Sen. Hatch calls high-skilled worker shortage ‘a crisis’

[tangent4ronpaul]

http://www.computerworld.com/article...ors_picks=true

He outlines a Republican tech agenda for next year

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) this week outlined the Republican tech agenda for the next Congress, and took a position that puts him at odds with some in his own party.

Hatch, in a speech at the corporate offices of Overstock.com in Salt Lake City, called for raising the cap on H-1B visas. "Our high-skilled worker shortage has become a crisis," said Hatch, who heads the Senate Republican High-Tech Task Force.

To support the idea of a skilled-worker shortage, Hatch cited the high demand for H-1B visas. There were 172,500 petitions this year for the 85,000 visas available under the cap, he said.

"American companies were thus unable to hire nearly 90,000 high-skilled workers they need to help grow their domestic businesses, develop innovative technologies, and compete with international competitors," said Hatch, according to the prepared text of his remarks.

In sketching out his views on tech legislation, Hatch also talked about the need for patent litigation reform, updates to privacy protections, and incentives to businesses to encourage sharing of cyber-threat information. One incentive could be a form of liability protection.
(cont)



STEM Grads Are at a Loss
Those who claim there's a STEM skills shortage are ignoring the evidence.
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articl...cant-find-jobs

All credible research finds the same evidence about the STEM workforce: ample supply, stagnant wages and, by industry accounts, thousands of applicants for any advertised job. The real concern should be about the dim employment prospects for our best STEM graduates: The National Institutes of Health, for example, has developed a program to help new biomedical Ph.D.s find alternative careers in the face of “unattractive” job prospects in the field. Opportunities for engineers vary by the field and economic cycle – as oil exploration has increased, so has demand (and salaries) for petroleum engineers, resulting in a near tripling of petroleum engineering graduates. In contrast, average wages in the IT industry are the same as those that prevailed when Bill Clinton was president despite industry cries of a “shortage.” Overall, U.S. colleges produce twice the number of STEM graduates annually as find jobs in those fields.

In the face of these stark facts, we now see several studies that seem to be desperate Hail Mary passes, using rather unconventional means to find “shortages.” Some analysts do this by expanding the definition of STEM jobs – traditionally those involved in innovation, discovery and development – to include air conditioning technicians and even some retail jobs to make the case that this workforce is large and growing. Without any coherent meaning, such analyses now serve only rhetorical purposes to advance particular legislation.

Cries that “the STEM sky is falling” are just the latest in a cyclical pattern of shortage predictions over the past half-century, none of which were even remotely accurate. In a desert of evidence, the growth of STEM shortage claims is driven by heavy industry funding for lobbyists and think tanks. Their goal is government intervention in the market under the guise of solving national economic problems. The highly profitable IT industry, for example, is devoting millions to convince Congress and the White House to provide its employers with more low-cost, foreign guestworkers instead of trying to attract and retain employees from an ample domestic labor pool of native and immigrant citizens and permanent residents. Guestworkers currently make up two-thirds of all new IT hires, but employers are demanding further increases. If such lobbying efforts succeed, firms will have enough guestworkers for at least 100 percent of their new hiring and can continue to legally substitute these younger workers for current employees, holding down wages for both them and new hires.

Claiming there is a skills shortage by denying the strength of the U.S. STEM workforce and student supply is possible only by ignoring the most obvious and direct evidence and obscuring the issue with statistical smokescreens – especially when the Census Bureau reports that only about one in four STEM bachelor’s degree holders has a STEM job, and Microsoft plans to downsize by 18,000 workers over the next year.

Educational and skills improvement is needed for low-income and low-skilled workers, but these problems are masked by cries of shortages or “mismatches” based on unsubstantiated claims about employees or students with the “wrong skills.” Such polemics divert attention away from the true clear-and-present danger to our STEM system – namely, debased STEM jobs that discourage domestic students and workers from pursuing STEM careers. In doing so, the ultimate outcome will be a nation weakened by the outsourcing of its core competencies.

-t

[euphemia]

This just shows how out of touch elected representatives are. Just ignorant.

[Brian4Liberty]

Who remembers when Hatch claimed to be "tea party" during his last election? Then he turns right around and goes back to business as usual, which includes being a bought and paid for shill for the US Chamber of (Crony) Commerce.

