Would love to know more about this.....especially political affiliations....

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07173/796195-28.stm

I couldn't care less what party these creeps affiliate themselves with.  That's not the point.
Thomas Friedman says "The world is flat."
Well, this is what the flat world looks like.
You like?
::)

The law firm is complying with the laws set down by Congress.  (letter of the law?  spirit of the law?  Let's put it this way -- nobody ever went to jail for violating the spirit of the law.)  The letter of the law says that in order to get an H-1B for some furriner (and the sort of rights that lead employers to say "you don't like our wage, go back to India"), all you gotta do is show the government that you're paying more than a number that the government has determined was a fair wage.  To get a green card (and the sort of rights that lead employees to say "pay me more or I'll go work for your competitors"), the letter of the law says you gotta show the government that you did what the government says is a fair recruitment process.

The government, of course, is decades behind the times.  That fair wage for the H-1B?  The survey was taken years ago.  So to get an H-1B, all you gotta do is offer him what you were paying people in 2001.  That proof that not one single American out of 300,000,000 is qualified, for the green card?  Well, you see, in Fedland, everyone reads newspapers, so if you wanna keep an alien on board after six years, recruiting in a newspaper is more than good enough!  (In Fedland, that Intarweb thing, with crazy companies like the one with the weird monster and the "dot com" after its name?  Or that llist operated by some guy named Craig?  In Fedland, they didn't fill out the proper forms, so they don't exist!)  So if you wanna recruit in a way that convinces Fedland you're doing it "right", you've gotta use media that guarantee you're not gonna find qualified candidates anyways. 

So it's easier to hire a guy you want to underpay (H-1B) under threat of kicking him back to his home country, than it is to hire a guy (the green card guy that you're willing to spend thousands of dollars in legal fees to hire, plus all the paperwork for the "recruitment" process) that you actually want to keep, under penalty of him leaving your job for the next highest bidder.

The law firm is advising a company of all the BS it'll have to put up with in order to legally hire a guy.  If the company wanted to underpay the employee, they'd keep him on as an H-1B.  The only reason the company is going through all this crap is because it wants to keep the guy on staff for more than the 6 years permitted to H-1Bs.  And it's willing to take the risk, after spending thousands of dollars (and years of time) on paperwork, that after all this work, the employee thus blessed with the green card will take advantage of his newfound right to simply shrug his shoulders and walk across the street to the competition.

The law firm isn't at fault here.  Congress is, for designing an immigration system that lets in 12 million illegals to pick fruit, knock each other up, and breed anchor babies by the thousands, but won't let in a few hundred thousand high-tech specialists who are too nerdy to ever breed but  who'll actually contribute more in tax dollars than they'll burn in social services.  Because the citizen friends and relatives of 12 million illegals outvote the few million techies who have no friends and whose relatives stay at home.  And it ain't about growing the economy, it's about getting re-elected.

"When it gets down to it -- talking trade balances here -- once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here -- once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel -- once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity -- y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else

    music
    movies
    microcode (software)
    high-speed pizza delivery"

- Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash.

If I had a green card, and this immigration bill passed, I'd apologize to my employer, tell them to keep my last two weeks' salary as partial payment for the crap they went through to retain me, and hop on the first plane outta dodge. Sorry, boss, your government has said it'd rather have an economy of fruit-pickers than an economy of technologists.  This isn't just about immigration -- if I were in biotech, witnessing the stem cell research "debates", I'd have already left for more profitable shores.  America, as the engine of technological progress, has jumped the shark.  The sooner Atlas shrugs, the better.