H1B Visas

I am a firm believer that we need more high-skill immigration (perhaps low-skill too, but that is a topic for a different day). The more brilliant minds and hands we recruit, the more our economy will grow and the better we will compete with the countries we steal these people from.

But when we have a law that is wrong (such as overly restrictive), the solution is to change it. Not to create either legal loopholes (which makes more business for lawyers, but not others) or illegal loopholes (such as lax enforcement of silly rules - which gives more business to the unethical). These are both less effective, and create an atmosphere of rule-breaking that does in fact create a slippery slope according to all of the ethics research that I have read over many years of studying this.

So I was reading a deposition in a lawsuit this week. The lawyer was trying to make the point that the company had incompetent designers, so he pulled a quote from the deponent's blog that said "we can't find any qualified engineers." The implication of course was that they had to hire second best, and that is why the product was defective.

The response was very telling. To paraphrase, he said that he only wrote that blog, as well as similar letters to his Senator and Representative, because he had an Italian engineer that he wanted to hire permanently and was trying to get him an H-1B Visa. He freely admitted that his blog and his letters were complete lies created just for this purpose. "That's what everyone does" he testified under oath.

I understand that he was more comfortable hiring the Italian employee he knew was good then to take a risk on a new applicant who was US. But if this is the way it happens, we really need to rethink our immigration laws. Of course, we already knew that.