The U.S. has fewer people employed in high-tech jobs today than in 2001, because it refuses to issue enough green cards. - Inspired by a report released by AeA, a tech trade assocation

However, how much of it is because of the recession? While tech is still a very profitable business in the U.S., the effects of our shaky economy can be felt everywhere, and unemployment rates have been on the rise for the past year.

My initial thoughts were to disagree, but looking at all the angles of this I agree. The US government is so concerned with the effect of immigration into the US, but it is crippling itself, by not allowing people to legally immigrate to the United States. We are educating and providing opportunities to educate to people from many parts of the world, but when that person wants to stay and become a member of our society, we tell them no. I think that we should seek out these great minds and allow them to become active members of our culture. Allowing them to help us regain some footing in the international market.

I was inclined to disagree with the headline but the article actually raises an excellent point. I think a lot of people are wasting opportunity in the sector, particularly second and young minorities of Latin and African-American ancestry. Meanwhile while first generation immigrants from Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa and all over the world come here, get excellent educations and often times go elsewhere for work. This is largely because degrees from their own countries often aren't recognized by large corporations, and definitely won't command the same salaries of the equivalent education from the west.

There's also no real incentives for people to stay here, the process is harder now to become a citizen. Often times Indians, Iranians, Lebanese and others from the Arab world are all lumped into the big "CAUTION" category. The government can't seem to make up it's mind on whether or not it does, or doesn't want illegals to become naturalized.

BF Skinner wasn't bs-ing when he defined positive-reinforcement as it relates to behavioral science. You have to reward the actions that you wan't people to continue. The U.S. government is essentially inviting the people of the world here and then slapping them on the wrist every step of the way. No wonder they choose other countries to live in.

The government has become far more stringent about issuing visas in general in recent years – regardless of profession, merit or capability.
There has definitely been a recent exodus of people who do not hold US citizenship recently – some calling this the reverse brain drain, as a sizeable chunk of all engineers, bankers and IT professionals (all professions basic to a country's infrastructure) are not American.
"U.S. businesses large and small stand to lose critical talent, and workers who have gained valuable experience and knowledge of American industry may become potential competitors… The problem is simple. There aren't enough permanent-resident visas available each year for skilled workers and their families. And there is a limit of fewer than 10,000 visas that can be issued to immigrants from any single country. So countries with the largest populations such as India and China are allocated the same number of visas as Iceland and Mongolia," writes Vivek Wadhwa of Businessweek

Whatever happened to motivating and orienting the youth and those needing vo-rehab to high-tech positions and filling from within the U.S.'s existing population? Hmm??

If this is true then maybe we should focus on educating our own population instead of foreign students....novel idea...don't you think?

Nonsense. The U.S. has fewer people employed in high-tech jobs today than in 2001, because it refuses to educate its youth.

Well, I worked in the tech industry until 2001. I left because the bursting dot.com bubble had caused panic layoffs to ensue, and after that, the few remaining available jobs were so low-paying that it was a slap in the face to my 7 years of college education. A foreign worker here on a Visa may find it acceptable to move into an apartment with several other families so they can work for peanuts in the high-tech industry, but I do not. I now work as a photographer and am so much more fulfilled than I ever was in the tech industry. The U.S. Tech Corporations have caused their own problems by alienating their workforce. The U.S. Auto industry struggles year after year on the verge of bankruptcy because they lost an entire generation of car buyers with their shoddy vehicles in the mid-1960's through mid-1980's, and they will never regain the confidence of that generation of buyers. The tech industry has done exactly the same thing with their American workers. They have lost an entire generation of skilled American workers because of their stupidity, and they will never win them back.

Have you tried hiring a talented programmer or IT person? It's impossible. Every company in St. Louis, including my own, pounces on anyone with real talent as soon as they're available, and poaching between companies is rampant. Salaries are very high, and getting higher every month. It's not unusual here to get a 10-20% raise every year by switching jobs.

On the other hand, there is a large supply of incompetent or underskilled tech workers that aren't employable. If you're having trouble finding IT work, I suggest you take a hard look at why no one will hire you, and fix the problem. Unless you're demanding six figures, the issue is not your salary.

Is education to blame? To some extent, yes. But we're also running up against simple math. Programming is hard, only a small subset of the population can ever be good at it, regardless of our education system. We're getting close to employing 100% of that subset. Improving education can move a few people into IT, mostly ones with minimal aptitude for it. Long term the only answer is to pull in people with skill and talent from other countries, or do nothing and watch our companies leave for countries with untapped talent pools.

