Immigration Stupidness

Cap on high-tech visas for 2007 already met

WASHINGTON - The government has already reached the limit on high-tech worker visas for 2007 even though the fiscal year does not start until Oct. 1, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said Thursday.

High-tech companies said that underscores the need to increase the 65,000 annual cap on the popular H-1B visas used to bring in engineers, computer programmers and others.

Why do we have this stupid cap in the first place? Oh, that's right, to protect high-tech jobs for American scientists and engineers.

(1) I bet every immigrant working as a scientist or engineer creates >1 high tech jobs for some American (probably someone with a business degree, which we have too many of).

(2) There aren't enough American scientists and engineers the way it is...everyone's majoring in business!

There's talk of increasing the cap to 115,000. I'm sure all of those would be filled just as quickly. We should get rid of the cap entirely and let all the Indians, Chinese, Korean, Russian, Nigerian, etc. scientists and engineers come to America. With any luck, they'll stay here and create millions of new jobs with the technologies they invent and companies they found.