With all the recent talk of immigration reform and problems with visas since 9/11 (after the Patriot Act made it harder to get into the country)- rarely does anyone talk about the brain drain out of country and into our competitors because of these policies. I’m not talking about keeping the Mexican farm workers out. I’m talking about keeping the Indian, Chinese and French scientists in.

But our policies are converging to make us non-competitive on the global stage.

One of America’s greatest strengths has been in attracting the best minds from around the world. If you have a chance, check out the recent movie “The Namesake” which portrays a young Indian couple who give up the life they’ve known specifically to come to New York and live the American Dream. They’re smart and they contribute to society. (And, then, their children do the same.)

But what if they had stayed in India instead? What would be lost to our economy?

On April 2, the US Citizenship and Immigration Service (part of the Department of Homeland Security) announced it was closing the deadline for H1-B petitions after receiving 150,000 in the first few hours of the first day you could file- for only 65,000 visas for 2008. The H1-B are the highly technical visas for foreign workers to come or remain in the United States. From the Times of India:

“This was expected. There is a huge shortage of skilled workers in the U.S in an industry that is still booming. Congress has to raise the H1-B cap to meet the demand,” said Andy Iyengar, vice-president of New Jersey-based Mascon Global Limited, which was among the many firms that rushed hundreds of H1-B petitions to USCIS on Monday to meet the one-day window that was widely publicised.

Many immigration attorneys had alerted clients to fill applications for 2008 on the first available date because of an anticipated USCIS cut-off and the lottery system.

Around a dozen top-flight Indian IT and outsourcing firms are believed to have filed hundreds, perhaps thousands of H1-B petitions on behalf of their employees to handle contracts in the U.S during fiscal 2008, which begins October 1 although applications are entertained from April 1 (April 2 this year because April 1 was a Sunday).

A survey of H1-B petitions for 2007 showed eight of the top ten applicants were either Indian firms (such as Infosys, Wipro, TCS etc) or US firms with large workforce in India such as Accenture and Cognizant.

Microsoft, Oracle and other tech companies have made personal pleas to their Congressmen, Senators and on Capitol Hill for the small quota to be raised.

Think about it for a minute. 65,000 a year. Over 22,000 teenagers applied just to Harvard this year alone. 65,000 visas is nothing.

In years past, the government has pushed up the quota to as high as 110,000. This still would not cover the 150,000 that applied for 2008 before the government stopped accepting applications.

H1-B visas rarely fill jobs that Americans can otherwise fill. They are considered specialty slots. From the San Francisco Chronicle:

By law, such temporary work permits are normally issued to persons who hold at least a bachelor’s degree. Government data show roughly half of people holding H1-Bs meet that minimum. The other half have master’s degrees or better, although high school dropouts with vital experience can qualify — which happened in 2003 when 117 fashion models won H1-B visas.

“In practically every graduate program in math, science or engineering in major U.S. universities, about half or more of graduates are foreign born,” Hoffman said, arguing that firms like Oracle hire these sought-after specialists on H1-B visas as a prelude to helping them get the green cards that signify permanent residency status or citizenship should they desire.

Microsoft’s Krumholtz, in reference to these sought-after foreign graduates, said: “We ought to be stapling a green card to their diplomas,” to make sure that they employ their intellects in the United States rather than returning home to compete against us.

If they don’t work here in the United States, they will certainly work for one of our competitors. Canada, Australia, and Great Britain are consistently ranked among the best countries in the world in which to live (with Sydney and Vancouver ranked among the best cities.)

It doesn’t take much to make great foreign-born talent decide to go to Sydney instead of San Francisco. If we can’t home grow the best workers here, let them in from abroad.

After all, what would Google be if Sergey Brin’s family (his father, a Russian citizen, was a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland) were not allowed to come to the United States in the 1970s?

Yet another great American success story.

America cannot afford to lose its edge. It must remain the nation of first choice for the creative class. Our immigration policies are making it harder to remain that first choice.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, thousands of workers moved to Oklahoma, Texas and Louisiana to take advantage of the oil boom that was creating thousands of high paying jobs during the oil boom. Housing prices soared. New shopping malls were built. It was the hey-day of the TV show “Dallas.”

And then it all fell apart. With it, thousands of jobs were gone. Only now, they’re back. But this time the story is playing out in Colorado, Wyoming, the Canadian Oil Sands and in Australia.

The companies can’t hire fast enough and they are paying wages far above the national average. From Businessweek:

If you’re a petroleum engineer in Colorado, where energy companies such as Shell, EnCana, and Halliburton are hiring like mad, you can write your own ticket. Even unskilled workers are being snapped up, says Sue Tuffin, director of the Mesa County Workforce Center in Grand Junction, Colo. “Parents are trying to convince kids to stay in school,” she says, but the lure of the gas fields is strong: “You can go to work on a drill rig with no training and make $30 an hour.” Pittsburgh-based Consol Energy Inc. is so desperate for coal miners that it’s staging a media campaign that includes billboards, the Internet, and its first-ever television commercials.