Okay this is Charlie Hancock again... Lets look at your information and put it up against my experience. During the dot.com bubble I earned $72,000 per year working on a web site that was a direct competitor to amazon.com. After 2001, unable to find work on my own, I signed up with several recruiting firms that test their applicant's skills. Most of them just told me I was one of the most marketable people on their list. One of the firms went further and told me that I had the highest scores on my three expertise areas that they had ever seen and I completed the tests twice as fast as anyone they had ever seen. My best job offer after that was for $18,500. There was another job offer that was for slightly more, but it would have required either moving my family to a lousy neighborhood, or driving 1 hour and 15 minutes each way every day. I did some consulting work after that, but the companies demands on my time were ludicrous for what they would pay. Their expectations included software development at bargain basement prices, but also hundreds of hours of unpaid time spent meeting with them trying to decipher their specifications from vague descriptions of the work they perform, as well as post development training events where I furnished projecting equipment, a conference center location, etc... Simply not possible. It was then that I knew it was time to move on. Conditions may have changed since then and companies may be willing to step up and treat tech workers properly, but it is far too late for me and many other techies that I keep in contact with, we have seen the big picture and moved on.

This nation needs to feed our own citizens FIRST. Regardless of gender, ethnicity, or color, it is the responsibilitiy of this nation to first care for our own citizens.

The question to ask is why aren't more AMERICANS employed in the High-Tech sector, and what can AMERICA do to place more AMERICANS in this sector.

I don't think we need more foreigners dominating our country... Let them dominate their own country's high-tech sectors and don't pay them to learn from us and then compete against our way of life and our country.

Why is our educational system so great at producing FOREIGN experts?

AMERICANS need to support and encourage AMERICANS in education and business...it's good for AMERICA!

The rest need to go back home and develop their own educational instituitions and fairly challenge the US in business, commerce and such... I'm cool with that.

Well in my last post on this issue, I briefly mentioned the "big picture" at the end, but I didn't elaborate on it. So let's dive into that issue some more and it will answer your question, KB...

If you read my posts you will see that I had a very hard time after 2001 and left the tech industry to pursue photography as a result. That time was a very challenging time for the entire I.T. work force. Massive layoffs, families and lives disrupted.

50 years ago, this situation would have been handled completely differently. Corporations would have seen the opportunity to grab talent and treat them right so that they would stay with their company until retirement, where they would get a gold watch and a very nice parting benefit. They would realize that if the American I.T. workforce was to survive, companies would have to take part in doing the right thing for the long term betterment of the U.S. and their own companies' workforces.

Instead, what happened in 2001 is that companies saw the opportunity to bargain hunt for the best talent in the world at third-world salaries. Instead of sucking it up and helping the I.T. industry during it's time of need, executives only thought of themselves. The CEO's could have chosen to only purchase a Lexus that year instead of a Rolls, to leave enough available cash to hire good talent and treat them right for the long term, but they did not. They saw the I.T. workforce as a disposable commodity that they could do with as they pleased. What they didn't realize is that we as I.T. workers are able to think for ourselves, and many of us decided that we wouldn't be a part of that rat race anymore.

So now the U.S. is left with a pool of I.T. talent that has moved on to independent pursuits, and companies are moaning because they can't find enough foreigners to fill our spots. I hope you can see why I don't have any sympathy for them.

Charlie, you may have had a bad experience and you're bitter as a result, but that doesn't mean your experience is true for everyone else. I survived being laid off and working several crap jobs after the big dotcom crash. You know how I did it? I took the best job I could each time, and relentlessly updated my skills and improved my chances of being hired.

Now I'm on the other side of the desk, and I'm doing the hiring. What I see is a small number of Americans with the right attitudes that have no trouble getting work, and a much larger number of people that haven't kept their skills up to date and aren't willing to compete.

Trust me, there is no shortage of work for Americans with skill, talent, and the right attitude. I've been turning over every stone to fill positions, and there's simply no one left in my area that doesn't already have a great job. I've tried to train people, I've tried to give people a chance, but in the end the truth is you can't survive without qualified people, and if the only ones on the market live somewhere else, then that's who you will hire.

Before the dotcom crash, there were a lot of "IT" people that should haver have been hired in the first place. Companies had no idea what skills they needed, and they hired blindly. The crash cleared the chafe from the system. Now companies have a much better idea of what they really need, and people with those skills are much harder to find. That's the root of the current problem. There is a huge pool of people that call themselves "IT people" that no one wants, and a very tiny pool of people that actually have the qualifications for the jobs that are going unfilled. There is no magic wand that will transform the unemployable into IT geniuses. Education will improve the supply to some degree, but unless computer geeks start reproducing like rabbits, we have no choice but to bring in the best people no matter where they live.

