The guild's at it again!

Here's another attempt by the Programmer's Guild (PG) to malign the H1-B program. The U.S Department of Labor publishes certain information about all the H1/L1 visas it issued, like the name of the company, the salary being paid and the duration of work. As per the high standards of processing at the Dept. of Labor (snicker!) they release this once a year at the end of the fiscal year which is every September.

Now PG is demanding that the Dept. of Labor should publish data for fiscal year 2007 immediately?! Are they kidding?!! I think they need to research the processing efficiency at the Dept. of Labor before they dream about things like this. Heck, the Dept. of Labor hasn't even finished entering Labor Certification application data they received in 2000, they were so inefficient that after repeated demands from the applicants they had to create backlog processing centers. Now PG wants faster access to the data for 2007?. Lol!

Without some serious overhaul or investments, they can't achieve this. If they do decide to invest, who is gonna pay for this additional cost? The fees charged for the application which is over $2000 for an H1 visa fund the program and some more, where is the extra money to speed up the process going to come from? The applicants don't need it fast. It's PG who needs it.

The normal H1 processing takes about 2-3 months. Even after processing is complete it takes until the next fiscal year before the applicant can get a visa if the visas are used up. PG wants this time frame for U.S. applicants to apply for those jobs. What they conveniently forget is that U.S. companies don't hire foreigners if they can get a U.S. worker they like. The months long waits plus high costs of application and legal fees is a definite deterrent unless the company feels strongly about a certain foreign applicant. In such cases, I can't see how they will recruit someone with lower skills or brain power.

Most of the people who are still unemployed , displaced or under-employed (I like how they come up with nice words for stupid wannabe programmers) are of lower quality who mostly just swarmed into IT during the boom times of the late 90s and were quickly gone once the market went bust. I've heard about carpenters and construction workers move into IT without even a Bachelor's degree in IT or related fields. These people should never have been in IT in the first place and it was the labor shortage that allowed them to get into IT.

So, other than making up more work for the Dept. of Labor I don't see any benefits from these demands by PG.