03/15/2004: 
Breaking News
Patriot Act Cause Of More Outsourcing?
note the "more" and "?" before you begin character assasination of me
from Dwinell Political Report (VT)
National Life Insurance Company of Montpelier announced that it was joining IBM and others to outsource work offshore. They tempered the bad news with the hope that their outsourcing company in the United States may move much of its work back to Montpelier, hiring many of the folks losing their jobs. One reason is that Vermonters do not tend to hopscotch from one job to another as they do elsewhere.
One of the drivers of outsourcing may be the Patriot Act. As recently as 2000, there were over 500,000 H-1B visas available for high tech people to move to the United States for work. In that year, the entire 500,000 annual allocation was used up by our then personnel-starved technology companies in one month. Now the annual allocation according to the Economist is only 65,000. All those good minds are not going to waste. They are creating jobs in their own countries instead of here.
It is not just prideful when you read that the new presidents of Georgia and Greece were "American educated." Not just is our collegiate system respected, it gives off values and experience on how civil society, rule of law, freedom of the press, and democracy can work. As fewer folks are allowed into this country, there will be less of this.
A Taiwanese colleague here in Bristol recently submitted a paper for review by a conference committee at Harvard in his field, Buddhist studies. He paper was selected for presentation. He applied for a visa to the United States and it was denied. So much for taken [sic] advantage of globalization.
