You miss another point.

It lowers the pay of skilled workers, making people less likely to choose those career paths.

The IEEE has some good papers on this.

-- It could be worse. I could still be living in Texas

Nursing is not a highly paid profession? Excuse me. A registered nurse might not be as as well paid as a Medical Doctor, but the RNs I know are doing way better than the average school teacher with a master's degree. They are doing almost as well as the average small practice lawyer.

Supply and demand, supply and demand. We have a lot of teachers, and a lot of lawyers. Registered nurses have been in great demand for many years. That is exactly why the nursing schools limit enrollment. They want to limit supply exactly the same way medical schools limit the supply of physicians, and for exactly the same reason, to create a shortage.

Ron Byers

Corvid

But wait a minute, we're forgetting the party line here. A huge influx of immigrants from desperately poor countries isn't supposed to have any effect on U.S. wages.

The present government sees everything as a business deal. Cheap labor skilled or unskilled is a welcome bottom line. There is no recognition that labor (all labor) has value. There is no urgency in training a future native-born workforce.
Need software engineers get visas and import them. Need farm workers open the borders. Need nurses import them.
From taking on 10-15% of Mexico's population to perform "menial" labor to visas for Indian engineers we are devaluing hard work. "Menial" jobs that were, in the past, stepping stones to higher wage jobs have been taken over by immigrants. Jobs requiring math skills go unfilled because math skills are not a high priority in schools and American born enginnering graduates are declining. In addition anvisa-engineer is cheaper than a native born engineer.
The idea that construction work, farming or janitorial services are jobs that Americans won't do is the self fulfilling prophecy of a government that looks the other way when American workers are discouraged from entering a given job market by below par wages and that uses non-voting "guest-workers" as pawns.
When considering skills required for technical jobs such as math or physics, there is no governmental response that would reward student achievements in those areas. Former astronaut Mae Jemison, among others has projects involving high school students in the physical sciences and showing the beauty mastering these skills exposes. Want better video games an integrated ipod-PDA-video recorder? Learn the skills to design them. A government sponsored learning based project placing science at the forefront (similar to the science explosion after Sputnik) would be helpful.
But, wait, we're spending our time arguing about stem-cell research, whether we should release information that suggests that global warming may be occurring, and whether a vaccine that may prevent up to 70% of cervical cancers will lead to promiscuity and therefore not released. We also have a cardiac surgeon Senator who can look at a 2 year old video of a brain dead woman, and say she looks OK. So forget that whole emphasizing science in the classroom thing.
Let's just keep importing the labor and skilled workers we need who are willing to work or lower pay, and ignore training a future workforce. We can all just make movies. The world loves American movies

Training nurses is expensive, so we just outsource this to the third world. In these countries education costs less (or in some cases nothing) and the US benefits by importing the skilled workers. If nursing could be done remotely they wouldn't need to migrate. So much for the argument about service jobs not being exportable...

--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape

In the abstract, I'm obviously a big proponent of free movement of people. The problem here is a potential bias in US policy that would allow skilled medical people to come to the US, while blocking their patients from following them.

It is precisely the selectiveness of US policy-- the conditions imposed on trade, on capital investment, on immigration -- that create distortions in global development.

This isn't as clear cut as the US not training enough nurses. There are more than enough trained RNs in the US population to meet the demand. But the attrition rate for the first five years for nurses is extremely high. Nursing in a hospital setting is a hard job. Long hours on your feet, the need to stay professional while dealing a with a population that is ill, outside of their comfort zone, usually a little scared, and sometimes openly belligerant.

They have to take precise notes and records. Failure to do so can lead to medical catastrophe for the patient or censure for the hospital by regulatory agencies.

Nursing pays well, but there are alot of other ways to make a living in the US. Many quit and become per diem nurses who get to choose their own schedules, thereby becoming a stop gap solution to the problem they're contributing to.

With the funding crunch in healthcare its hard to see them raising RN wages consideralby. But if some solution could be found to keep new nurses in the profession longer then we eventually wouldn't need all that many foreign nurses to immigrate.

Its just too bad you don't have the same concern for American workers impacted H1-B and L-1 visa workers that corporate America imports.

Here's is the nasty dynamic-- the US refuses to invest in training and education of our own population...

