Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Ran into an interesting statistic this morning

I know members of our close family and other acquaintances with advanced degrees waiting in line to obtain working visas so that they could come and work here in the United States. These visas are called H-1B visas and are typically given to professions that require a large amount of technical skill and degrees in engineering, medicine, arts and law. Usually the visas are granted with a reason explaining why the person was hired. The problem is that the government has a cap of about 65,000 visas issued each year resulting in a lot of missed opportunities, deadlines and dreams. The following factoid that I came across in the latest issue of Harpers from their monthly column ‘Harper's index’ struck me as something combining satire, circumlocution and euphemism:

"Number of H-1B visas, for workers with a 'body of highly specialized knowledge' granted to fashion models last year: 349"

Lydia Venieri's ‘War Games’ at the Stefan Stux Gallery (Sept – Oct 07)

1 comment:

Tree said...

Well...it takes a lot of skill to be a hanger with feet. ;-)