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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Incorporated (QCOM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: engineer who wrote (13795)	8/16/1998 9:22:00 PM
From: GO*QCOM	Respond to of 152472

Clearly congress and the President should pass and implement the bill that lets more qualified Engineers into the USA with less red tape.They certainly have responded to a shortage of Doctors in the USA in the past by relaxing the red tape.We were flooded with FMG's with breath taking speed once they opened the gates.

To: engineer who wrote (13795)	8/17/1998 4:32:00 AM
From: John Cuthbertson	Respond to of 152472

OT: LBP on Immigration and H-1B visas. Engineer, On the other hand, if you were an engineer in San Diego between about 1991 and 1994 while the local aerospace industry was imploding, you probably had a hell of a time getting hired. Even though there were tech companies that were growing at the same time, including Qualcomm as a notable example. The reason for that is largely that companies do not want to spend any time/money training people who have the basic abilities and education but lack experience in their particular aspect of technology, when they can instead hire people fresh out of grad school or college who have been studying that exact technology, even if those students may be foreigners. Not that there is anything unnatural or evil about this attitude on the part of the companies, but it is not necessarily in our national interest as a whole to give them the latitude to do things this way. Also, low unemployment figures for engineers, scientists, and other technical professionals are misleading in that they don't account for the problem of underemployment, i.e. if you have a Ph.D. and are driving a cab, you don't show up in the unemployment figures. Displaced engineers are not going to be sitting around drawing unemployment compensation. They are typically able, hard-working people with families to support, and will be out doing whatever kind of work they can find. But that doesn't mean that as a society we will be getting the kind of return that we should on our considerable investment in their education. As for your suggestion that tech companies (and the country in general) should be working starting in grade school to improve math and science education and get kids interested, I agree. But that will only go part of the way to getting more Americans in the technical education "pipeline." It takes smart people to do R&D work, and in the U.S. those smart people have a lot of other career choices besides engineering that yield higher pay and social prestige. Allowing the hiring of lots more immigrant engineers who will work for cheap will repress the economic feedback mechanism, rising salaries, that would attract more Americans into technical fields. So, even acknowledging the fact that immigration restrictions make your job harder recruiting for Qualcomm, there are still very good reasons for having them. ==John