Utter cark Nathan, this is the same nonsense spouted by AEI and others corporate think tanks to excuse the massive importation of skilled labor that has harmed American tech workers.

If you left your cheap labor liberal mentality back in Berkeley and actually studied the issue you'd find that many American tech workers are now either under employed or not employed at all the fields they were trained in.

See during the 80's Americans were told hi-tech was the future for jobs so a lot them went to college to get various sorts of technical degrees. We had engineers and scientists aplenty and still do.

However during the 90's American corporations began massive off-shoring and importing of H1-B and L-1 workers began. American tech workers got it from all sides.

As a result a lot of tech work is no longer done in the U.S. and workers have ended up in non-technical work, older experienced engineers were lucky to get a occassional consulting contract.

In short its not about education its about American corporations who have used every tool availible to make themselves profitable - at the expense of the American worker and the future of this country.

In regards to the nursing shortage there are several bottlenecks causing this.
1) A limited number of seats in nursing schools. We have far more applicants than seats. There are no state or federal initiatives to deal with this issue.

2) A high turnover in Nursing. IMS 1/2 change professions within 3 years. The complaint - they end up as paper sufflers thanks to HMO red tape. Most of these folks didn't become nurses so as to push paper.

FWIW

Yes, but we're also suffering a critical nursing shortage in this country. Sure, you don't want the "C" student as the surgical assistant on your heart surgery, but I'd be happy with a lot more "C" students taking my temp and blood pressure and freeing up the really good students to close my surgical wounds. But right now both are being forced to do way more than they should.

I find it unfortunate that everything in this debate continues to focus on higher education, which essentially assigns everyone with only a high school degree as "unskilled." Which, unfortunately, is quite true today, because our standards for a high school education have become so low that it's more of a right of passage than any form of employment training.

A lot of these "unskilled" workers don't have the time or money to spend their early 20s working through yet another educational program. When they get their HS diploma, they want to be able to find work then and there, as some already have kids or will have them soon, and don't want to put additional burden on their parents. And yet, most high school graduates have effectively no employable skills, and have to learn everything on the job. That's not a good educational system, that's compensating for a bad one badly.

Our students should be learning in middle school, now largely a wasteland of unproductivity and misery, what they learn in early high school. They should be learning in high school what they're now learning in early college. Or, for that matter, they should be learning how to work a trade, and learning it well. This way, we would have the most skilled carpenters, electricians, leatherworkers, stonemasons, and craftsmen coming out of high school, along with students fully ready to enter a three year nursing program.

This would be a much better and more productive use for our primary and secondary education dollars, and would prevent the need for investment in extremely expensive higher education programs, keeping those optimally focused on professions which actually need advanced training, such as teaching, nursing, law, medicine, engineering, etc. By improving the productivity of our high school graduates, we increase their employability. And if we get them better training in high school, without the need to send every last person to four year college degrees, we gain years of productivity rather than consumption. And that benefits everyone, most of all the student.

Note: I am NOT advocating less education. I am advocating more intensive education, earlier, with more vocational education in late high school.

Walt- You are obviously a skilled recruiter for your viewpoint, since even when a person might agree with you -- as I do with the problem of H1-B and other hightech visas -- you insult them :)

Of course there should be more government initiatives to expand the seats in nursing schools and improve nursing conditions to retain existing nurses. More unionization of nurses would improve retention, since that leads to better treatement.

The point is that the US has plenty of capital to invest in upgrading our training facilities and educate the existing population to fulfill a host of needs, while absorbing a relatively large amount of unskilled immigrants. That kind of policy would promote social justice both here and abroad.

While I agree with Friedman's basic point, I think that his statements are being driven by a lot of
Randroid/Libertarian ideology too.

-- It could be worse. I could still be living in Texas

Which, unfortunately, is quite true today, because our standards for a high school education have become so low that it's more of a right of passage than any form of employment training.

Your perspective presumes that the purpose of getting an education is to be employable?   HOW so?  Our public schools are not employment training centers.  Nor should they be. We educate students and public schools should not serve as a training ground for employers.

That would be shifting the employers cost onto the public taxpayer. Which is unacceptable.  It is the employers  responsibility to train individuals and provide the skills essential to productivity and profit for his business.  NOT public schools. Corporations controlling education is fascism.

Public schools educate minds.  Educated minds are essential to a democracy....not job skills.