If the numbers are true and the US really does have fewer people employed in high tech than in 2001, how does issuing green cards to foreign nationals to work in the US grow US jobs? The jobs are now foreign jobs. There only US jobs if they are filled by US workers.

We have fewer jobs because the employers want to pay less for the same work.

It IS about money. Period. I used to work at a university in the labs, where I wondered why there aren't any US students around - especially since it was a land-grant university. I was told that there simply WEREN'T any American applicants. Why? Simple - who in their right mind would take an RA position working 80 hour weeks for several years working on a thesis plus whatever personal jobs the prof cooks up for $12.5k and a cheesy room when they could simply get a job (and a life) paying in the $40Ks which would pay for them to attend night classes and eventually take the General Exams at the end? The aforementioned immigrant 'technology worker'. Thus the utter lack of feedstock from US universities.
Know what else? The fraction of 'good' tech professionals from abroad isn't better than here - it is a farsight worse. Bogus and unverifiable degrees and credentials written in a language a hiring authority cannot read are far from uncommon. I have PERSONALLY witnessed one instance of a 'technical professional' from the pacific rim editing a pdf of an academic paper to add himself as an author where he had no connection to the research. I have caught another from the same country cutting and pasting data from a US national lab into her thesis and passing it off as her results. I was verbally assaulted by another when I PROPERLY calibrated a piece of analytical equipment because it no longer gave the "right results" - apparently I wasn't briefed on the doctrine of 'calibrating to the expected value'.
Why is it, I wonder, that US employers are actually resisting hiring foreign tech professionals? I have this from two well placed individuals that they try VERY hard not to hire from offshore. Why? The QUALITY of work isn't very good. Sure they take the job at the payrate and show up for ridiculous hours - but that just isn't enough.

First and foremost this is a digital age issue not a Nation-State issue. Those who continue to use 'Nation-State thinking' tend to treat this as an immigration or national issue - it is not! Fortunately the world is flat thanks to the Internet. Thus the C21st challenge for US employers is to take full advantage of that fact and use the power of Web 3.0 social networking to help solve their employment needs. Jobs not filled? What jobs can not now be filled in a Web 3.0 world of social connection, conversation, and cooperation. Yeah sure your new worker lives on the other side of the planet to you - so what? She lives in a different time zone - so what? She is subject to a different tax structure, etc - so what? The good news is she can be working for you within the hour and fit into your crew seamlessly even though she can not easily hang with them at lunch in their favourite cafe along University Avenue in mid-town Palo Alto. From time to time she can visit the gang for some face time. Generally though she will work from home and love the fact that she is part of the new world of work - she understands that she is an integral part of a global network of workers who occupy their working life online and contribute to innovative projects/programs from Palo Alto to Hong Kong to ..... She is proud that her digital age workspace is almost carbon free - she loves the fact that she is an part of a connected conversation that goes around the globe not around the cubicles. She enjoys the fact that she is a free agent - this means she can work on or contribute to a huge variety of networked or distributed work programs.... She is paid equitably. She is happy that her workspace is transparent to all. She is content with the knowledge that her future employment depends entirely upon the success of the products/services she develops with her global colleagues. She lives within a world of work that is inclusive not exclusive. In stark contrast Google Inc is anchored by its commitment to the Googleplex in Mountain View California which is still used as the hub of future developments. The same can be said for US innovation in general which is anchored by its commitment to a Nation-State notion of work, workers, copyrights, etc. Microsoft has not yet joined the digital age and it is suffering the negative consequences of that decision - America will do the same if it ignores Web 3.0 social networks as a means for developing cooperative innovation loops.....

@Allen: Pretend you're running a lemonade stand, and you hire 100 lemon squeezers. Then someone invents a lemon-squeezing machine, but it's very hard to operate. You only need 10 people to run the lemon-squeezing machine, but there are only 8 people in your country that know how. The result is 100 unemployed lemon squeezers, and a 2 person shortage of machine operators.
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There are less tech jobs than in 2001 because many of those jobs are obsolete. The jobs that replaced them require new skills, and there are not enough people with those new skills. IT is not digging ditches. Just because someone can do job X does not mean they will ever be able to do job Y. That is why statistics that lump all tech jobs together are close to useless.

