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updated: 2019-12-19
 

"Even as of 1990, only 57% of new computer science graduates got programming jobs, and my student surveys have shown the figure has been much lower in the last few years.   To a large degree, this is due to employer preference for the cheaper, immobile H-1Bs." --- Norm Matloff 2003-12-12 "On the Need for Reform of the H-1B Non-Immigrant Work Visa in Computer-Related Occupations" _University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform_ vol36 #4 pg82

 
 

2009 February

U	M	T	W	R	F	S
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28

 

"the model created by the NSF's Division of Policy Research and Analysis (PRA), have been gaining prominence.   This model projects a cumulative 'short-fall' of 275K engineering graduates by the year 2011...   The nature and structure of the PRA model, which has not bee published in the open literature -- and thus, has not been subject to the rigorous scrutiny of peer [and public] review...   The PRA model defines engineering supply as the number of bachelor's degrees produced in engineering fields...   Demand is not explicitly defined; instead the model considers a 'proxy' for demand, defined as he annual production of bachelor's degrees in a given base year." --- Alan Fechter 1990 Autumn "Engineering Shortages and Short-Falls: Myts and Realities" _The Bridge_

 
 
 

captain William Scott's flag for the Republic of Texas.

2009-02-01

2009-02-01 11:29PST (14:29EST) (19:29GMT)
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard _London Telegraph_
In Davos protectionism is a dirty word

2009-02-01
Martin Feldstein _Nashua NH Telegraph_
"Stimulus" proposal is an $800G mistake
Tamba Bay Tribune
Napa Valley CA Register
Miami FL Herald
Everett WA Herald
Concord NH Monitor
Delaware News Journal
St. Paul MN Pioneer Press

2009-02-01
Frank Bass & Rita Beamish _Yahoo!_/_AP_
AP investigation turns up evidence major US banks being bailed out sought foreign workers, avoided hiring US citizens
Manchester Guardian
Minneapolis MN Star Tribune
Nita Ayer: India Daily
Chippewa WI Herald
Lakeland FL Ledger
Harrisburg PA Patriot-News
Forbes
News Max
American Daily
Slash Dot
Product Design & Development
Op Ed News
Cleveland OH Plain Dealer
Baltimore Sun
Brisbane Times
Washington Times
"Major U.S. banks sought government permission to bring thousands of foreign workers into the country for high-paying jobs even as the system was melting down last year and Americans were getting laid off, according to an Associated Press review of visa applications."

2009-02-01
Tom Shipman & Philip Sherwell _London Telegraph_
Obama seeks to dilute hire American parts of "stimulus" proposal after Europe threatens trade war

2009-02-01
Martha R. Gore _Miami Examiner_
Foreign workers have been taking jobs from Americans: They are willing to work for lower wages
"Foreign imported workers have been used by American corporations under the false allegation of a worker shortage.   The real reason for using foreign workers is that they are willing to work for lower wages.   As far back as 2002, Nobel economics laureate Milton Friedman said that the 1990 H-1B visa program is a government subsidy because it allows employers access to imported highly skilled labor at below-market wages.   The excuse is that there are not enough qualified American workers but the reality is that since 1960, 30M Americans have graduated with bachelor's degrees and advanced degrees, who could work as scientists, engineers, computer programmers and mathematicians.   During that time, there were only 8M high tech positions that needed that level of training.   So Americans were competing with foreign technical workers for the same positions.   Between 1975 and 2005, more than 25M foreign workers were approved in just 5... visa programs.   Fast forward to 2009 and the growing number of unemployed in the United States of America (U.S.A.).   According to a review of visa applications published by the Associated Press (AP) on 2009 February 1, a good example is the banking industry which is being bailed out with billions of U.S. [tax-victim] dollars.   Over the last 6 years, dozens of banks now receiving bail-out funds have requested visas for more than 21,800 foreign workers as senior vice presidents, corporate lawyers, junior investment analysts and human resources specialists.   During a time when huge numbers of bank employees were being laid off, the number of visas sought by a dozen banks actually increased from 3,258 in 2007 to 4,163 in 2008.   Lobbyists made sure that those hiring foreign workers helped to get employer-friendly amendments to H-1B.   Now convicted Jack Abramoff, lobbyist for MSFT, enabled that corporation and other companies to benefit with changes to the law to enable them to import more workers.   Another example is Pfizer which is bringing in foreign workers from India, supposedly to take jobs that could not be filled by Americans.   In the meantime, it is firing American workers.   The reason is that the difference in pay is between $65 an hour for an American technical worker and $35 for a foreign imported worker.   On 2009 January 29, Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) sent a letter to MSFT saying that 'The company has a moral obligation to protect these American workers by putting them first during these difficult economic times.'   The question remains whether the 111th Congress will institute a program of 'Hire Americans First' or will it succumb to the demands of industry and continue to import foreigners for jobs that can be filled by U.S. workers."

