Dear Representative:

As one of your constituents, I wish to bring to your attention a very important issue about jobs being lost from the United States, and ask for your support in any and all legislation that will help keep decent middle-class jobs in this country.

Recent studies indicate that U.S. employers will move about 3.3 million white-collar jobs and $136 billion in wages overseas in the next 12 years. The most recent study by Gartner, Inc. ("U.S. Offshore Outsourcing: Structural Changes, Big Impact") reports that an alarming 500,000 IT jobs will move just in 2003 and 2004. That’s about one in 10.

Major high-tech companies, such as IBM, Hewlett Packard, and Microsoft, have already started moving work to cheap labor countries such as India, Russia and China. Do we really want to export our technical know how to China? In many cases, U.S. employees are required to train their foreign replacements, and then they are laid off. With the current economic recession and the depressed state of the high-tech industry in the U.S., this is the most unpatriotic action a company can take.

What is most alarming is that these are highly technical jobs that require advanced college degrees, and commonly become the basis of knowledge for business critical application development and military technology that our nation’s security and economy depends on. We are exporting our know how, and our information based technical specialization that was supposed to replace the Industrial Economy we just shipped overseas last decade.

I am one of many developers who came up from the ranks of IT development to make major contributions to both the private and military sector. Commonly the job boards overflow with requests for highly trained IT professionals with secret clearance, these jobs often remain open for months at a time. On the other hand the mid level IT jobs aren’t available, and developers go without wages for months at a time because the competition is high for the few remaining jobs, and are forced to contract for brief periods with no benefits. How do you expect that our country will be able to fulfill the demands of an information age if we don’t grow that talent internally so that a few large companies with no interest in America can save pennies on the dollar?

I strongly urge you to support any and all legislation that will:

1. Require U.S. employers to disclose the jobs they are moving, and provide incentives for keeping high-tech jobs in the U.S., and provide deterrence to moving them abroad.

2. Eliminate the H-1B and L1 visa's which allow foreign workers to take U.S. high-tech jobs. The IT unemployment rate is high enough that experience U.S. workers can likely fill all available jobs currently being performed by foreigners.

I hope I can count on your support.

Sincerely,

Clay Graham
Software Engineer