US to hike H1B visas, merit will count for green cards

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54. Please read the details

The H-1B cap increase would come with many strings attached. Among the strings, there would be further compliance requirements and IT consulting firms like Tata or Infosys (which are the bad guys IMHO) would really suffer. In fact, some have already complained that if this immigration reform were to pass, those types of companies would not longer be able to afford doing business.

About the education thing. Look, I'm one of those evil legal immigrants. I was educated in my home country until the final years of high school. From then on, I was educated in the U.S. To me, one of the biggest differences between the U.S. and other systems is the lack of interdisciplinary well-rounded knowledge in U.S. schools. It's one hour of history, one hour of math, one hour of English, etc., but there's no interdisciplinary dialogue or discussion. In Italy, we would be discussing Baroque music, art, architecture, literature, history, science, math, etc. and how each discipline benefited from the other. We were already doing this in elementary school.

In particular, the ties between mathematics and music are very well known. In U.S. schools, students get to pick which classes to take beyond a set of required ones. In Italy, you have to study it all, whether you like it (or are good at it) or not.

In the U.S., testing is true/false or multiple choice, mostly. In Italy, testing is essay-based. Math tests are usually in the form of word problems. In Italy, you are tested and quizzed orally. The teacher will pick a student randomly. The student stands up. The teacher asks a question and the student must respond, but not simply by 'yes' or 'no.' The student must support the answer given by providing facts or proving equations or giving formulas or citing literary works or philosophers.

Italian schools are also not concerned with extracurricular activities or sports, unlike U.S. schools. While Italy is certainly not a top-tier system, my city's schools were - they have been studied by educators worldwide, in fact, especially at the elementary school stage.

I've been amazed at the lack of general knowledge that many U.S. college graduates and coworkers possess. These are assets that eventually surface in the workplace.