[Danke]

[Brian4Liberty]

The CEOs, lobbyists, and politicians like Hatch know as much about what is going on at the lowest hiring level as Thomas Frieden knows about what hospital workers do in Dallas.

[Ronin Truth]

Idiotic globalist government programs like H1-B, outsourcing, offshoring, etc. did irreparable damage to the career choices of many young US tech wannabes.

[Krugminator2]

Totally agree with Orrin Hatch (on just this issue.) Imagine if the PGA Tour decided to keep out foreign players in order to protect American professional golfers. There are no shortage of American pro golfers playing the mini-tours in Arizona. But keeping out the best players would give you a worse product. It is even more insane for STEM jobs.

Most top engineers are foreign born. Literally, 85% of engineering PHD students are Asian. I have an engineering degree from a top 5 school. The best students were Asians. Kicking them out of the country after they get a degree is one of the most braindead things this country does.

[Krugminator2]

Idiotic globalist government programs like H1-B, outsourcing, offshoring, etc. did irreparable damage to the career choices of many young US tech wannabes.

That is because most American kids are imbeciles. If American kids can't compete, that is too bad. The world isn't going to stop progressing. Kids need to be better prepared academically at a younger age. Breaking the gov't education monopoly and having every kid on voucher system is a good way to start solving this problem. The answer certainly isn't to make us uncompetitive with Canada and others countries with rational immigration laws.

[Carson]

All the counterfeiting has put a strain on every occupation at every skill level. We been stretched so tight their isn't any money in any endeavor worth attracting help. People can no longer afford to work for nothing.

[RonPaulIsGreat]

I'm 100% in support of importing people with degrees in Stem fields, forget visas, I'd give them full citizenship on the day of graduation if they wanted it.

To much mindless guberment flag worship going on here. My team, murica... You stealing our jobs!! Blah.

[pessimist]

He outlines a Republican tech agenda for next year

hahahahhaha

politicians know NOTHING about technology. they only now how to accept all the goodies and cash and dinner invitations from the lobbyists who write their scripts and line their pockets.

[pessimist]

THEY KNOW NOTHING I TELL YOU! NOTHING!

THEY DON'T EVEN READ THE BILLS THEY PASS. YET PEOPLE CONTINUE TO VOTE!

[MRK]

Free market economics. Goods are part of the free market, labor is part of the free market as well. The aggregate benefit of the free market is positive.

Or, is this incorrect?

[RJB]

They have a shortage of skilled workers who will work for less because most American kids these days have outrageous student loan debts to pay off to get that skill. Foreigners usually don't have that burden and can work cheaper.

[Brian4Liberty]

That is because most American kids are imbeciles.

So are you an imbecile? Or are you not an American?

[Krugminator2]

So are you an imbecile? Or are you not an American?

I would say I was woefully ill-prepared to compete on the same level with foreign born students.

[Ronin Truth]

That is because most American kids are imbeciles. If American kids can't compete, that is too bad. The world isn't going to stop progressing. Kids need to be better prepared academically at a younger age. Breaking the gov't education monopoly and having every kid on voucher system is a good way to start solving this problem. The answer certainly isn't to make us uncompetitive with Canada and others countries with rational immigration laws.

The kids reflect the quality of their government schooling. End that and then discover how bright the kids really are.

[Ronin Truth]

THEY KNOW NOTHING I TELL YOU! NOTHING!

THEY DON'T EVEN READ THE BILLS THEY PASS. YET PEOPLE CONTINUE TO VOTE!

Not all of us.

[osan]

This just shows how out of touch elected representatives are. Just ignorant.

Or paid-for.

[nobody's_hero]

They have a shortage of skilled workers who will work for less because most American kids these days have outrageous student loan debts to pay off to get that skill. Foreigners usually don't have that burden and can work cheaper.

Indeed. It's very difficult to compete with someone who already has a degree but works for peanuts in another country who could come to the U.S. and make much more than they could, doing the same work in their home country.

Meanwhile starting out in the U.S., you consider the enormous costs here at home of getting involved in higher education and skilled jobs and yeah, you'll never get ahead. I could go out and borrow $80,000 for Med school here in the U.S. and never be in as good a position to excel as a student who graduated from a foreign med. school and comes to America with very little debt (relatively speaking) and would actually be willing to work on the low-end of the pay scale for doctors (which to him is a ton of money).

