Blame offshoring for the negatives of immigration 4448

On Tue, 31 May 2005, rkusenet

I have followed much of this as it appeared in our printed media. The facts are that many many young people got into some kind of IT job while they were young, idealistic, and full of energy and it was not uncommon at all to find all of them (all US born) putting in 12-14 hour days. Some of them, when they got to about age 40 were asking themselves when they could "have a life" meaning a wife and kids and a House Pictures and some time off.

When I was a graduate student ('70s), I put in 70 hours per week on my studies. As time went on and later in life, in my normal job, this decreased to about 55 hours per week. Now I am mostly retired, but still put in time.

It is also a fact that in many places of employment in the USA where all of the employees are "immigrants" (legal or not) there is a mindset that the boss is something like god, the employer environment is ALL of your life, and there is no other life. So, some bosses really like this; they pay for 8 hours of work or less, and get maybe 12 hours of work done. Guys who come on restrictive visas are not entirely free to change jobs or else their status could become illegal, so the boss has an axe over the guys head. Is that what you mean "Yeah right, level playing field"? Or do you mean something else?

I just finished reading a book that combined Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese history in 1100 pages. There may be mbutt poverty and mbutt low standard of living in 3rd world countries but there were a lot of golden spoons in the mouths of people in those countries going back thousands of years. There were always rich and priviledged clbuttes at all times (think merchants besides kings, emperors, and maharajas). Of course, maybe you mean "golden spoons" because we have running water, indoor plumbing, and TV-internet-cars here.

OK, fine, thank you. You can be quiet, then, and not do any "whining." I prefer to do the "whining" and maybe some people will learn from that and pick some direction in life where the "whining" might be less. I wish for all people, everywhere, to have a better life, better standard of living, etc., but I do not like the idea that for some to have a better life, then we have to take away the better life from someone who already has the better life.

"Maintaining its edge" should not be confused with how much money executives and business owners make. An article I read recently showed that among our top name corporations, some half or more of all R&D is done in China or Korea or Pacific Rim, and ALL of manufacturing is done there and so our big name corporations are just "import agencies" and that may be what you are thinking about. IBM just sold its whole PC division to Lenovo, a Chinese company, and IIRC, Lenovo will put the IBM logo on the box, but Lenovo will get the profits. Eventually, maybe in a few years, many companies in China-India will just flood our market with "knockoffs" and counterfiet products and pay no royalties. The end for the USA is close. All of our big corporations have been getting smaller over recent years.

This whole post you made is noticeably better than your earlier post. Thank you, and you should take these opportunities to polish a little bit your messages.

1. The world obligation is to learn English. I did not make that rule, but,yes, it makes my life a little easier.

2. I can do German and some Russian.

Its true. I've seen the advertisments, I've hears the stories from Americans who were told to train their Indian replacements and once they learned the work, the Americans were laid off. Many I know could not find new similar work. I've seen the advertisements that say "jobs for H1b only". I've talked with one manager of programmers who tried to hire an American but the HR department controls even the sight of resumes and the only one that the manager was allowed to hire was an H1b or someone who could get an H1b so the manager refused to hire another person.

So, now, I know dozens of born-in-the-USA guys, and many (but less than half) just around 40 years old who have good experience and have sent their resumes in for jobs recently and never get an interview. Yet, they were always employed up to now and had no problem to get a programmer job.

There will be a great economic train wreck in the USA in the near future. We have govt debt, obligations for our SS system, our Medicaid system, and our Medicare system and sometime in the future it will collapse. We also have this strange prevalence of debt-based money system which, the more I read about it, the more it will become a great train wreck in the future, too. The only way to avoid this will be a great Debt Reduction in the standard of living in the USA and if that happens, there will be a great Debt Reduction in our economy and since the rest of the world gets its money from our trade deficit, the rest of the world will sink, too. Our propaganda from the economists that all the money made by other countries comes back to us to buy Treasury securities is mostly a lie. That money comes back, largely, to BUY our real estate so that about 60% of all tall buildings in most of our large cities are actually owned by foreign enbreasties and they get a lot of RENT from this investment. Of course its an oversimplification, but the basic picture is that someday the music will stop playing. I am grateful that I will surely be dead before this happens.

Also, the USA is no longer an English-speaking country. It is rapidly turning into an English or Spanish speaking country. We have many public signs now in both English and Spanish, many businesses that are Spanish olly, and I can call many US companies now and get robot voice menus in both English and Spanish, and sometimes even the Spanish comes first. The statistics, for today, are that 12% of our population were born someplace else. And, half are from Mexico or Latin or South America. This is a whole different and very heterogeneous problem and has nothing to do with India or Indians. And, they are not "melting into" our society, either. In this respect, I think Indians, at least, (such as yourself), are learning English and learning it very well. So, you should congratulate yourself on that. When I was a kid, 50 years ago, there were all kinds of people around me from other places and in the next generation, they all spoke native-fluent English. Today, the Hispanic kids (at least in many areas) get all of their schooling with Spanish being the language.