So wait the solution is to let anyone who feels like it declare themselves a neuro-surgeon???

You left off another possible consequence: that people would mow their own %^$#ing lawns.

If having a lawn mowed cost $120, a lot of people would get a cheap mower, and do it themselves.

-- It could be worse. I could still be living in Texas

Education has the same problem. The vague desire to help students gives way to the reality of commanding the attention of 20 second-graders who would rather be elsewhere.

This is turned into a "we need more teachers/nurses/pharmacists" crisis, rather than a we need to treat the teachers/nurses/pharmacists we have like valued human beings so that they will have the energy to do their important jobs.

Visas for foreign workers in a given field be balanced against the turnover rate for non-immigrant workers. Fields that refuse to retrain and retain workers as technology shifts should not be allowed to simply import new workers from overseas. The average career in the field for someone with a computer science degree is something like seven years. Why should people make the investment in an education if corporations are just going to use them up and toss them aside?

Thanks to rmrd0000 for laying out the institutional background. In a perfect world, you would completely split the functions of capacity planning and quality control. Any university should be allowed to open a medical school, provided the school meets quality standards set by the profession - isn't this what happens in other professions, lik engineering and law?
This is clearly a matter of the supply of places not demand. There's excess demand for places at current levels of earnings; there still is in the UK with lower ones, at any rate for doctors - I'm not sure about nurses. A drive for expanded training should be part of the Democratic plan for national health care, AMA be damned.

I'm uneasy with the hierarchy of value placed on different categories of workers. Developing nations are losing needed human capital (not to mention the destruction of families and communities) by the immigration of "unskilled" working people, just as they are from the immigration of professionals and others with specialized training.

I personally don't think the construction trades are unskilled and I assume those construction skills are needed in Mexico and other developing nations. What Mexico needs is a populist revaluation of their economy- making good use of all workers in the building of a prosperous nation.

That's no more utopian than our assuming that mass immigration is values based and not just a hunger for cheap labor and greater inequality here in the US.

In as much as much of that nursing labor is being expended treating retirees,

In as much as retirees typically like warm weather, and the Philippines have that,

In as much as retirees have limited incomes, and living costs in the Philippines are low,

Why not export the retirees, instead of importing the nurses?

If Brad the Dad is right and Americans can't do quality work or difficult work should just give up as a country. I do believe that work has been degraded as a desirable thing to a certain degree, but I also believe that Americans work hard everyday. One of the limits to access to a graduate nursing degree, for example, is the debt incurred in most cases to pay for the degree. That financial burden presents a barrier to most people. After paying for a nursing degree, you're now asked to pay for a PhD. A country that truly believes in education would provide scholarships to encourage higher education and ease the economic burden.
At the other end of the financial spectrum, I just saw a report from Washington state on cherry picking. An orchard owner could not find US natives to pick cherries even at $9/hr. For 50 wks of constant work (5 days a week) the annual income is $18K. A cursory review of McDonalds payment schedules suggests a full time employee with one year of experience can earn $8-10/hr. Perhaps Americans are not lazy, but understand the job market perfectly.

A few points that get easily overlooked in this type of discussion:

1. Until recently, everyone KNEW that the US had and was continuing to train too many doctors, because of the increased efficiencies of managed care. Medical schools decreased their available slots accordingly, as well as postgraduate training programs. Today, everyone KNOWS that we will soon have too few physicians.

2. It is generally accepted that more physicians does NOT equal cheaper healthcare; instead each doc seeks to feed his/her family/educational loans by doing more procedures, etc.

3. Due to the need to match the physician supply pretty closely to actual need, national committees meet to develop a concensus re how many physicians the US needs to train each year. Many medical schools (maybe half) are state-supported and seek to match their local demands as well. Note that all medical education is expensive and is never covered by tuition costs. So there's always an institution that determines how many physician training spots it's willing to subsidize. For those interested in reading more about this process, see www.aamc.org

4. The vagaries of our reimbursement system are such that we pay doctors very little to talk to and examine patients, and quite a lot to take pictures of them, interpret pictures of them, and stick implements, possibly sharp, in them. These incentives have powerfully shaped the system that we now "enjoy."

Bottom line: centralized management (not really control) of medical system training capacity is not necessarily a bad thing. Note that much of what I've said does not apply to the nursing situation. I think that if hospital nurses felt they were being adequately paid for the crap they deal with every day, there would be no shortage.

