The senior partner in my practice group wants to know - we are doing some marketing projects (it’s a rather uncertain time to be an immigration lawyer; the busienss clients don’t want to hire foreign nationals if they are going to have to spend thousands of dollars to make them legally employable, and the individual clients don’t want to spend any money, even if they have it).
I’ve set him up a LinkedIn profile, but I started poking around this morning, and so far Plaxo looks like a hybrid of LinkedIn, Livejournal, and Yelp. Is it worth bothering to set up a profile there, or is it a duplication and/or more of a personal contact maintenance service or somesuch than a way to do professional networking?
As far as Plaxo goes, I have a friend who uses it, and likes it, but it’s probably not so much how well it works but how many people use it that is the key concern. I think Linkedin is probably more well-known, etc. I’m not aware of numbers of users of the competing applications, so I can’t tell you if there is a clear winner there. You can look through CNET reviews, etc. to get a better idea there…
On a slight hijack, you said that your business clients don’t want to hire foreign nationals if they are going to have to spend thousands of dollars to make them legally employable. If that’s the case, then does that mean that they’re hiring Americans once again? Is the difference in paying wages + fees for hiring foreigners is no longer as economical now that desperate Americans are going for cheap? Or is it that the economy sucks so bad they’re not even hiring “cheap coolie labor” anymore?
This is probably material for a far different thread, but what I meant to say is that if employers are laying off thousands of people, it’s even less likely that they are going to want to hire foreigners for whom they have to pay for employment visa petitions. And for the major category of professional work visa (H-1B), as well as for employment-based green cards, employers are required by law to pay at least the prevailing wage for the occupation, experience level, and geographic location of the position, so if they are following the law, it isn’t any cheaper to hire a foreign worker (au contraire, it’s more expensive because of the legal compliance requirements). The main exceptions are currently extending visas for existing employees, or hiring people with rare skillsets that are in high demand in the U.S. workforce in spite of everything.
Admittedly, not every employer follows the law, but our clients do, or they aren’t our clients anymore if we find out about it.
Interesting. I didn’t mean to sound like one of those “them damn furriners takin our jobs” types, but I thought it might be that the economic downturn might have provided a tipping point in favor of American workers there. Eh, maybe, maybe not. Kind of like all the effort and expense thrown at border control is probably not as effective at stanching the flow of illegal immigration as the recession. Or the fact that we don’t seem so het up about foreign oil so much now that gas costs half (or somesuch) what it did 6 months ago.