The world isn't going to be truly competitive until we all reach the same level playing field in terms of economic background. That's going to be extremely beneficial for foreigners and extremely painful for those of us already in the U.S. Their standards can only go up, while ours will go down.

There's a lot of problems that led up to this point, gov't intervention in education being near the top of that list.

Yeah, I agree that more protectionism, is the antithesis to free markets. Then again, I must say that it seems to be that the people who just say, "so what?, you should compete for those jobs!" is either being extremely naïve and/or an $#@!, considering the variables involved. American doctors are no longer competing with Indian doctors for jobs. They are retiring, and few young people are idiotic enough to take on the enormous burden to go into that field knowing that foreign doctors will do twice the work for half the pay.

Xenophobe accusation in 3.2.1. But really, I think I'm merely stating the obvious. It's not said with hatred or disdain, it's just the way it is. As a nurse, I work with plenty of foreign doctors in the ER and they're all very pleasant. But I'm in no way foolish enough to think that if we were both doctors and were competing for the same contract at any hospital in the U.S., that they wouldn't easily be able to sign for less than I could live on. There's no way to compete with that. Sorry to bust any an-cap bubbles.

[osan]

Totally agree with Orrin Hatch (on just this issue.) Imagine if the PGA Tour decided to keep out foreign players in order to protect American professional golfers. There are no shortage of American pro golfers playing the mini-tours in Arizona. But keeping out the best players would give you a worse product. It is even more insane for STEM jobs.

Most top engineers are foreign born. Literally, 85% of engineering PHD students are Asian. I have an engineering degree from a top 5 school. The best students were Asians. Kicking them out of the country after they get a degree is one of the most braindead things this country does.

Yeah, uh huh. That is why the invented world issued from the United States by 90%. I've been in the tech world 30+ years and there is no shortage of capable native workers. To suggest otherwise is patent nonsense. The H1Bs come on not because we need their skills, which BTW are often grossly inferior, but because they are CHEAP. But you often get that for which you pay. I've worked on endless projects where the foreign help was basically clueless at a rate 10x that of domestic workers. Their vastly reduced cost (purported) ignores the hidden costs associated with their hire, and it can be staggering. Ferreting out hidden costs is one of the thing that I DO. I have conducted devastating analyses for clients demonstrating where they have been hemorrhaging resources completely unawares, and in some cases the culprit was the mediocre-at-best "cheap" labor they'd hired in the false belief they were getting away with something.

None of this is to say that there are not competent and even excellent foreign talents out there. Most certainly there are, but on the average the US workforce produces FAR AND AWAY better than anywhere else in the world, ESPECIALLY where creativity is required for original invention. Nobody comes close to the American technical worker on that point because we are the only large population remaining on the planet whose thought processes have not been completely demolished by the wrecking ball that is the collectivist-authoritarian mindset. We are not quite yet broken of spirit, nor have our minds been quite so narrowly channelled in their world views. It is precisely because we are of renegade mind in still significant measure that we almost as matters of habit run off to the farther reaches of creative thought. Most of what we come up with is crap, mind you, but that is par for the course when one is feverishly exploring the possibilities.

My career has been such. I have a thousand ideas a minute and have gushed forth all manner of utterly worthless crap at meetings in a seemingly endless torrent of vomit. But every once in a while a true gem would spew forth from my thoughts - the billion dollar idea - and THAT was how I made my contributions to those things to which I had applied myself. No genius or particular talent; just the stick-to-itiveness to keep the ideas coming. And that his how I manage projects. I don't give a damn how stupid an idea may seem at 10:00 AM. By 10:15 someone, somewhere, might put that idea together in correlation with another and come up with yet another billion dollar creative result. You just never know whence sheer and utter genius will issue. It comes out of nowhere, nobody ever seeing it until it sits in their laps, smiling up at them. And at times it issues from the most unlikely people. $#@! just happens sometimes.

