Obama has touched on a sensitive and valid unemployment issue. Job losses is blamed on immigrants. Serial stream of bad news from Bears n Stearn’s to Fannie Mae n Freddie Mac to Lehman brothers is further deteriorating the US job situation.

In the article “The Bitter Taste of Bigotry”, it is rightly said that one man’s loss in another’s gain.

Thousands of engineers and computer scientists arrive in America yearly to fuel high-tech businesses. Silicon Valley is filled with startups founded by immigrants, like Vinod Khosla’s Sun Microsystems and Sergey Brin’s Google. Astonishingly, Congress has actually reduced the number of special H1-B visas given to foreign workers, which allow American companies to import guest workers with highly specialized knowledge. As a result, many of these workers move to countries with more liberal immigration policies, like Canada and Australia. In these cases, America’s loss is another country’s gain.

Canada immigration is made much simpler that within 1 year with sufficient points based on higher education a Canadian PR (permanent Residency) status can be achieved and after three years the immigrant becomes Canadian citizen. Australia has similar system within two years of PR one can become Aussies citizen.

Compare this to PR (Green Card) in US which is now taking eight painful years compounded with H1-B visas reduction and a lottery system to get H1. Citizenship is another five more years. To become an immigrant a total of thirteen years are required so that would be 1/5th of immigrants life (assuming 65 years of stressful life) spent in this cycle.

To sum up – America’s loss is another country’s gain.