On Tue, Jul 08, 2003 at 05:58:44PM +0100, Paul Makepeace wrote:
Any success actually having a H1B granted?
I know some people are interested in, or know peole interested in work in the US: News just in from my visa lawyers: the H1-B cap is being reduced very shortly back to pre- .com levels of 65,ooo/yr (i.e. halved). Not only that but some new free trade agreements with Chile & Singapore have allocated ~6K visas to those countries, which comes off that 65K. More deals in the pipeline with some other countries will further reduce this number.
Unemployment continues to rise in the US with "intact" families ending up in shelters http://nytimes.com/2003/08/14/opinion/14HERB.html , and that's apart from the 3+% of the adult US population that's currently incarcerated http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_prison_population (highest in the world, recently surpassing Russia).
Welcome (or not) to Fortress USA.
Paul
Not to mention that I'm starting to see a few IT workers in the US complain about jobs being "stolen by foreigners". Not entirely sure who they're talking about, since most of the lost jobs around here disappeared into thin air along with the companies that had provided them. There's not much of that mindset here in Seattle, but I'm told that Seattle is a "liberal pinko commie bubble" by people who are ... well ... not from here. There's a few jobs to be had around here, and a fair number of Anglophiles like me to work with. On the other hand, folks like me dream about moving to the UK :-)
- Brian Wisti http://coolnamehere.com/
