Without hijacking the thread (looks around for other comments), what about H-1B?

Posted by: Jeff at July 21, 2009 7:44 AM

H1B? I don't have a problem with it, and I'm in IT.

Americans don't want to learn the skill sets to be programmers and engineers, they all wanna be MBA day-traders so they can get in to Goldman. India wants to turn out engineers and programmers, let them come here. Most of them end up staying.

But there are plenty of people who want to cry about how the H1B visa-holders are taking "American" jobs. Fine, you wanna cry about it, get your kid to stop chasing after promises of easy money.

Posted by: brian at July 21, 2009 8:04 AM

Oh, and to answer Nick's last question - what if the iPod had to be made exclusively in America?

It would not exist.

The MP3 compression algorithm was developed by Fraunhoffer in Germany.

The audio compression/decompression chip was designed in Japan.

The CPU is derived from the ARM architecture, which was developed by Acorn in the UK.

There are no LCD screens like that being made in the US, and most of the patents are held by Japanese and Korean companies.

People have to get over the fact that we don't do everything anymore.

I mean, there's something to be said for not giving business to communists (China), but what the hell is wrong with buying a Japanese car or a Korean TV?

Oh, and any time someone gives you shit about your vehicle's origins, remind them that the Toyota Camry has a higher percentage of American content than the Chevy Malibu. That usually sets their ears to steamin'.

Posted by: brian at July 21, 2009 8:18 AM

Another reason the Toyota Sequoia is more American than the Jeep Patriot is that it doesn't suck. (Actually that's just a guess based on the reputations of the two companies. I'm not in the big vehicle market, myself.)

My objections to the H1B program involve how unfairly it treats foreign workers. In general anyone with a college degree should be allowed to immigrate to the US.

The technology industry is worldwide; a programmer from India competes with me wherever they live. Better for us that they live here and pay our taxes than live somewhere else and pay someone else's.

Posted by: Pseudonym at July 21, 2009 8:22 AM

Better for us that they live here and pay our taxes than live somewhere else and pay someone else's.

And buy their house here, and patronize all the local businesses here, and bring their friends over who start other businesses, etc.

How do these nimrods think America got started in the first place?

Posted by: brian at July 21, 2009 8:32 AM

For some strange reason people do not seem to understand that Europe and Asia are not WWII rubble farms any more. The B-29 was what gave the US a temporary competitive edge, not superior quality in every industry.

Posted by: John Tagliaferro at July 21, 2009 9:16 AM

"Americans don't want to learn the skill sets to be programmers and engineers, they all wanna be MBA day-traders so they can get in to Goldman."

And plenty of people want to play pro basketball too. Alas, most cannot due to a lack of talent relative to others seeking the limited available slots. So to with Goldman Sachs.

But then, most people cannot become engineers, either, no matter how hard they work--they simply lack the brains. Only the top few percentiles of the IQ scale can really do engineering work, like EE, ME, etc. If you are clocking in below the mid 90s in percentile terms, my guess is you are not up to the job at all.

Given that reality, India and China, with three times the number of brains to begin with as compared to the US, should produce more engineers than us their population obtains access to education. If 1/3 of their population currently gets access to education, they should be producing an equal number of engineers right now.

But as I understand it, those two nations currently count people holding mere certificates of vocational training "engineers", even though the title is not really appropriate. (Sort of like when we call janitors custodial engineers.) So their current numbers may not reflect the real number of engineers.

Posted by: Spartee at July 21, 2009 2:49 PM

"For some strange reason people do not seem to understand that Europe and Asia are not WWII rubble farms any more. The B-29 was what gave the US a temporary competitive edge, not superior quality in every industry."

And don't forget that America still had its generation of young men trained in engineering. The rest of the world had sacrificed them on that war's altar.

So with no two bricks still held together, and a whole generation of young workers dead, it took those nations about one and one-half a generation to rebuild their societies. Now they are ready to go, and a bunch of Midwestern manufacturing unions are bitching that it is all so unfair, unfair, unfair. /stamp foot

Sorry, UAW. It was a good ride while it lasted, but $90k/year for driving a forklift is over.