@JoshJ: THAT is a solid analysis of the tech jobs market - and why the published analyses of said market are not reliable to understand the details. Well done - and applicable far beyond IT (where I work). I STILL, however, cannot believe your hiring issues in St. Louis (was it?) are due to a shortage. I am an excellent case in point - I have a broad skill set and I learn quickly. My resume has been described as 'flatly unbelievable and absolutely fabricated'. The broad and eclectic nature of my employment stems from my taking all manner of questionable low end positions where I made good (like you, kinda?). Now? I present a stripped resume, if one at all. I am now an executive leading development of applications for a polymer company on a global basis. No proper biz training or education - I read up a bit and get good cues from my leadership. Why can't hiring authorities like you find gems like me? Simple - YOU AREN'T LOOKING FOR US! You firmly believe you are but the process being used is not one that will pan the gold from the silt. That method seems only to reveal shiny bits that are taken as gold but almost always turn out to be pyrite, at best, or mica or even shards of broken beer bottles (tuit - litter - castoffs from others). Historically, employers take candidates that seem to have a better 'punch list' than mine only to discover that the other guy didn't have any ability - just a good 'hire me' script, executed masterfully.
Some free advice - listen to those willing to tell you things you don't want to hear. I have found that in dysfunctional organizations, this guy gets kicked and beaten - whereas in highly functional groups this guy is lauded and appreciated for picking better paths and avoiding disasters. After years of being passed over by guys like you, I now have a job I HAPPILY commute 35 miles each way ($4.50/gal and all) that I am DUG IN TO for the duration. We are out there - plenty of us - you just aren't really looking for us. I believe that you believe you are but it just isn't so.
Enjoy the weekend!

Lots of interesting comments on this one as well as perspectives. It sort of reminds me of the old poster where you have 3 or so people that are blindfolded and each one has their hand on the elephant...on at the trunk, one at a tusk, and one at a leg. There are a lot of reasons why there are not as many US citizens working in the IT field and most everyone here has their viewpoint of the symptoms (based on which part of the elephant that they are touching). And as an IT consultant that has worked within the Fortune 100, for a defense contractor, and for smaller companies for about 30 odd uears I have seen / been impacted by pretty much all of these symptoms.

Given that perspective...This is both a Digital Age and nation state issue, it is definitely about money (tax structures, laws, and the like included), there are plenty of IT resources that are US citizens available to work, hiring companies are looking for perfect fits/lowest rates/willingness to work for free, and finally I have counseled all of my children NOT to go into the IT field. Regrettably, IT and the workforce for it has been commoditized and devalued. Those of us with a solid education in business and IT who are willing to keep our skills current are left to 'hold the bag' that we have been holding despite the hole in the bottom. It still beats, 'would you like fries with that sandwich sir/ma'am' or digging ditches.

I think it is fundamentally a business issue that is affected by national decisions.
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Businesses no longer care about employees, only the bottom line and their quarterly earnings. Their loyalty is not to a nation, it is to their shareholders, and as such, they will gladly outsource or higher cheaper labour at home.
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For me, a US job is a job that generates money for the US tax system, whether or not it is held by a US citizen or not.
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The US has become the World's university but the K-12 system is far behind many countries and so many of the foreign students coming here are better prepared for university work than American high schoolers.
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I was educated in Jamaica which uses the British System and my first 2 years of college in the US was a breeze because most of what I had to do in my math, english, biology and chemistry classes was taught to me before I was 15.
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The national issue is that the US K-12 education system is sub-par and so it turns out potential workers that generally do not have the aptitude to excel at the tech jobs that need to be filled, which is why the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is supporting education projects.
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Hiring foreigners is only a stop-gap solution and not a long-term one. Nothing short of what happened with the space program - a massive investment in educating people to better prepare them mentally for specific kinds of study - will solve the problem facing America today.
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Clean/Renewable energy, technology, science and engineering have to be given as much priority as basketball, american football, baseball and being a movie star/pop idol.

Einstein was German, Werner Von Braun was German, Fermi was Italian, Federico Faggin is Italian. Without brilliant minds from abroad the US would not have gone to the Moon, would not have had the nuclear technology, nor the atomic bomb, would not have had the computer chip.

@GregPalusa - All true. And NONE of them were hired because they were cheap - they were GENUINE cases of bringing in the talent from abroad. Their contribution is inarguable - which can NOT be said of much of the hoards of H1B holders washing ashore... Please understand - no one is saying foreign talent is valueless, just that the argument about needing foreign help to make up a shortage of qualified Americans is bogus (or at the least, misguided).