My uncle Les owns and runs one of the big engineering firms in NYC. He has hundreds of engineers working full time for him with, at times, hundreds more hired on contract bases and most of them are Americans. In fact, he says it's very much a buyer's market these days. He also tells me that with but a small handful of exceptions, he would not trust a foreign engineer to the door, as most of them are not worth the match with which you'd light them ablaze, for his nickel. Les is the sort who does not want merely competent. He wants outstanding, and you rarely get that in foreigners where creativity is needed.

Consider the Japanese. Their engineers are second-to-none in terms of competence. The Japanese are absolutely tops in the world at taking an idea and refining it to its optimum realization. However, their ability to come up with truly new approaches and inventions is next to zero. It is not a matter of inherent intelligence of talent, but one of culture. They are a narrowly channeled people in terms of worldview and thought. They are not creative in the sense of origination, but they are tops in refinement. The world needs that, but they also need inventive talent and that is where American workers exceed all others by vast margins. It's not the water, but rather the general cultural environment that promotes this approach to seeing the world. That culture exists nowhere else because everywhere else is the boot of the whipmaster on the neck of the people completely, which is precisely where we are headed in short order.

What Theye seem to fail to see is that when they extinguish that fire in the American, Theye are going to stagnate and eventually lose it all because for all their apparent obsession with progress, that state of movement is going to slow WAY down to a crawl. That will happen because at first nobody will give a $#@! about doing extraordinary things, being that everyone will be so perfectly "equal" (AHEM). And in the generations to come, the urge will be lost and then Theye will be as $#@!ed as the rest of us. Good luck with that, ye tyrants.

To suggest that there is a shortage of skilled talent on American shores and that we must therefore import in order to avert some vaguely referenced disaster of national proportions is a contrivance born of ignorance and/or corruption worthy of the iron-bar. It is sheer idiocy.

[osan]

That is because most American kids are imbeciles.

That leaves up to 50% + 1 who are not. While I agree that vast swaths of the American population are functional idiots, it must be borne in mind that we have a pretty healthy population, leaving us with tens of millions of very smart and motivated people out there doing their do and thinking their think.

If American kids can't compete, that is too bad.

Completely agree. But that is not the case. Sad and wonderful all at the same time is the fact that it takes only about 1% to 2% of a large population to make that body move forward. Put enough talent and drive into that small subset and the ship still sails. Remember the 3%? That was all it took to successfully drive off the filthy English. That means 97% of the colonists were cowards or worse yet, loyalists. This goes to show the power of small numbers of people with high drive, brains, and will to put them to use.

The world isn't going to stop progressing.

All else equal, probably not. All else, however, is very often not equal. One simply does not know what tomorrow may bring. A meteor strike of significant proportions would stop progress dead in its tracks as the world of men became instantly preoccupied with remaining alive in 5-minute chunks. One need be careful with the assumptions under which they labor.

Kids need to be better prepared academically at a younger age.

Depends on what you mean by "better prepared". Younger? Hardly. America was built not by Harvard graduates, but by people educated in accord with programs such as the trivium and quadrivium. They were well trained in language and the BASICS. Talent and drive did the rest.

Breaking the gov't education monopoly and having every kid on voucher system is a good way to start solving this problem.

Disagree. Eliminating government schools altogether and eliminating all property taxation is the good way. It is the way of free and morally correct people. It is the way of non-aggression. It is the way of freedom and mutual respect for the rights of all men.

The answer certainly isn't to make us uncompetitive with Canada and others countries with rational immigration laws.

Nonsequitur re: H1B hires. It is our immigration that fails the smell test. In a better world we would be on the money, but the world of men is rank with the stench of corruption and evil. Render the land free. Tear down the Empire and the attendant welfare state. Remove the gratuitous violence of the so-called "state" and restore governance to naught other than the guaranty and protection of Individual Rights and watch America rocket past the rest of the world from one day to the next.

[osan]

hahahahhaha

politicians know NOTHING about technology. they only now how to accept all the goodies and cash and dinner invitations from the lobbyists who write their scripts and line their pockets.

But... but... Al Gore... Information Superhighway...

[osan]

I would say I was woefully ill-prepared to compete on the same level with foreign born students.

I would say you are making excuses for your own failiures.

