workers or you’ll have to have a job that cannot be exported such as landscaping, construction, health care, restaurants, etc. There’s no way to compete with these people on wages and maintain our standard of living.  When we lost the low paying jobs, it encouraged people to retrain and get higher paying jobs.  Now what are we supposed to do? We can’t all be C.E.O’s.

Immigration issues 65,000 H1B work visas each year and the number of visas was recently cut in half to supposedly protect American jobs.  The point of the visas is to bring in qualified workers from other countries when we have a shortage of highly skilled U.S. citizens.  Outsourcing unlimited additional jobs defeats the point of these visas.

There is no reason to import or export computer programming jobs.  I guarantee there is no shortage of programmers in this country. Look how many people in Silicone Valley were desperate for work when the Internet companies crashed a few years ago. We are causing a huge brain-drain and losing our competitive edge.  There is no way I will encourage my children to work in technology if this trend continues.

And one more thing, it is frustrating enough to call Dell Computer Customer Service and get someone reading from cue cards who usually cannot help me, but it is insulting when they tell me their name is Nancy or Bob or Steve from Bangladesh.  How stupid do they think we are?

ARRRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

Technorati Tags: India, outsourcing, jobs, programming, immigration