Yes, professional nerds have an interest group. Here’s what they’re up to at the moment:

The Programmers Guild, a group representing IT workers, has begun filing what will amount to about 380 legal complaints against U.S. companies advertising that they prefer to hire foreign workers with H-1B visas.

The group has filed about 100 complaints since May and plans to file about 280 more over the next six months, said John Miano, founder of the Guild. The complaints, made to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), accuse several companies of advertising that they specifically want H-1B workers, a violation of U.S. law.

The U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act requires that U.S. jobs must be available to U.S. workers.

Now, the charge may turn out true, I don’t know enough to be sure. But poke around on the Programmers Guild website & you’ll see this goes further than a mere “hey, waitaminute!” thing. They see their livelihood as being attacked, so their response is to blame it on tech-savvy immigrants. It seems everyone wants to blame immigration for their problems all of a sudden, it’s sad.

Of course, that’s only half of the story. Considering the case at hand I asked myself “hmm, if the charges are correct, then what’s driving them to do it?”, which prompted me to look into this whole “H-1B” mess. Going straight for the horse’s mouth, I find the following:

Who can an H-1B alien work for?

H-1B aliens may only work for the petitioning U.S. employer and only in the H-1B activities described in the petition. The petitioning U.S. employer may place the H-1B worker on the worksite of another employer if all applicable rules (e.g., Department of Labor rules) are followed. H-1B aliens may work for more than one U.S. employer, but must have a Form I-129 petition approved by each employer.

In other words, people who fall under this designation are legally tied to whatever job gets them accepted, barring what’s more than likely such a huge stack of paperwork that most don’t bother. When you’re an H1-B worker, the US government effectively acts as a huge temp agency — if not a pimp. No wonder they don’t want citizens, whether current or prospective, the labor market for H-1Bs is artificially rigged against the workers.

So, one side wants to run the IT departments of the country as serfdoms, while the other looks at tech-savvy immigrants the way Tom Tancredo looks at the guy that does his landscaping. Here’s an idea: abolish H-1B, & all other arbitrary hoops to jump through on immigration. You want to come here, whether permanently as an american or for awhile to run networks, long as you aren’t a known criminal come on in. The Programmers Guild’ll be pissed because of the sudden lack of discrimination, & the employers of tech guys’ll be crying because they can’t screw over Habib & expect him to stay, but fuck em. When advocates of increased government power on both sides lose, that’s a win in my book.