I, too, was "woefully ill-prepared", as judged by the job done by the schools I attended. I managed to get through several degrees and run my own consulting business. Whatever my failings were, they were completely mine and nobody else's. I didn't fail because my mammy didn't potty-train me properly or my daddy never told me that he loved me. My failures were the result of my choices. I own them, learned from them, became smarter and better at what I do, and I can compete with anyone on the planet in the arenas to which I have chosen to apply myself. I yield no claim to anyone on that account.

The ball, sir, is in your court. Any inadequacies you may find in yourself are readily, if not easily, amended to strength. The only issues remaining are your choice to improve yourself and the resolve to see it through.

[charrob]

I have an engineering degree from a top 5 school. The best students were Asians.

That is because most American kids are imbeciles. If American kids can't compete, that is too bad. The world isn't going to stop progressing. Kids need to be better prepared academically at a younger age. Breaking the gov't education monopoly and having every kid on voucher system is a good way to start solving this problem. The answer certainly isn't to make us uncompetitive with Canada and others countries with rational immigration laws.

>>I have an engineering degree from a top 5 school. The best students were Asians.

Although there are exceptions, Asians I have seen are wonderful busy bees. They endlessly study and are very good test takers – that is bread in their culture from the time they are born. However my experience with many is they lack a creative ability that I’ve only seen in American kids. American kids are lazier – they don’t study as hard and they don’t revolve their entire lives around school work. But they have an innate creativity absent in many foreigners. I think it was either Steve Jobs or Bill Gates that quit college and started their business in their family’s garage. There is more to being a really good engineer than being a good test taker or hard worker. I’ve been amazed when working with many that they simply cannot see the many problems with their quick, fast solutions that they refine to death and endlessly work at. They rush into solutions without independently thinking of all of the possible problems their quick solution creates. While they all rush into conference rooms to endlessly discuss and refine a rushed solution, they fail to see the full scope of the problem – unlike the American kid who sits back quietly at his desk and thinks through the problem in its entirety.

>> That is because most American kids are imbeciles. If American kids can't compete, that is too bad.

First, there’s 1.4 billion people in China and 1.3 billion in India – so American kids in a population of 316 million have to compete with the top students from a population greater than 2.7 billion people – many of those foreigners (particularly in India) come from wealthy families who have heavily invested in their children’s education. I disagree with shutting the door on American kids who “can’t compete”. The opportunities given to many of these foreigners as they were growing up differ greatly from their American counterparts.

Additionally, none of this has anything to do with not having tech talent in this country. I’ve repeatedly read about the many baby boomers in their 50’s and early 60’s who have built up vacation days, pensions, and perks obtained by many years on the job, but, who are not quite ready to retire, and are being made to teach their young foreign counterparts their jobs in order to get severance pay before they are fired. Are they being fired because they cannot do their jobs? No. It’s because their foreign counterparts are young, have no benefits, and are willing to work for half the cost. After they lose their jobs, many of these baby boomers end up losing their homes and everything they’ve worked for for an entire lifetime.

This is about overwhelming the labor supply to depress wages for corporate profits, nothing more. And the paid whores in congress are willing to stab their own countrymen in the back so that the tech corporations will put more money in their campaign coffers.

[Ronin Truth]

http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com.../DDDoA.sml.pdf

A hundred years of this crap takes a major toll and explains a lot.

[MRK]

Flash mob troll thread?

*ponders*

*rereads comments*

[Krugminator2]

I would say you are making excuses for your own failiures.

I, too, was "woefully ill-prepared", as judged by the job done by the schools I attended. I managed to get through several degrees and run my own consulting business. Whatever my failings were, they were completely mine and nobody else's. I didn't fail because my mammy didn't potty-train me properly or my daddy never told me that he loved me. My failures were the result of my choices. I own them, learned from them, became smarter and better at what I do, and I can compete with anyone on the planet in the arenas to which I have chosen to apply myself. I yield no claim to anyone on that account.

The ball, sir, is in your court. Any inadequacies you may find in yourself are readily, if not easily, amended to strength. The only issues remaining are your choice to improve yourself and the resolve to see it through.

When I say woefully ill-prepared, I mean against the top students. I was valedictorian of my high school and had 3.4 GPA in college, while playing a D1 varsity sport on scholarship. I was light years behind the top students. I make a very good living. What I am saying is there is a huge gap between high school students educated in the United States and foreign born students. Look at pictures of engineering grad students at any major university. Virtually all of them are Asians. Deporting the best students makes no sense. Nobody is saying that if you work hard that you can't close the gap.