People who used to work in supermarkets or in landscaping or construction in Colorado, are now finding working in the oil industry is far more lucrative. It is almost like winning the lottery for many young workers and is reminiscent of the life altering wage increases seen in Silicon Valley in the late 1990s. From the Denver Post:

Bob Bryant had been stocking cottage cheese and skim milk in the dairy case at Safeway for a decade when he heard the siren song of oil and gas.

At the urging of an oil-worker friend, Bryant, 37, switched from being a dairy manager earning $14.21 an hour to a water-truck driver making $19.50. He started working 60 hours a week rather than 40.

His new job means getting up at 4:30 a.m. and commuting nearly 100 miles a day. He drives remote dirt roads in all weather and slogs knee-deep in muck at times. But Bryant has paid off credit- card debts and is looking forward to the day he can buy a new home for his wife and three children.

“I have no regrets whatsoever,” Bryant said.

As workers move into more lucrative jobs, there is demand for other goods and services. But, given the worker shortage, there is no one to do those other jobs.

Energy work, with annual wages that average more than $50,000, has increased demand for goods and services but left struggling businesses peppered with “Help Wanted” signs. The shortage cuts across the board into fast-food joints, construction projects and classrooms.

“There is such a demand, and it’s getting way worse. It’s desperate,” Mesa County Commissioner Craig Meis said.

“We are trying to hire a mechanic and can’t. In the past, that hasn’t been a problem. And we’ve had several people quit to go be oil-field water haulers,” said Tim Davis, an assistant sales manager at Grand Valley Auto Sales, where “Help Wanted” is posted on the marquee.

At the local county job center, there are thousands of jobs posted but not enough workers:

The energy industry, which is drawing more oil-field-support companies into the area to keep up a groundswell of drilling, has added 1,400 - or 75 percent - of all jobs created in Mesa County last year. Unemployment has dropped to about 3 percent, and less in the energy counties of western Colorado, while it stands at 4 percent statewide.

The Mesa County Workforce Center has 2,500 job openings listed but only 1,000 people in search of jobs. Twenty-five to 30 new job openings are posted each day. At the same time that the oil-and- gas industry creates this demand, fewer migrant workers are available because of more stringent laws pertaining to worker documentation in Colorado.

“If someone doesn’t have a job now, it’s because they don’t want to work,” said Beau Searle, district manager of Calfrac Well Services Corp., a company looking to add 20 employees.

It’s a great problem to have.

How long will it last? It seems that the energy boom has a ways to run. It could easily keep booming through the end of the decade.

Maybe those in Detroit or New Orleans should think about re-locating: to Colorado.

Am I the only one who reads the obituary page? Is that morbid?

I find it fascinating. The big city papers usually have nice articles about local prominent people who contributed in some way to the community, but were not “famous” for the most part. Sometimes they are teachers, professors, writers or businessmen.

But that’s just it. Most times, they are “men.” I’m not trying to start a gender war but apparently I’m not the only one who has noticed. The studying of obituaries for a look inside our culture and society has been going on for quite some time. In the 1970s, researchers began to investigate the percentage of men versus women that were mentioned in obituaries. Many researchers thought it would matter if it was an east coast paper (more the mainstream establishment) or a west coast paper (with its frontier and anything goes attitude). Apparently, it really didn’t. From the Encyclopedia of Death and Dying:

Kastenbaum and his colleagues set the bar; others challenged it using a variety of methods and data sources. For example, in 1979 Bernard Spilka, Gerald Lacey, and Barbara Gelb examined obituaries in two Denver newspapers, the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News, arguing that the West is more progressive than the East. They sampled obituaries from July 1976 through July 1977 in both papers. Their findings provided weak support for gender bias favoring males. This is most pronounced in terms of obituary length, but there is evidence that women receive fewer obituaries and fewer photographs as well. They concluded: “Economic, political, and social factors within Western society continue to support a greater valuation of males and this is perpetuated even in the manner in which one’s death is marked and remembered”.

In the 1970s, researchers believed that the “women’s movement” hadn’t progressed far enough along to make an impact on the obituaries- as those dying had been born, for the most part, before women were even given the right to vote. But research in the 1990s still showed that men continued to dominate:

Robin Moremen and Cathy Cradduck examined gender differences in obituaries in four regional newspapers in the late 1990s, following the original Kastenbaum method. In Moremen and Cradduck’s study, the New York Times represents the Northeast and is included in the original study; the Chicago Tribune represents the Midwest, the Los Angeles Times the West, and the Miami Herald the Southeast. As in previous studies, men receive significantly more obituaries than women, however, unlike the Maybury study results, Moremen and Cradduck’s study found regional differences: Obituaries are 7.69 times more likely to be written about a man than a woman in the New York Times (compared to 4.02 times in the original study); 4.21 times more likely in the Los Angeles Times; 3.11 times more likely in the Miami Herald; and 2.47 times more likely in the Chicago Tribune.

