While there are companies and people who talk about the shortage of skilled labour, there are people like Vivek Wadhwa, a professor for Duke University's master of engineering programmes, and others like Ron Hira of Rochester Institute of Technology, who feel there is no basis to the claim because there is no hard evidence to prove that. What is the position of NFAP on this? Is there a shortage, or not?
We recently conducted a review of job openings for skilled positions in the US among all companies in the Standard & Poor's 500. We found major US technology companies averaged over 470 such openings, and American defense firms had, on average, over 1,200 skilled job openings.
The leading companies on the list had over 3,000 job openings for skilled positions in the United States.
This is a global labor market. If larger companies are unable to hire a key person or fill positions in the United States, they likely will have the option to still hire the person or perform the work in another country.
This option is always going to complicate any discussion on this issue, since there is not purely a domestic labour market for technical talent. The irony is that the ones most hurt by the H-1B limits are smaller, growing companies, who may be prevented from hiring key people and don't possess the option of placing someone in Canada, Ireland or India, the way large corporations can.
Image: A US government employee watches as her new visa card is passed over a radio sensor by a US Customs agent. The new visa card has an inbeded chip which uses a new radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to record the entries and exits of visitors crossing US land borders. | Photograph: Gary Williams/Getty Images
Also read: The world is NOT flat. It's spiky
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