To: The Dallas Morning News
Date: March 28, 2000
Subject: Technical immigrants to the United States
Result: Not printed due to limited space

Dear Editor,

There was an article in a recent Business section of the Morning News by Jim Landers, who bemoaned how, with all the software that is being rushed into the marketplace these days, much of it is of a very feeble quality. Mr. Landers compares the USA to China and especially to India in saying that their technical training and products are so superior to ours, that we had better watch out or we may find ourselves in the same situation as the U.S. automakers did previously, when large quantities of people started buying foreign-made automobiles. Because that was where you had to go to find basic quality and reliability.

As one who spent 12 years in information systems technology, programming and designing software for businesses, working directly for many companies, and also as a customer representative for a number of consulting companies, I have a perspective on this issue.

I myself had a problem in the data processing profession (as I called it then). I had this attitude that was like, let's do it right, let's do it good - and let's take the time and care to do that. That caused me problems, and was an impediment to my career. The reason was that most of those around me, including management - to whom I did not decline to impart my views - had the basic attitude that said: Just slop it out as fast as you can and we'll worry about the problems later. Or, better yet, we can let somebody else deal with the problems somewhere down the road.

Indeed, I believe it is this attitude that was at the bottom of the whole "Y2K" debacle.

But that's history. Now we have the problems that were addressed by Mr. Landers in his article, one of which was how we have such a dearth of technical personnel in this country that we are constantly having to raise the number of technicians who can immigrate to America from India and other countries.

Related to this whole matter is the well-publicized problem of how people in technical professions are paid so well, whereas teachers are paid so poorly - so they say - that there is a strong incentive for people not to teach courses in science and math, but to take advantage of the high salaries that are paid to people working for industry in the technical professions.

I have an idea. There are many people in the world who have technical skills that we need who want to come to America. The waiting list for such people is long. They want to come partly just because it's America, and also to take advantage of the high-paying employment opportunities we have here.

So let's give them half of what they want. They can come to America, where teachers make more money than they made in their home countries, but in exchange for that privilege, they have to agree to teach for, say, 5 years before they will then be free to sign up for those very high paying jobs with industry.

The advantages of this arrangement for everybody concerned seem so self-evident that I see no need to say any more about it.

Thank you, John Vehon