Male obituaries are longer (except for the Miami Herald), and significantly more likely to be accompanied by a photograph (except for the Miami Herald). The average age at death is seventy-nine for women and seventy-two for men, which is consistent with national averages. People in business and the performing arts receive the most recognition, with men dominating these categories. Women dominate categories like miscellaneous (including devoted to family, animals, and children; homemaker; volunteer; active with seniors), clerical/retail, and related to someone famous, usually a man.

Again, maybe those women who ran for Congress in the 1960s and 1970s hadn’t been dying yet by the 1990s. Now, there were women on the Supreme Court, more women as CEOs and more women Senators. But in November of 2006, the Chicago Tribune found itself asking the same question- are more men dying than women?

Why is it that so far this year about 73 percent of the Tribune’s obituaries are about males?

The newspaper’s research library checked previous years and found the gender breakdown roughly the same back in 2002 and in 1998. A man was the lead obituary writer one of those years, and a woman the other. The Tribune’s library also checked with other newspapers, from St. Louis to New York, and found the imbalance was similar or even greater.

The newspaper’s lead obituary writer, Trevor Jensen, said he scans news articles and death notices for interesting life stories. Obituaries should be neither tributes nor eulogies, he told me, but interesting stories that also reflect a part of society and the community. “They are lives that pique my interest and, I would hope, readers’ interest too.”

Could it be that many women’s lives just aren’t that “interesting”? It then becomes a question of what is an interesting life.

Maybe the obituaries will be changing in the next ten to twenty years as the Hillary Rodham Clinton generation starts to head to the heavenly gates.

But in a recent online interview, Bill McDonald, the obituaries editor at The New York Times, was asked whether his paper would consider an “affirmative action” policy to have more obituaries for women. “Ask me in another generation,” he replied “… the obit page is not a reflection of the times in which we live. It’s a mirror on a past that is slipping away.”

In past decades, women were not making inroads in areas that would warrant an obituary- i.e. in making money. Now, however, the tide is turning. In 2006, 70% of veterinarian students were women (making up 36% of all vets.) In the legal profession, 30% of all lawyers are women, but they make up 50% of law students (and, at some schools, are the majority.) It’s only a matter of time before these women are getting written up in the paper upon their deaths.

Or is it?

Forget the Donald. Real estate is so, like, yesterday.

The greatest investor in the last generation just put out a “help-wanted” sign for a new investment manager. Yes, Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, who is now 76, realizes that he needs someone much younger in the #2 position so when he’s, um, no longer with us, that person can step in.

Recently, the #2 in training was GEICO investment manager, Lou Simpson. Unfortunately, he’s already 70 himself. So that won’t work (sorry Lou!).

Buffett made the announcement in his letter with the Berkshire Hathaway 2006 annual report. According to CNBC, which talked with Buffett shortly after the annual report was posted on the Berkshire website, he received his first resume within 6 minutes of the “want-ad” going out. Within a few hours, he had 20 resumes.

Buffett even listed the criteria for what he’s looking for. The criteria don’t sound too strict:

Picking the right person won’t be easy, Buffett said, because they’ll have to have the right qualities and Berkshire needs to be able to retain its choice. Berkshire may hire several candidates for the job.

“It’s not hard, of course, to find smart people, among them individuals who have impressive investment records,” Buffett said. “But there is far more to successful longterm investing than brains and performance that has recently been good.”

He said the right person must be able to think independently and recognize and avoid serious risks. Emotional stability and a keen understanding of human and institutional behavior are also important.

Hanging onto an investment manager could be difficult, Buffett said.

“Being able to list Berkshire on a resume would materially enhance the marketability of an investment manager,” Buffett said. “We will need, therefore, to be sure we can retain our choice, even though he or she could leave and make much more money elsewhere.”

Add to the list these other requirements:

1. Must be willing to live in Omaha.

2. Must like coke (Buffett is a Cherry Coke fanatic).

3. Must like sitting around in Warren’s old office reading annual reports all day.

4. Must not be a day-trader type (as Warren rarely trades.)

How easy would that job be, in the end? Sounds great to me. Except you have to “manage” a $60 billion portfolio.

Buffett acknowledges that he’s in great health and doesn’t intend to retire anytime soon. So, the Apprentice could be apprenticing for quite some time (just ask Lou Simpson.)

Still, it’s an intriguing possibility. Let the real Apprentice hunt begin.