Dear Rep. Woolsey,

I am a 37 year old software architect who is among the top 3% in experience and pay scale for my profession and I am having trouble finding work. As a result of the dot com market crash, many of my peers are now out of work and prospects are looking dim.

Last year, Congress considered the American Competitiveness in the Twenty-First Century Act of 2000. It was designed to increase the number of H1-B visas for highly skilled temporary workers that can be issued each year from the current level of 107,500 in Fiscal Year (FY) 2001 to 195,000 each year through FY 2003.

The expansion was ill-advised as the shortage of highly skilled workers does not presently exist. While a brief shortage may have occurred in 2000, this shortage was caused by overly optimistic investing in dot com schemes. This period of madness has passed.

The actual shortage is of young, minimally skilled, recent graduates, and somewhat more skilled foreign workers willing to work on software for below market wages. Many of my peers, among the most experienced and gifted experts in industry, find themselves out of work and displaced by annually replaced, inexpensive, temporary, H1-B carrying workers.

Expanding the H1-B visa pool has produced a labor glut in the software industry and resulted in a very real loss of income for myself and my peers as companies lay off Americans and replace them with cheap, indentured, foreign workers.

In addition, software professionals in my age group begin to experience "old dog" discrimination as employers begin to perceive us as both over-paid and falling behind the times. The conventional wisdom is that it is more economical to hire more cheaper, minimally skilled workers and apply brute force to the development effort than to hire a few highly skilled professionals at their well deserved senior rates. This is a false economy but a popular one nonetheless.

I urge you to take action against the expansion of the H1-B visa pool as it is costing our own highly skilled work force jobs as well as helping to build the experience base of our foreign competitors at our own expense.

Sincerely...