But karl,

The fact that there's a nursing shortage to begin with means that we have to fill it *somehow*. Many of these foreign nurses coming to the US-- I hate to admit it-- are going to be like your "C" student, not because they're lazy but because they don't have the level of training or cultural familiarity that American nurses have. I've seen the results of this up close, and when you're a nurse, little miscommunications can have fatal consequences. This is another reason that I don't like the idea of importing foreign nurses en masse (with less training than here in the US), just as much as I'd be opposed to, say, a mass migration of US nurses in the opposite direction.

The best thing to do is to expand the number of nursing school slots and help advertise the profession. There are plenty of strong, well-qualified US students who'd love to go into nursing, but there aren't enough schools, and the pay is not commensurate with the challenge of the work. So we fail to attract the high caliber of people that we otherwise could, into the nursing profession.

"The issue is not a shortage of US nurses..but ashortage of nurses willing to work in hospitals."

I would modify that to read, "a shortage of nurses willing to work for the crap wages they're currently paid for all their effort and their many years of training." Many doctors and construction workers, for example, have extremely stressful and demanding jobs, but with fair and proper wages and benefits (including reasonable amounts of vacation time), they can work decades without burning out.

But with our nurses, they don't get paid anywhere near a fair wage. Basically, the message to US nurses is, "we'll happily exploit for your labor, but we won't compensate you fairly in return." The solution to the problem is to both train more nurses here, and to compensate them fairly.

That's naive, Dan. Nobody's forcing the nurses here, nobody's claiming that-- the problem is that we're providing an obvious and easy hook to draw them in, *while they've been trained in poor countries that desperately need them*, while failing to provide squat in terms of compensation for the countries we're poaching them from. It's the desperately poor subsidizing the already filthy rich.

I worked in India for a while, and I saw little kids dying-- by the many thousands, as it turned out-- from easily treatable diseases because there weren't enough health care staff, they were lured away to the US or UK without anything approaching a fair compensation to Indian hospitals (e.g., funds to help expand nurse training and provide more incentives for others to remain). There has to be something approaching a fair compensation scheme, as I discuss below, or countries like India and the Philippines are going to start imposing draconian measures to prevent the exodus-- e.g. contractually demanding that nurses work 7 years or so in country to be admitted to nursing or medical school, or even (in a few cases) switching the language of advanced instruction from English to French. These countries are desperate, and we have to be considerate of the situation from their side.

An additional problem too is the rapid pace of technological change. A nurse is a nurse is a nurse (Yes, I know there are some nursing specialties in existence). Once trained s/he can go anywhere with current skills. Not so in tech fields. A person with eight years of VB6.0 experience (let alone 20 years of COBOL!) is looked askance at by an employer who wants people with VB.Net experience. Skills are so highly specific that they do not transfer well from one job to the next and this makes a tech job search, even when one has a superb resume, a frustrating experience (and a candidate search by the employer is probably just as frustrating)

You don't get off the hook that easy, sorry.

Yes, technology changes. It's one of the things that makes this field exciting. But the idea that some kid from India just out of school with six months of Java experience is going to deliver more than a guy with 8 years of C++ doesn't fly. A GOOD software developer can make the switch fairly easily because he understands the principles of programming. My experience with H1Bs is very uneven. Some are outstanding, some are average, and some are simply in the wrong field - same as Americans. The problem is, in the never-ending quest for cheaper labor, bottom line thinking takes over and you have people making decisions who DON'T HAVE A FRIGGING CLUE who is a GOOD developer or even what the technologies they are looking for are, and have no idea what other technologies with different names might be a close match - so they'll easily fall for the resume with the right buzzwords over someone with real talent. All the better if they cost half as much.

I know, it's happened to me. I had to fight for my current position against all the people who looked at my grey hair and dismissed me without a second thought. The large company who eventually DID hire me out of dire necessity (because I did have a precise skill on my resume) got much more than they bargained for and is now, two years out, awfully damned glad they did.

Again, the people who understand this stuff are pushed to the side and the green-eyeshade boys take over. It drives much mischief these days. The USA is basically flushing itself down the toilet.

