Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2011 11:35:18 -0700
From: Norm Matloff <matloff@cs.ucdavis.edu>
Subject: followup on S&E workforce workshop, July 11

To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter

Earlier I reported on a conference held on July 11 at Georgetown
University on the science and engineering workforce, which included much
discussion of H-1B and other foreign worker issues.  

One of the organizers of the conference, my UCD colleague Phil Martin,
has placed some of the presentations and a summary of the conference on
the WCPSEW Web page, http://migration.ucdavis.edu/wcpsew/more.php?id=6_0_7

One of the (non-speaker) participants in the conference, Daniel Kuehn,
posted his views of the talks, at

http://factsandotherstubbornthings.blogspot.com/2011/07/stem-workforce-conference-yesterday.html

By the way, the person who, in his words at the above link, "aggravated"
him but turned out to be enjoyable to talk to at dinner was me. :-)

I archive many of the posts I make to this e-newsletter, in
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive and my report on the conference is
at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/SloanDC.txt  I'm mentioning
that here for two reasons:

1.  I have added some new material to my report, consisting of various
points that I recalled later after posting my analysis. 

2.  I have removed the names of agencies of participants.

As someone who has done research on security and privcacy in statistical
databases, I am especially sensitive to the privacy issue.  The
conference operated under Chatham House Rules, meaning that one could
quote what was said but not who said it.  Actually, I learned later that
those rules also exclude giving affiliations, which I didn't realize at
the time.  I've thus removed affiliations from my updated e-newsletter
report above; if you made a copy of my posting at the time, I'd
appreciate your replacing it with the new one.

Of course, the above WCPSEW site now shows both names and affiliations
of some of the speakers.  Moreover, I'm aware of at least two
participants who posted full lists of the speakers on their Web pages.
However, I would note that there were a number of non-speaker
participants at the conference as well.  (All participants, speaker and
non-speaker, sat around a table and listened to presentations and then
discussed them.)  In the case of government agencies there was typically
more than one participant from a given agency, so one really can't
deduce who said the things quoted in Phil's report or mine.

Named or not, the conference participants did include a number of people
who are in very influential positions concerning H-1B and related
issues.  Thus Phil's summary and mine, along with the selected
presentations, give you, the reader, a rare window into just what these
influential people are thinking on this topic.

Norm