Gone in 60 Seconds

From The Orange County Register

It took just hours Monday for federal officials to log in about 150,000 applications for visas for high-skilled workers to come to the United States, more than double the 65,000 permits that became available on April 2.

Citizenship and Immigration Services has closed the application period and will use a lottery system to determine which employers will get to bring in the workers they want. Companies that don't get the visas they want now won't be able to apply again until April 2008.

Lobbyists like to claim that this is a sure sign of huge increases in the limits on visas. But lets get a few facts straight first.

Companies were told that all applications submitted prior to April 2 were going to be discarded and that a lottery system would be used if demand outstripped supply. This is nothing more than a pressure tactic to whip companies into a hysteria so that they can allocate huge blocks of visas "just in case." If this were gasoline, we'd call this hoarding. But because its foreign labor, everyone gets a free pass.

Instead what this shows is that the industry cannot get enough of cheap labor (as compared to a resident or citizen worker). Doing the simple math shows that 150,000 visas per business day means that our vaunted industry's appetite is closer to 36 million visas per year. Bill Gates has argued recently before Congress for unlimited visas.

Just think hard about what that would do to society as we know it.