The New Zealand Herald
June 1, 2007 Friday
Hillary Clinton's hi-tech sales pitch
Presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton has been in Silicon Valley trying to cosy up to America's hi-tech sector (), which she believes needs to "hit the restart button on the 21st century".
Lame slogans aside, Hillary is making a clever move. The US IT industry grew rapidly during the presidency of tech-friendly Bill Clinton and like Hollywood the IT sector has a more liberal bent, especially with the latest boom in user-generated internet services.
The last few years have been characterised by a lot of valuable IT work being outsourced to cheaper countries like India and the IT skills shortage has hit the US reasonably hard.
Hillary dangled a fairly big carrot in front of Silicon Valley executives today in the form of increased R&D funding, more IT training and a relaxation of Visa conditions designed to make it easier for foreign software engineers to work in the Valley for longer. Already, over half of Silicon Valley software engineers are foreign born.
Her bag of tech goodies includes:
- Increase the number "H1B" visas to attract more highly skilled workers from overseas.
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