Low times for hi-tech jobs: keeping your hi-tech job depends on many factors. But what happens when you're sent packing because of outsourcing and the odds of finding another job are against you?

Seven years ago, I was a Program Manager for a company that manufactured, tested, and designed printed circuit boards. I had been in the electronics field for over 20 years, working my way up alter starting out as an electronic technician. In the year 2000, my job was to fulfill my customer's expectations without overstepping my own company's abilities. If an order was needed in two weeks and some of the components had 10-week lead times, I had to find a way to make it work. If a circuit board's test fixture broke down and we didn't have a replacement, I had to look for the answer. My day began and ended working with customers and bosses who weren't concerned with details, only results.

I had been struggling to keep our company's largest customer. They needed their prices lowered, or they would be leaving and going to a circuit-board manufacturer with ties to cheaper labor. Everybody from purchasing to process engineering did what they could, but it wasn't enough. The customer eventually pulled out.

The writing was on the wall. My company had plants around the United States and in Canada, but the cost of manufacturing here compared to elsewhere became so prohibitive that we needed one in Mexico in order to compete. As it turned out, it was too little, too late. As our customer base dwindled, so did we, and during the summer of 2001, the layoffs began. A month after 9/11, the plant had let go 75 percent of its workforce, myself included. A year later, my old customer had to completely close its doors as well. It seems their new board assembler (from Mexico) had quality issues.

In my case, I eventually decided my best course was to change direction and follow a different career path. It took quite some time for my wife and me to get back to a livable wage, but we've made it without the loss of our home and without going into backbreaking debt. Many others have not been as lucky.

A company's decision to lay off its employees can happen for many reasons in this country. Another all-to-common reason behind Americans' job loss is to simply be replaced by someone from a foreign country. That foreign worker is oftentimes less qualified than the American worker he's replacing, but he is willing to do the job for much less money. Someone who will come in and sit in your chair before you can say, "I just went for a coffee!" That is, unless you are "lucky" enough to sit in your chair long enough to train your replacement before he replaces you.

The H-1B is a visa category that allows American companies and universities to seek temporary help from skilled foreigners who have the equivalent of a U.S. Bachelor's Degree. Employers use this process to hire engineers, computer programmers, and other workers who have technical expertise. In fact, Microsoft Corporation fills their employment numbers to the tune of about one-third of its 46,000 U.S.-based employees with visa-holding or green-card toting workers. A yearly cap has been placed for such visas at 85,000, but the actual number varies due to other exemptions. In 2006, more than half of the total number of accepted H-1B visas went to Indians. Most of these visas were given to IT professionals.

Are we doomed? Should we just give up some career categories--such as IT--to foreigners? No. We need to stay on top of our young people and continue to grow in our math and science programs. We need to develop higher quantities of brighter and more creative engineers than we have been developing, and we need to insist that our government look after its middle-class citizens and their jobs. The United States still has a technological edge, and we will continue to hold onto it and our jobs for a long time if we invest in ourselves.

We must convince employers who use foreign labor here or utilize offshore labor that such measures may only be a quick-fix and will be detrimental in the long run. Companies that use process improvements, wage adjustments, quality marketing, anything to keep the work where it belongs, are doing it for their people and, in the long run, their country. Loyalty to an employer didn't disappear because of the me generation. Nor did it vanish merely because many employers--particularly the multinational monoliths who have little allegiance to their home country--adopted tunnel vision toward their stockholders' bottom line. Many employers do care for their employees, but outside factors--including wrongheaded government policies--make it exceedingly more difficult for them to stay in business and continue to provide American jobs.

Until things change, an increasing number of Americans will feel firsthand what job loss amidst poor job prospects is like. I recently interviewed a supplier for the auto industry who was laid off due to a chapter 11 bankruptcy situation. The company had been losing out to foreign competition. His weeks of searching for a new job have not gone well, despite being proactive and starting before he got the bad news in April. He worries about his family. Added to his concerns is the absence of his severance and vacation pay that is being held up in bankruptcy court. He has reason to be concerned since top executives of the company are vying for over a million dollars from the companies' sale to an investment fund group. Age has become a factor in his search, and he has taken to leaving dates off his posted resume forms.

During my own layoff, I often wondered why our government, both federal and state, couldn't adopt policies that encourage, or are at least friendly to, companies that buy and manufacture within the United States, while discouraging those that buy or move their manufacturing beyond our borders. Instead, government seems to do just the opposite.

Exporting American jobs or importing foreign workers, even for the purpose of providing goods and services more cheaply, can be difficult to understand when you're the one without the job. Two Indian call-center workers were in my area to train for jobs that will eventually pull two departments out of the United States and into Hyderabad, India. I asked them if they had any concerns about the workers who will be displaced when the jobs start up in India. One of them said, "As you are concerned with jobs coming to India from the United States, we are concerned with losing our jobs to China."

That simple statement says a lot. Jobs that other countries can do for a cheaper price, without compromising quality, will gravitate to that spot. But that statement is not the be-all and end-all of the job-loss equation for the 50-year-old engineer now out of a job in the United States. Less obvious, perhaps, is the fact that American companies could do much better competing in the global marketplace if not for wrongheaded government policies, which not only put us at a competitive price disadvantage with other countries, but also reward American corporations that move their manufacturing out of the country.

Vic LeClair III is a freelance writer residing in Wisconsin.