Posted by: Spartee at July 21, 2009 2:54 PM

I'm against H-1B, but I see the other side. However, this is provably false.

Americans don't want to learn the skill sets to be programmers and engineers (brian)

The calls to graduate more engineers do not focus on any field of engineering or identify any specific need. Graduating more engineers just because India and China graduate more than the United States does is likely to create unemployment and erode engineering salaries. One of the biggest challenges for the engineering profession today is that engineers’ salaries are not competitive with those of other highly trained professionals: It makes more financial sense for a top engineering student to become an investment banker than an engineer. This cannot be fixed directly by the government. But one interesting possibility can be seen in China, where researchers who publish their work in international journals are accorded status as national heroes. U.S. society could certainly offer engineers more respect and recognition.

Respondents to our survey reported that they were able to fill 80% of engineering jobs at their companies within four months. In other words, we found no indication of a shortage of engineers in the United States.

Posted by: Jeff at July 21, 2009 4:04 PM

Jeff, the interesting question is how many of those engineers are foreign-born (H1B or otherwise).

Posted by: brian at July 21, 2009 4:42 PM

To some extent I agree with Jeff: sweeping generalizations like "Americans don't want foo" are seldom accurate. The "shortage" that the H1B program was created to solve was not of engineers, but of engineers willing to work for $30k/year. That's why they made it so easy to send H1Bs home again. If H1B workers had just as much freedom to find another job as a native born American they would not be as open to substandard wages and conditions as they are now. Opening the floodgates would decrease wages somewhat, but fairly, and I think the benefits to society would far outweigh the costs.

Posted by: Pseudonym at July 21, 2009 9:01 PM

Actually, manufacturing electronics goods in the United States would only be marginally more expensive than manufacturing them elsewhere. There are, for example, plenty of semiconductor fabrication plants in the U.S. that are competitive with those in foreign countries.

If other countries were forced to comply (in reality and not just on paper) with reasonable environmental and labor standards, even that marginal advantage would largely disappear.

There are rivers in Taiwan (a big source of electronic components) that are so toxic that people have died simply by walking next to them. And mainland China is far, far worse. While companies like Apple claim to have "green" products, the only "auditing" of their supply chain usually consists of a letter from the supplier "guaranteeing" that the manufacturing was non-polluting. Total BS, of course.

As for labor, many electronics components are produced under conditions of virtual slavery. For example, the Meitai Plastic and Electronics factory in Guangdong, China, employs two thousand workers, mostly young women and is a major supplier of electronics components to Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Microsoft and IBM. At Meitai, workers are:

- Prohibited from talking, listening to music, raising their heads, putting their hands in their pockets.

- Fined for being one minute late, for not trimming their fingernails—which could impede the work, and for stepping on the grass.

- Required to work at the factory 81 hours a week, including 34 hours of overtime, exceeding China’s legal limit by 318 percent.

- Docked for primitive room and board, dropping their pay to 41 cents an hour and were routinely cheated of 14 to 19 percent of their wages.

- Physically locked in the factory compound four days a week and prohibited from even taking a walk.

When this story broke, the companies involved promised to "do something" about it. But the situation remains the same. And that plant was probably about average; there are much worse examples further up the supply chain. Look hard enough, and you start seeing the children with fingers sliced off because they've been working 18 hours a day.

So when the bozo on this video claims that an iPod would cost so much more if it were made in the U.S., what he's really saying is that it's OK for you to have cheap products, even if it means forcing other people to live and work in a hell on earth.

I really wonder if it would be all that bad if we insisted on reasonable standards elsewhere in the world -- and real auditing of the ENTIRE supply chain -- before goods could be sold in the U.S.

At least then we'd really know whether U.S. manufacturing is competitive or not.

Posted by: Geoffrey James at July 23, 2009 6:06 AM