You're right about high turnover, but it has little to do paper shuffling. It's all about work load, as health systems try to decrease staffing. It's a bit like the factory upping the pace of the assembly line, but if you make a mistake it's someone's life--incredibly stressful. Some states are introducing patient/nurse ratio limits which counterintuitively ease the nursing shortage. Right now it's a vicious cycle. Management cuts staffing and training to save money, nurses leave in response to work load, management pays obscene amounts to nurse staffing agencies, needs to cut staffing more, etc, etc, etc.
Nurse staffing agencies are consistently listed as one (or more) of the top 5 contractors on 990s(Nonprofit IRS forms).
I worked on an organizing campaign where management wanted to move the nurses onto 12 hour shifts and fill in breaks with agency nurses. The response at the negotiating table wasn't "no", but "what are you stupid?" I know I don't want a nurse who has been running around the floor for the past 12 hours performing triage or bagging a premi.
Many hospitals and nursing homes also try to replace RN's with LPNs, giving them borderline and sometimes blatantly illegal tasks. Nurses are in the profession for helping people as well as for the money, so when management prevents them from doing their job, they run the other way.

I would modify that to read, "a shortage of nurses willing to work for the crap wages they're currently paid for all their effort and their many years of training

Nurses with BS and MS degrees make excellent money...wages are not the issue.

Uh, try again. Still aiming low.

Any Registered Nurse (only one state, North Dakota, I believe, requires a BSN for entry to practice) will make at least 50K in a hospital. Starting salaries in my region are 60K+. I make $31 an hour part-time (Yes, I am an RN, too, with an associate nursing degree and I'm on the low end of the part-time scale for pay, most places are $35-$40/hr). My wife makes 90K on the first rung of management. CRNA's make at least 120K around here. 150K is not unusual for CRNA's.

That said, what other commentators have said about the hours and the work conditions is right on point. My wife conciously made the effort to rise to management to get away from bedside nursing, though she has gone back due to necessity at times (the same forces at work in the broader work world play in hospitals, too. Job tenure is often shortened for many reasons, especially in large markets like mine.

Marc

Uh, try again. Still aiming low.Any Registered Nurse (only one state, North Dakota, I believe, requires a BSN for entry to practice) will make at least 50K in a hospital. Starting salaries in my region are 60K+. 

Yes, and,I was being conservative,and yet I believe the assertion was they make at least 50K ..which means we agree, these are not low-paying jobs.

No, you do not have to have a BSN to be a licensed nurse. Hospital training programs turn out LPN's.

Job tenure is often shortened for many reasons, especially in large markets like mine.

Yes, hospitals just like other corporations,force out top-earning workers for budget cuts.

The transfer of high wage IT U.S. jobs to lower cost foreign workers via offshoring and H-1B visas is contributing to unprecedented levels of unemployment among American electrical, electronics and computer engineers. Offshoring and H-1B visas also pose a very serious, long-term challenge to the nation's leadership in technology and innovation, its economic prosperity, and its military and homeland security.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the U.S. Information Technology workforce consists of 3.56 million people as of the end of Q1 2006. That’s the largest IT workforce number since 2001, when the number was 3.574 million, but it’s still a dismal number. Why? BLS counts both the employed and the unemployed as part of the "IT workforce" headline number. After adjusting the headline number to account for the IT unemployment rate there are only 3.471 million IT workers actually employed in the U.S. today, less than employed in 2001

It gets worse; America's population has grown by over 15 million people since 2001 so the number of employed IT professionals has declined while the population has grown by over 15 million. In 2001, 1.25 percent of all Americans were employed in IT. In 2006, 1.19 percent of all Americans are employed in IT.

Digging yet deeper into the BLS numbers shows that many hundreds of thousands of IT workers who lost their jobs since 2002 and were lucky enough to find other IT-related employment have done so at lower salaries and are underemployed. Furthermore, people who don't find other IT-related employment are dropped from BLS statistics altogether - they are considered to have "left the labor force." The real IT unemployment rate is higher than whatever figures BLS posts in any given year or quarter, because it simply makes no allowance for the many hundreds of thousands of IT workers who remain unemployed or have take a job at WalMart. They vanish from statistical tables.

Yet, in the face of such unemployment, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and other technology industry executives lament they are perplexed by the declining enrollment in computer science programs at the nation's universities. In March Gates personally added his voice to his company's lobbying effort to expand the number of foreign-born computer scientists allowed to work in this country under H-1B visas.

