Daily features: July 12, 2007

• Daily video

Tomás Contreras, a legal immigrant and entrepreneur, talks about his three-month stay in an immigrant detention center. He was detained on his way back from visiting family in Mexico. This video is part of Voces de la Frontera's reality tour.

• Thursday blog round-up

• 'Gandhian' visa flower protest by Indian immigrants gets noticed, and the SAJA blog compiles news links.
• The StructuralPatterns blog wonders why and how Rudy Giuliani can 'collapse' immigration and terrorism together.
• The GreenFertility blog ridicules Pat Buchanan for stating that immigrants bring disease into the country; followed by a news article that states that the unhealthy are very unlikely to immigrate at all.
  

• Cartoon of the day

By Daryl Cagle at MSNBC.com. Published July 11, 2007.

H-1B visas for highly-skilled 'dealt death blow'

The newly-blocked S.1639 immigration reform bill is talked about a lot in reference to inflow from Central and South America, and mostly in terms of "low-skilled" immigrants. However, as we've posted before, the "high-skilled" and their employers also had a stake in the bill.

CIO Insight reports:

High-tech companies such as Microsoft argue that a decline in the number of United States-born computer science graduates over the last seven years has forced them to rely on the H-1B visa and employment-based green card programs to deliver adequate supplies of qualified IT and engineer professionals.

"That can only be achieved through immediate reform of these programs to ensure they are meeting the needs of our economy ... It is our hope that the Congress will prioritize finding a solution to these urgent issues before the end of the year," said Microsoft officials.

Earlier: High-tech execs demand foreign workers