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To: Jim McMannis who wrote (11962)	7/31/2003 3:42:17 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 306849

well how are they going to get back here, if they are not sponsored? I think the general flow of events in the past was, 65K H1-B visas were increased to over 200K by 2000. When workers would come over they would need sponsorship from some tech company, which then was pretty easy for a tech company to do, fill out a few forms and pay some money and wait. Then, after a while the person gets the green card, the only hitch is they need to keep consistently working to get the green card from the employer, if they switch jobs the whole cycle starts again. Now, the H1-Bs are back to 65K again, so way down, and the L1s are getting hit by congress, but more significant some restrictions have been placed on the companies trying to sponsor these people. You can see it on hotjobs, most contract positions now say only citizen/greencard. So no more H1Bs really, or a very small number because 65K/year is really small considering this is the process everybody uses to gain a greencard here.... celebrities, the osbornes, sports figures and IT workers all share that 65K pool. I worked in SV before 1996 and there weren't too many immigrants here when the quota was 65K. Anyway no vehicle for companies to import workers. The flip side of all this, is that the supporters of H1-B say that this will force companies to offshore, because if they can't bring in cheap labor they will take the job out. My personal view is that isn't true, I am not worried about this, in fact H1-Bs actually lead to more offshoring in my view because workers come here, learn the ropes and then duplicate the effort in Bangalore. To me the interesting thing is how far tech management has fallen in the eyes of government after all these scandals with options and offshoring and who knows what else. These guys aren't getting any favors from the politicians anymore.