Skilled Immigrants Would Boost Up U.S. Economy : Indian-Americans
Wednesday, 06 February 2013, 23:56 Hrs
Bangalore: The U.S. should find ways to come out of recession by granting more H-1B visas to lure skilled immigrants in order to enhance its ailing economy, said top Indian-American experts to lawmakers.
Vivek Wadhwa, director of research, Pratt School of Engineering, DukeUniversity said "If you look at all the data, every single study that's been done, it shows that when you bring skilled immigrants in they create jobs. Right now, we're in an innovation economy. Skilled immigrants are more important than ever, not only to create jobs, but to make us innovative and help us solve major problems," as reported by PTI.
He added "So bring the right people in and you will make the pie bigger for everyone, and we can bring in more unskilled as well because we will have a bigger economy. We need them.”
Wadhwa told U.S. lawmakers during a Congressional hearing on immigration convened by the House Judiciary Committee that "The population of America will decline unless we, you know, keep immigration going, at least at the pace that it is."
More: http://www.siliconindia.com/news/usindians/Skilled-Immigrants-Would-Boost-Up-US-Economy--IndianAmericans-nid-140464-cid-49.html
Meanwhile...
America's genius glut: Don't expand H-1B program
Source: New York Times
By Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute
... If anything, we have too many high-tech workers: more than nine million people have degrees in a science, technology, engineering or math field, but only about three million have a job in one. That’s largely because pay levels don’t reward their skills. Salaries in computer- and math-related fields for workers with a college degree rose only 4.5 percent between 2000 and 2011. If these skills are so valuable and in such short supply, salaries should at least keep pace with the tech companies’ profits, which have exploded.
... If there is no shortage of high-tech workers, why would companies be pushing for more? Simple: workers under the H-1B program aren’t like domestic workers — because they have to be sponsored by an employer, they are more or less indentured, tied to their job and whatever wage the employer decides to give them.
Moreover, too many are paid at wages below the average for their occupation and location: over half of all H-1B guest workers are certified for wages in the bottom quarter of the wage scale.
Bringing over more — there are already 500,000 workers on H-1B visas — would obviously darken job prospects for America’s struggling young scientists and engineers. But it would also hurt our efforts to produce more: if the message to American students is, “Don’t bother working hard for a high-tech degree, because we can import someone to do the job for less,” we could do significant long-term damage to the high-tech educational system we value so dearly.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/08/opinion/americas-genius-glut.html?_r=0
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=2333325
= new reply since forum marked as read
Importing more cheap labor helps the American economy? Really? 
