<<<<< JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER  No. 2033 -- 6/30/2009 >>>>>

New York City hired IBM for a large contract. IBM in turn outsourced parts
of the work to Mumbai, India and for the work that had to be done in the
city, they imported about 17 Indian H-1Bs.

A city spokesman defended the choice to use IBM for the contract because,
as he said, their computer systems are so old it would be impossible to
find Americans that know how to work on them. Surprisingly a 25 year old
Indian H-1B from Mumbai named Sunny Amin knew how to work on these legacy
systems well enough to get an H-1B visa. He got his education in India
which either says something about how outdated those schools are, or how
cheap H-1Bs are to hire in the U.S., or both!

The work involves maintaining the city's databases which hold property and
other tax records. Those databases hold a wealth of information that would
be useful for crime, espionage, and terrorism and yet New York seems
unconcerned with the privacy and national security issues involved with
using foreign nationals to do the work.

That excellent and revealing article was on the New York Post. The web page
has a comments section that is worth reading and posting to.

Meanwhile, the New York Times was busy planting spin by publishing a
commentary by Mr. Flat Earth himself (Thomas Friedman). He explains why we
need more H-1Bs. He rather callously states that we should buy people as
though they are commodities.

   Now is when we should be stapling a green card to the diploma of any
   foreign student who earns an advanced degree at any U.S. university,
   and we should be ending all H-1B visa restrictions on knowledge
   workers who want to come here. They would invent many more jobs than
   they would supplant. The world’s best brains are on sale. Let’s buy
   more!

Just my opinion, but I don't believe these two articles are a coincidence.
Somehow the NYT found out about the Post article just in time to plant some
H-1B propaganda.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

http://www.nypost.com/seven/06282009/news/regionalnews/nyc_hit_by_nerd_job_r
ob_176570.htm

NYC HIT BY NERD JOB ROB

By SUSAN EDELMAN

June 28, 2009 --

It's a geek tragedy.

While the city vows to save and create jobs for recession-ravaged New
Yorkers, one of its biggest contractors is importing techies from India,
instead of hiring local computer nerds.

IBM won a $1.9 million contract with the Department of Finance to analyze
its old main databases so they can be improved, but the company has
transported "consultants" from Mumbai and other parts of India to do most
of the work.

At least 17 employees hired by an IBM subsidiary in India have worked in
New York since October, inspecting the city's computer systems, which hold
property and other tax records, insiders said.

"It was a dream come true," said Sunny Amin, 25, who traveled from his
Mumbai home to the Big Apple -- his first US visit.

Amin, who has an engineering degree from a college in Aurangabad, landed
his first job with IBM-India.

While a bit lost at first, Amin said, he rented an apartment in Parsippany,
NJ, and commuted by bus. After nine months on Wall Street, he's being sent
to another IBM job, in Minneapolis, on his three-year work visa.

Amin would not reveal his pay but did say, "I make about 10 times more than
I would in India."

In contract documents, IBM says it pays its technical consultants at rates
ranging from $26.24 to $278 an hour, not counting travel and living
expenses.

It could not be learned whether IBM pays its Mumbai recruits the same
rates, though watchdogs say US firms hire thousands of workers from India
because they come cheap. IBM did not return calls.

But Amin's fortune means US citizens get shut out of well-paying jobs,
critics charge.

"It's like a slap in the face," said Robert Ajaye, president of Local 2627,
a union of city-employed computer specialists. "We have people in house who
could do this job."

Instead, he said, some city staffers have had to "translate" for Indian
techies lacking English skills.

Finance spokesman Sam Miller defended the contract.

"Our systems are so old that there are not many companies that have the
ability to work on them. IBM does," he said.

susan.edelman@nypost.com

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/opinion/28friedman.html

June 28, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Invent, Invent, Invent
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

I was at a conference in St. Petersburg, Russia, a few weeks ago and
interviewed Craig Barrett, the former chairman of Intel, about how America
should get out of its current economic crisis. His first proposal was this:
Any American kid who wants to get a driver’s license has to finish high
school. No diploma -- no license. Hey, why would we want to put a kid who
can barely add, read or write behind the wheel of a car?

