Engineers Looking for Work

Here is a Letter to the Editor for the Austin American Statesman that made a very good point (worth repeating here):

Re: Feb. 10 letter “Filling the job market.”

The letter writer said ” thousands of jobs that require technical expertise go unfilled everyday. We require foreign workers on visas to fill them.” In my career as an engineer, I can emphatically say that this is not true and never has been. It is a myth propagated by corporations to allow the importation of tens of thousands of foreign engineers on work visas, which puts downward pressure on salaries and benefits of U.S. engineers and decreases their job opportunities. That situation became much worse in the last 10 years due to the widespread outsourcing of engineering and scientific jobs to India and China and Eastern European countries. There are thousands of U.S. engineers and scientists who are looking for work or are underemployed.