But many IT professionals question whether the scarcity of qualified employees is as dire as Gates and others claim given the high IT worker unemployment rate. There ARE unemployed U.S.-born computer scientists, many with advanced degrees, available to fill the Microsoft positions; they just cost more to employee than Chinese or Indian computer scientists.

Now the Bush Administration and his GOP controlled US Congress want to further undercut U.S.-born students, their parents and the U.S. workforce in general. President Bush and Congress are about to greatly expand the H1B and L1 “guest worker” visa programs via the giant Immigration Bill, now pending before US Congress.

Read my full OpEd article at opednews.com

There are multiple disincentives, given purely bottom line concerns, to hire US citizen IT personnel. Established salary, for all ages, tends to be higher than acceptable for H1B workers, even though the H1B legislation calls for parity or even higher than parity wages. One of the problems here is that an employer may move to a low-salary area.

In the past, relocation expense was a fairly standard benefit, but has become unusual. One of the problems of the current IT workforce is that a good deal is concentrated in larger cities or high-cost areas. While the lower cost of living in many lower-cost areas could make a lower long-term salary (with employment) competitive, someone in a high-cost area may not have the disposable cash for a move. Compare the expense of moving a household with the expense of flying in an H1B worker whose family remains behind.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Thanks to rmrd0000 for laying out the institutional background. In a perfect world, you would completely split the functions of capacity planning and quality control. Any university should be allowed to open a medical school, provided the school meets quality standards set by the profession - isn't this what happens in other professions, lik engineering and law? This is clearly a matter of the supply of places not demand. There's excess demand for places at current levels of earnings; there still is in the UK with lower ones, at any rate for doctors - I'm not sure about nurses. A drive for expanded training should be part of the Democratic plan for national health care, AMA be damned.

Oh please. The AMA does not control med schools like that.

In fact, any university at any time can open up a med school and the AMA has zero control over it. There are set standards that are set by the LCME (Licensing Council on Medical Education). These guidelines are public. As long as your school meets these guidelines, you can open up as many medical schools as you want.

IN fact, thats why Florida is opening 3 new med schools within a 5 year window. The AMA had no influence over any of it.

As long as you have a few extra million dollars lying around, anybody can start a new med school. So lets quit pretending that the AMA has some kind of secret domination over creation of new med schools.

Where the AMA comes into play is with creation of residency slots where med students train AFTER med school.

This whole debate is missing a larger point, which is that the AMA has very little control of the practice of medicine.

1) Did the AMA volunteer to allow nurses the power to script medications? No, the state legislatures did.

2) Did the AMA volunteer to allow the creation of special nurse practioner programs? No.

3) Did the AMA volunteer to allow thousands of foreign medical graduates and doctors flood the USA every year? No. Nearly 40% of all residents in training are foreign medical grads. The USA takes in more foreign doctors than ALL OTHER NATIONS, COMBINED. Does that sound like a tightly held AMA monopoly to you?

4) Did the AMA volunteer to allow creation of "naturopathic" med schools whose grads can script drugs just like MDs? No.

5) Did the AMA volunteer to allow psychologists the ability to script drugs? No.

6) Did the AMA volunteer to allow the creation of CRNAs, who can do everything and anything a full blown anesthesiologist with roughly 6 more years of training? No.

For the vast monopoly quasi-labor union that you claim the AMA to be, they certainly havent done a very good job of locking up their market. Everybody and their brother scripts drugs and diagnoses diseases now, most of them dont even have medical doctorates. The only monopoly I see is perhaps surgery. I guess you advocate we hand over surgery to kids straight out of college as well?

What you also ignore is the influence of osteopathic, DO schools. DO schools have a separate accreditation body and have been expanding like wildfire.

When you look at both new DO and MD Schools, its clear that there is a massive upward ramping of programs. Since 2002, there are at least 25 new medical schools either built or in planning stages.

So get off the rhetoric of monopoly already. If the AMA ever had a monopoly, it ended about 30 years ago.

Total growth in jobs is probably up. The problem is regional underemployment, and it appears that it's often much harder for citizen IT people to relocate. Since H1B visas grants, as I understand, are based on local shortages, there's a disincentive to assist with relocation when an H1B worker may travel single and lightly.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*