Biased Opinion Alert
In late April, Micro$oft urged lawmakers to ease restrictions on H1-B work visa issuance in hopes to increase it's already substantial overseas hiring trend.

reference link:
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D89NV0H00.htm?campaign_id=apn_home_down

Those of you who know me, know that I am about as big of a Micro$oft zealot as they come.  I have made a career out of Micro$oft products and truly believe much of their technology to be empowering, from a developer perspective.    With that said, I can see absolutely no good side to this event and I am hoping one of you could possibly persuade me otherwise.

Obviously, I have a biased opinion on this topic - being an American born software developer with dwindling employment options in a largely non-technical community.    This is a sensitive topic because if you take the stance that "America's largest software company should employee some Americans", you are labeled a racist or bigot. 

Let there be no mistake - I have met - and worked with some incredibly talented people of Oriental and Indian decent that were outstanding software developers and spoke better english than I.  I have several indian friends that not only have better diction than I do but a much more verbose vocabulary.  On top of this, two of those friends are outstanding developers and one is a great network engineer.

With that said, *I* still wouldn't move to India or China to fill the position of telephone support, even if the position payed ten times our Salary.  Why?  I don't speak the lanuage.    I tend to think that speaking the native language is a prerequisite for a telephone support position.  Yet, every time I call Microsoft's support line (which costs $100/hour or more) - it takes longer to help the non-english speaking person on the other end to spell my name and email address than it does to diagnose the problem.  

Really, who at Microsoft, Dell & Gateway thought it was a good idea to staff the call centers with people who do not speak English.     I don't have a problem with providing jobs to overseas workers but why do we take jobs away from Americans to do so?   What is so wrong with the American worker that companies are forced to continue to find ways to not use them?  Sure - the labor is cheap but is it really worth it?

I'm not worried about an America being "taken over" by people of foreign decent, I'm sure America will be just fine.  (Although many rednecks walk our streets today with this very thought accepted as truth.)  But, I do believe that with countries shipping boat and planeloads of their brightest to the States, it will adversely affect those countries' economies in the long run.

Companies should outsource to overseas responsibly.  Open overseas field offices and employee locals.    Don't imports thousands of workers or close American-based businesses to move operations overseas.  Likewise, countries exporting their brightest to answer the American thirst for technology workers should do so with caution.    If you spend all of your resources building up American businesses it will stunt the growth of your own economy.

Just my two cents...
clink, clink.

Bill Dodd
mcp, mcsd, mcad, mcsd.net, mcdba