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Affiliate Marketers: Time to Stand Up
For those of you who’ve been around me and know a bit about my background, I used to be very politically active. While that activist streak has mellowed with my ever increasing age, every now and again I find an issue that is worth championing. When flipping though TechCrunch the other day, I saw a group of Representatives had pulled together a piece of legislation that makes sense for all of us to get behind — H.R. 1930 and its Senate counterpart, S 1083. For most of us, all it takes is a brief stroll around our offices to see the contribution that foreign born workers make. Most of these people have advanced degrees and are some of the brightest people I know.
I’m not out to spark a debate about immigration here but simply want to provide information about an issue that impacts us as affiliate marketers and as members of the tech community. I’d encourage you to take a minute to klank out a letter to your Representatives and Senators. It’s really easy. Below you’ll find a copy of the letter I wrote to my Representative, Jane Harman and Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, feel free to tweak it to fit your feelings. I’ve also provided a link to the TechCrunch post too.
Affiliate Marketers do your best.
Congressional Research Service Summary of H.R. 1930 and S. 1083
Find out who your Repesentative is
Find out who your Senators are
My letter to Rep. Harman:
Honorable Jane Harman
2321 E. Rosecrans Avenue,
Suite 3270
El Segundo, CA 90245
Dear Representative Harman,
I respectfully write you to express my support for H.R. 1930, the Securing Knowledge, Innovation and Leadership Act of 2007 and urge you to become a co-sponsor of this legislation.
Your district is home to many vibrant technology firms that help develop some of the world’s newest technologies. Many of these firms such as the one I work for depend upon foreign-born but American educated workers. Sadly, many of these workers who have migrated here to better themselves and make significant contributions are sent home with their taxpayer subsidized educations because they are unable to obtain a visa. This seems illogical to me. These college educated immigrants are highly skilled workers that we want living in the United States and by not granting them a visa to work here, we lose twice. We loose first because we subsidize their university educations and we lose again when they return to their home countries to take up leadership roles in foreign based companies.
A recent example of America losing because of our immigration policies not supporting highly educated workers is a recent announcement by Microsoft to open up a development facility in Vancouver, Canada. Within their announcement, they specifically stated this facility was for foreign born workers who could not obtain the H-1B visas to work in the United States. If H.R. 1930 were to become law, instances like the one above could be avoided and we could have thousands of the world’s best and brightest leading businesses that employed other Americans and paying taxes to the United States instead of to competitor nations.
H.R. 1930’s most important provision besides raising the cap on H-1B visas is its provision that allows any foreign-born individual who receives a masters degree and higher from an American higher educational institution to continue to live and work here in the United States. This is simple common sense.
I urge you to co-sponsor H.R. 1930 and ask you to take a leadership position on this important legislation by urging Speaker Pelosi to bring this matter to a vote on the House floor.
Sincerely,
Lee Gientke
6 Comments
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This makes perfect sense. Another thing that makes sense is to let foreign-born workers to contiue to live and work here when they were living and working in the country for 5 or 6 years already and they reached the maximum lifetime of their work visa (L1 = 5 years, H1 = 6 years). They should be able to change companies or start their own business (get the greencard pretty much automatically, if there are no other reasons why they should not get one (criminal record etc.))
Disclaimer: I am extremely biased in this case, because I am one of those foreign-born workers who ran out of VISA and had to leave (unwillingly) the country without knowing, if and when I would be able to return to what I call my new home.
p.s. I got my greencard last year, after being in the country for 7 1/2 years.
Carsten, you were a person I was thinking of when I wrote that letter… like you say, this makes sense. I hope you and some others spent a moment and a stamp to write your representative.
-Lee
Is that my representative? I cannot vote because I am not a U.S. citizen. My stamp does not mean anything and I do not represent a vote that could be lost (although I could make other people change their vote, but many folks do not think that far hehe) and I have a Conflict of Interest (= extreme bias).
I have the name and address, phone number etc. of “my” local congressman. I contacted him in 2005 to ask for help in my case, when I had to leave the country involuntarily for several weeks. He wasn’t much of a help though.
What do you think?
Carsten, the only reason I wrote my letter was because I have an opinion and hope these guys will agree with me. Worst case is that you write a letter and you tie up the staffer who has to draft a response to you. I think your representative will be George Radanovich or Jim Costa. Visit this link:
https://forms.house.gov/wyr/welcome.shtml
to find out. No need to mention you aren’t a citizen in your letter… You are a constituent and they are supposed to care for you too!
Hi Lee,
Yep, Radanovich would be the one. My old company did his website design. He is good friend with the owner of my former company (and he (the owner)) supports Mr. Radanovich financially. Since you were in politics, I thought that this little extra info would be interesting for you.
” No need to mention you aren’t a citizen in your letter”
hehe.. sneaky
They probably remember still my name though, but I got the idea. Actually pointing out my case, which they already know about, is just another good reason why he should support this. Its not the same thing from a technical point of view, but the consequences are the same and people tend not to care about the technical details that got them pain and misery.
You have to leave the country, in a very short period of time, with no idea if you can ever go back to your new home and new friends.
Maybe as a tourist after a while, if they let you in, which is depending on the “technical details” of your specific case and time-frames, not a sure thing.
Specifically when you want to visit the U.S. as tourist. That is the time since the day you had to leave. Well, you can see that I spent some time thinking about such things.