Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : Rande Is . . . HOME -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KevinThompson who wrote (49525)	3/21/2001 10:07:05 AM
From: Tradelite	Respond to of 57584

Watch out for employment situation... Below is a story from today's Washington Post. Yesterday, I saw a report saying MBA grads are having a hard time finding jobs. How soon we forget....there was a time in the past 10-15 years when a typical college grad couldn't FIND a job that required his college degree. And to think my ever-so-confident son, about to graduate from biz school, told me only months ago that the layoffs were "only affecting the dotcoms." Right.....maybe halfway right then....definitely not right now. A quick read of any newspaper about layoffs will tell us differently. _______________ High-Tech Visa Approvals Down From Last Year y Carrie Johnson Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, March 21, 2001; Page E01 The Immigration and Naturalization Service reported yesterday that the number of approved H-1B visa petitions has dropped by nearly 30 percent compared with last year at this time. The visas for trained foreign-born workers are one more hot commodity that has cooled as a result of the slowdown in technology spending and the crash of high-tech stocks. Last year,companies desperate to keep up with demand exhausted the annual nationwide quota of 115,000 H-1B visas in the first six months of the fiscal year. After intense lobbying by technology firms, Congress voted in October to increase the number of H-1B visas to 195,000. But from October 2000 until earlier this month, the INS said, it had approved petitions on behalf of 72,000 foreign-born workers under the H-1B program, compared with more than 100,000 in the same period a year earlier. Some of the companies that requested the most visas during the first six months of 2000 -- such as Motorola Inc., Cisco Systems Inc. and Vienna's MicroStrategy Inc. -- have since reduced their payrolls and financial projections. In the past two months, Motorola has announced that it will cut 4,000 jobs and Intel Corp. said it will eliminate 5,000. Cisco said it will reduce its workforce by as many as8,000 full-timers and 3,000 temporary and contract workers. "From our perspective, there are a lot more people in the marketplace right now," including H-1B visa workers, said Ateesh Roye, senior technical recruiter at the Mindbank Consulting Group, a technology employment agency in Vienna. But Roye, who is himself here on a high-tech work visa, said many foreign nationals are still finding work with subcontractors both in the United States and in places such as India, which sends more visa holders to the United States than any other nation. Theresa Cardinal Brown, an associate director for business immigration at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said there are many reasons for the apparent decline in H-1B approvals. Brown said some regional offices of the INS are still processing requests filed as long ago as December. She also noted that the new law excludes workers hired by universities and other higher-education institutions -- as many as 12,000 -- from the visa cap. Still, Brown said, "at the height of H-1B, when things were going crazy, the INS was processing 15,000 applications a month." That pace does seem to have slowed, according to the INS. An agency spokesman said about 66,000 applications are pending, though some of those are likely to be rejected or not covered under the visa cap. He declined to speculate about the reason for the decline. Critics of the H-1B program say it supports foreign workers to the detriment of Americans. Groups such as the Congressional Black Caucus have said that the ready availability of workers from overseas depresses wages for all employees and is harmful to immigrant workers, who must return to their native countries after six years if they do not get official sponsorship to remain in the United States. The new INS report covers corporate requests for visas filed from October 2000 through March 7. It does not take into account leftover petitions the INS approved from late March to September of last year with Congress's permission. Companies may not have hired as many foreign workers as were approved. © 2001 The Washington Post Company