6. Lax recruiting in the USA shows glut of able & willing workers.

Have you asked executives what efforts they're taking to recruit.

Indeed, help-wanted advertising in print media is down to less than 20% of what it was in 1987 according to the Conference Board.   Unfortunately, no one was keeping track of on-line employment advertising before the Clinton-Bush-Obama economic depression.   The figures available begin in the deepest depths of the 2002 trough, and thus are not useful for making comparisons one way or the other.   To get a reasonable base-line would require data going back before 1982, but the web didn't yet exist atop the Internet at that time.

In how many major newspapers do they regularly advertise their job openings?   Is it closer to 2 or 52 for each job opening?   Are they in general circulation and trade and professional publications widely read by STEM workers, or a place where you're hoping you're not likely to find able and willing US citizen applicants?

While employers were recruiting on-line in the late 1980s, no one was keeping track of how many such ads were posted, so we do not have a base-line to compare with the current, Clinton-Bush-Obama economic depression era.   All we know is that on-line advertising has generally increased since the worst depths of 2002.

Perhaps it is true that some very rare jobs are difficult to recruit for, but the case is much harder to make in high tech, where over a million US workers have struggled for years, sending out thousands of resumes, doing pick-up work, networking, and taking survival jobs while they try to regain full employment.   The thing to do is hire the best and then educate or train them in the specific niche that goes beyond their base skills.   1996 June
graphs of employment data

Unfortunately, the vast majority of these ads posted on-line are not for real, full-time permanent employment making hardware or software products.   The vast majority are for bodyshopping (temporary, contingent, consulting, contract, "staffing", "solutions", "services", PEOs...).

In any event, the firms whose executives whine the most loudly and disingenuously seem to be the least interested in actually interviewing, relocating, educating and training US workers, since they refuse to include contact information in their job ads such as hiring manager or HR contacts' names, e-mail addresses and telephone numbers.

At the same time, we hear that some of these firms are awash in resumes.   Recruiters have been complaining since at least 1998 that they're inundated with hundreds and even tens of thousands of applications for each job opening and are overwhelmed by the task of cherry-picking.   Many have turned to software tools and data-bases to parse and extract limited data from resumes, or on-line forms, which results in many capable candidates being over-looked.
1998-08-20
1999-03-22
1999-12-31
2004-02-22
Career Planner: Resume Bots
Business 2.0: Resume Parsers
2007 InfoWorld: Resume Parsers
2009-05-26: candidates dumbing down resumes to avoid age discrimination: _WSJ_/_Yahoo_
2010-02-26
The Recruiting Back-Lash: David Kagan: _Challenger, Gray & Christmas at Work_

Another result is that applicants are put through series of telephone screenings, trivial pursuit quizzes that test rote memorization, "stress" interviews.   They seem ready to try anything to find a rationalization for rejecting capable and willing US citizens, as demonstrated in the 7th annual employment and immigration law seminar by Cohen & Grigsby, and now Fragomen et al..   These are large, respected firms, and these methods are general throughout the country as witness the reactions of the immigration lawyer associations and hints at more covert application of the same practices in Dallas and elsewhere.   2007 June

"But it's one thing to not give priority to Americans, and quite another to actually exclude them.   The latter would presumably be (reverse) discrimination on the basis of immigration status, which is illegal.   Such exclusion is commonplace.   It is usually hidden, but in a surprising number of cases it is overt.   Those of us who study this issue have seen it for years." --- Norm Matloff _H-1B/ L-1/ Off-Shoring e-News-Letter_ 2006-06-20 "How the Pros Work the Immigration System"
Hiring H-1Bs only
Matloff on h1b
2006-06-20

US Department of Labor's Strategic Plan for 2006 through 2011, on page 35 states:
"H-1B workers may be hired even when a qualified U.S. worker wants the job, and a U.S. worker can be displaced from the job in favor of the foreign worker."
DoL strategic plan pdf
2007 Programmers Guild

The Federal Register 2006-06-30, Sec. 2, paragraph 4: "the statute does not require employers... to demonstrate that there are no available US workers or to test the labor market for US workers as required under the permanent labor certification program." (from Donna Conroy)

graphs

There was no shortage of talented USA citizen STEM workers.

There is no shortage of talented USA citizen STEM workers.

No credible evidence of impending shortage of talented US citizen STEM workers has been produced.