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Most of you probably don't know about America's "other" foreign-born governor unless you live in Michigan, the state Canadian-born Governor Jennifer Granholm has run since being sworn in as the state's first woman governor on January 1, 2003. She was re-elected last year for her second term.
Granholm's family moved to California when she was a young child and she initially tried her hand at acting. But at the age of 21, she decided that an acting career was not in the cards and enrolled at UC-Berkeley where she was a Phi Beta Kappa and then went on to earn a law degree from Harvard.
Like Governor Schwarzenegger, she is ineligible to become President of the United States because of her birth in a foreign country.
Favorite fact: One thing Ms. Granholm has in common with Arnold Schwarzenegger is the fact that both were contestants on The Dating Game television show.
1)Remove the H cap but require all H-1B Beneficiaries to have advanced degrees from US or foreign universities;
Why burden honest employers with DOL micromanagement? If the whole purpose of the labor condition application is to make sure that H-1B dependent employers do not cheat vulnerable foreign workers, then why not simply ban H-1B dependency outright? Do that, prevent any H-1B dependent employer from being able ever to file an H-1B petition and scrap the LCA so that no one has to worry about it any longer. Trees everywhere will breathe a sigh of relief;
2)
Level the playing field. Prevent any single employer from grabbing more than its fair share of H-1B visas by establishing a limit beyond which additional petitions will not accepted.
I assume on #2 Endelman meant a per company cap, as opposed to a national cap. If that were a percentage of the occupation (say 15%) at each company I may go for that. The goal should be to supplement American labor, not replace us outright.
This kind of a bill will help me personally but I don't support excluding people who don't have an advanced degree but have a few years of experience in the industry.
Firstly, without a worldwide ranking system for universities/colleges for each field, a merit based immigration system that doesn't require employer sponsorship doesn't hold any value. You can get an MS from a random university in the US or anywhere else but it does not necessarily mean that you are better than a person who graduated with a bachelors degree from one of the IITs and has a few years of work experience. In most cases, the employers will pick the IIT graduate.
Ideally, higher priority should be given to an advanced degree holder from a higher ranked program. I think it's ridiculous that a graduate from MIT gets the same priority as one from Lehigh University under the current system.
I may be able to support graduates from non US colleges as well, as long as the program is based on rankings. I'm all about competition. If we had a per-company cap instead of a national cap that might work.