I'll assume you make low to mid 7 figures in a good year or else you are not near the top.

[tangent4ronpaul]

The world isn't going to be truly competitive until we all reach the same level playing field in terms of economic background. That's going to be extremely beneficial for foreigners and extremely painful for those of us already in the U.S. Their standards can only go up, while ours will go down.

There's a lot of problems that led up to this point, gov't intervention in education being near the top of that list.[/SIZE]

In Liberia the average daily pay is between $1.50 and $2.00 a day. in the slums it's $0.02 a day. In Sierra Elone that one district had the farmers balking at quarantines. A $0.45 bribe each changed their mood. That's A LOT of money in those parts.

>>I have an engineering degree from a top 5 school. The best students were Asians.

Although there are exceptions, Asians I have seen are wonderful busy bees. They endlessly study and are very good test takers – that is bread in their culture from the time they are born. However my experience with many is they lack a creative ability that I’ve only seen in American kids. American kids are lazier – they don’t study as hard and they don’t revolve their entire lives around school work.

Additionally, none of this has anything to do with not having tech talent in this country. I’ve repeatedly read about the many baby boomers in their 50’s and early 60’s who have built up vacation days, pensions, and perks obtained by many years on the job, but, who are not quite ready to retire, and are being made to teach their young foreign counterparts their jobs in order to get severance pay before they are fired. Are they being fired because they cannot do their jobs? No. It’s because their foreign counterparts are young, have no benefits, and are willing to work for half the cost. After they lose their jobs, many of these baby boomers end up losing their homes and everything they’ve worked for for an entire lifetime.

This is about overwhelming the labor supply to depress wages for corporate profits, nothing more. And the paid whores in congress are willing to stab their own countrymen in the back so that the tech corporations will put more money in their campaign coffers.

When I was in elementary and middle school math classes the teachers would assign us 30-40 problems from the book every night. More on weekends. there were a few from the easy section, at least half from the intermediate difficulty section and some from the hard problems section. we wrote our name on the top of each homework or test and the teach collected them. Then they would randomly distribute our homework or tests to other students in the class and we put our name on the test we were grading. The teacher would then read off the answers while writing them on the board. then they were collected and we checked the grading on our own homework and only came up if we were contesting a problem marked wrong. Papers were collected and a count wes made of wrong answers and grade assigned and put in the book. We immediately got them back and were told to figure out why we got something wrong. If a lot of kids got the same question wrong they would go over it on the board.

I took some college level math classes a few years ago and we were never assigned more than 5 homework questions a night. All from the easy section...

The bankers love it when baby boomers go broke. They make out like thieves.

It's about more than corporate profits, it's about income re-distribution. Same with climate change. same with regulations, those are a bunch of parasites lining up at the food bowl to get gvmt to enforce their profit potential at the point of a gun under the pretext of protecting us. But yes, campaign contributions... most come from corporate interests and are bribes. Most of the money goes into TV advertising.

There was a time when broadcasters had to run PSA's (incl campaign ads) and broadcast debates as a condition of their use of the public airwaves.
There was a time when the League of woman voters ran the debates and didn't lock out third parties.

Bring those two thing back and we would see rapid improvements in this country and the world.

Better would be making congress spend 90% of their time reviewing current laws and repealing those found non-productive and having to approve every single regulation on the books. Having sunsets on every law.

Right now the USA is being thrown under the bus as corporations with no loyalty to this country are buying elections while switching focus to developing markets like China and India.

Oh yeah, these fools demanding a higher minimum wage... we are headed for dumping 30% of the lowest paid part of the workforce by 2025.

http://www.computerworld.com/article...ors_picks=true

yeah, H1A - they work for less, don't have the burden of employer matching with taxes, SS, medical insurence, etc. USSA sweatshops here we come!

-t

[tangent4ronpaul]

one other thing... you are only supposed to sponsor a H1A visa holder if you can not find a qualified person to do that job in this country.

I have heard of people coming into the county that were classed as "sanitary engineers". Yes - that means a janitor!

-t