Now what does that have to do with pulling us out of the Great Recession? A
lot. Historically, recessions have been a time when new companies, like
Microsoft, get born, and good companies separate themselves from their
competition. It makes sense. When times are tight, people look for new,
less expensive ways to do old things. Necessity breeds invention.

Therefore, the country that uses this crisis to make its population smarter
and more innovative -- and endows its people with more tools and basic
research to invent new goods and services -- is the one that will not just
survive but thrive down the road.

We might be able to stimulate our way back to stability, but we can only
invent our way back to prosperity. We need everyone at every level to get
smarter.

I still believe that America, with its unrivaled freedoms, venture capital
industry, research universities and openness to new immigrants has the best
assets to be taking advantage of this moment -- to out-innovate our
competition. But we should be pressing these advantages to the max right
now.

Russia, it seems to me, is clearly wasting this crisis. Oil prices
rebounded from $30 to $70 a barrel too quickly, so the pressure for Russia
to really reform and diversify its economy is off. The struggle for
Russia’s post-Communist economic soul -- whether it is going to be more
OPEC than O.E.C.D., a country that derives more of its wealth from drilling
its mines than from tapping its minds -- seems to be over for now.

At the St. Petersburg exposition center, showing off the Russian economy,
the two biggest display booths belonged to Gazprom, the state-controlled
oil and gas company, and Sberbank, Russia’s largest state-owned bank.
Russian companies that actually made things that the world wanted were
virtually nonexistent: Two-thirds of Russia’s exports today are oil and
gas. Gazprom makes the money, and Sberbank lends it out.

As one Western banker put it, when oil is $35 a barrel, Russia "has no
choice" but to reform, to diversify its economy and to put in place the
rule of law and incentives that would really stimulate small business. But
at $70 a barrel, it takes an act of enormous "political will," which the
petro-old K.G.B. alliance that dominates the Kremlin today is unlikely to
summon. Too much rule of law and transparency would constrict the ruling
clique’s own freedom of maneuver.

China is also courting trouble. Recently -- in the name of censoring
pornography -- China blocked access to Google and demanded that computers
sold in China come supplied with an Internet nanny filter called Green Dam
Youth Escort, starting July 1. Green Dam can also be used to block
politics, not just Playboy. Once you start censoring the Web, you restrict
the ability to imagine and innovate. You are telling young Chinese that if
they really want to explore, they need to go abroad.

We should be taking advantage. Now is when we should be stapling a green
card to the diploma of any foreign student who earns an advanced degree at
any U.S. university, and we should be ending all H-1B visa restrictions on
knowledge workers who want to come here. They would invent many more jobs
than they would supplant. The world’s best brains are on sale. Let’s
buy more!

Barrett argues that we should also use this crisis to: 1) require every
state to benchmark their education standards against the best in the world,
not the state next door; 2) double the budgets for basic scientific
research at the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and
the National Institute of Standards and Technology; 3) lower the corporate
tax rate; 4) revamp Sarbanes-Oxley so that it is easier to start a small
business; 5) find a cost-effective way to extend health care to every
American.

We need to do all we can now to get more brains connected to more capital
to spawn more new companies faster. As Jeff Immelt, the chief of General
Electric, put it in a speech on Friday, this moment is "an opportunity to
turn financial adversity into national advantage, to launch innovations of
lasting value to our country."

Sometimes, I worry, though, that what oil money is to Russia, our ability
to print money is to America. Look at the billions we just printed to bail
out two dinosaurs: General Motors and Chrysler.

Lately, there has been way too much talk about minting dollars and too
little about minting our next Thomas Edison, Bob Noyce, Steve Jobs, Bill
Gates, Vint Cerf, Jerry Yang, Marc Andreessen, Sergey Brin, Bill Joy and
Larry Page. Adding to that list is the only stimulus that matters.
Otherwise, we’re just Russia with a printing press.


- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Newsletter Homepage:
http://www.JobDestruction.com/shameh1b/JobDestructionNews.htm

Support this Newsletter and www.JobDestruction.com by donating:
www.zazona.com/Donations.htm

To Be removed from this mailing list, reply to this
email with UNSUbSCRIBE in the subject window
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -