Daily Doings at the Line of Death Bar & Grill

Not so many years ago, there was a shortage of computer programmers here in America. We were dealing with the Y2K problem at the time. So we opened our doors to immigrants from other countries who had talent in computer programming and software development. And thus, the H-1B Visa program was born. It was a good idea at the time.

In 2000, I worked on a program for a client that tracked engineering drawings and reminded them (and their managers) if a drawing was going to be late. Two years later, I'm told that a team in India will be taking my code and re-writing it in Java to be used business-wide, and that I would not have any involvement in the effort, other than the notes and code I already provided. At the time, I thought, "Great for globalization and the bottom line. Not so great for American programmers."

Somehow, the idea that companies can offshore their software development to people in other countries became all the rage. Why pay an American programmer to do the work when someone overseas can do the work for less than half the price?

And here it is, 2011. The American economy is in a recession, has been for the past few years, and may very well be on the verge of depression. We appear to have a glut of computer programmers now. So why are companies keeping American programmers like me out of work? (I can't be the only programmer in this situation.) Because the folks from overseas are still cheaper than I am, and may be able to do the job better than me because they're trained and experienced with the new technologies that are in demand.

So I'll ask: Is it time to retire the H-1B visa program? Or do we need to curtail the amount of foreign workers that come to America every year?

Or am I way off-base on this one?