2009-02-01
Moira Herbst _Business Week_
Lay-offs for some, visas for others as firms use recession as excuse to step up off-shoring
 
 

2009-02-02

2009-02-01 16:44PST (2009-02-01 19:44EST) (2009-02-02 00:44GMT)
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard _London Telegraph_
Joseph Stiglitz says let banks fail; it will wipe out mal-investment and speed recovery
"'The UK has been hit hard because the banks took on enormously large liabilities in foreign currencies.   Should the British taxpayers have to lower their standard of living for 20 years to pay off mistakes that benefited a small elite?...   There is an argument for letting the banks go bust.   It may cause turmoil but it will be a cheaper way to deal with this in the end.   The British Parliament never offered a blanket guarantee for all liabilities and derivative positions of these banks.'   Mr. Stiglitz said the Government should underwrite all deposits to protect the UK's domestic credit system and safeguard money markets that lubricate lending.   It should use the skeletons of the old banks to build a healthier structure."

2009-02-01 19:43PST (2009-02-01 22:43EST) (2009-02-02 03:43GMT)
_Wall Street Journal_
Congress approved broad-band to nowhere

2009-02-01
Frank Bass & Rita Beamish _AP_/_Yahoo!_
banks sought foreign workers
Independent Ulster
Reality Zone
"Banks collecting billions of dollars in federal bailout money sought government permission to bring thousands of foreign workers to the U.S.A. for high-paying jobs, according to an Associated Press review of visa applications.   The dozen banks receiving the biggest rescue packages, totaling more than $150G, requested visas for more than 21,800 foreign workers over the past six years for positions that included senior vice presidents, corporate lawyers, junior investment analysts and human resources specialists.   The average annual salary for those jobs was $90,721, nearly twice the median income for all American households.   The figures are significant because they show that the bailed-out banks, being kept afloat with U.S. [tax-victim] money, actively sought to hire foreign workers instead of American workers.   As the economic collapse worsened last year -- with huge numbers of bank employees laid off -- the numbers of visas sought by the dozen banks in AP's analysis increased by nearly one-third, from 3,258 in fiscal 2007 to 4,163 in fiscal 2008..."

2009-02-02
_Conference Board_
The Conference Board Reports On-Line Job Demand Plunges 506K in January
"In January, there were 348,500 on-line advertised vacancies for management positions -- a decline of 175,800 or 34% from last January's level.   Demand for office and administrative support job positions dropped 156,900 to 274,700 and were 36% below the 2008 January level.   (Table B & Table 7 on pdf).   Computer and mathematical job ads were down 104,200 to 391K over the same period.   Other categories showing severe declines included sales and related jobs (-97,800), business & finance (-90,300), and architecture and engineering (-56,100)...   the number of on-line advertised vacancies for health-care practitioner and technical occupations was down 87,200 over the past year to 486,200 in January."

2009-02-02
Thomas E. Brewton _View from 1776_
Questionable Judgement in/WRT Banking
"Historically a bank's fiduciary duty is to protect its depositors' funds, to be able to return them intact upon demand.   Using large percentages of depositors' funds to acquire assets such as securitized mortgages in structured investment vehicles violates the traditional, conservative banker's code.   The banker was to know his borrower well, face-to-face, and to assure himself that the borrower was of good character and possessed of the financial capacity to repay his loan, as well as to take suitable liquid collateral to cover any default of payment...   In a broader sense, the demand that banks lend regardless of economic conditions or the financial soundness of borrowers reflects the view that banks are just another conduit for fiat money created by the Federal Reserve.   This is implicit in the Keynesian faith that collectivized planning by the political state is the prescription for economic prosperity.   In it there is no room for individualistic judgment."

2009-02-02
Norm Matloff _H-1B/ L-1/ Off-Shoring News-Letter_
Obama admin. appointments -- update
 
Recently I posted some disturbing news on major candidates for the Obama administration.
 
There is more news of this sort to report now.
 
Tomorrow's Wall Street Journal reports that "Republican senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire has emerged as President Barack Obama's top choice for commerce secretary, with an announcement coming as soon as Monday, an Obama administration official and law-makers said Sunday."   Given this phrasing and the source, it would appear that this is more than rumor, though of course no one knows until the event occurs.
 
Nevertheless, if it's true, then DoC would be headed by a hard-core supporter of the H-1B program, as made quite clear in Gregg's video on YouTube
 
Next we have that "McKinsey Global Institute Director Diana Farrell has joined the Obama Administration as deputy director of the National Economic Council and deputy assistant to the President for economic policy", according to a letter distributed by McKinsey.   As many of you know, McKinsey is in the vanguard of promoting off-shoring.   Her views on H-1B are naturally in line with the word "global" in the McKinsey Institute's title.   Note for instance, this from 2006 Searching for Skilled Migrants
 
But Diana Farrell, director of the McKinsey Global Institute, said that in fields such as engineering, the U.S. and other developed countries needed to import talent or send work over-seas because universities weren't producing enough graduates to replace retiring baby boomers and fill new positions.   [An assertion belied by NCES and BLS statistics.]
 
This of course is pure industry lobbyist phrasing.
 
And here's a howler: Ms. Farrell penned an article in the Harvard Business Review 2008 September, titled, "New Thinking for a New Financial Order".   The summary says, "World financial assets are growing faster than the world economy.   Confronting that and other modern realities of global finance requires more than regulatory reform: It calls for deeper thinking..."
 
On the plus side, I forgot to mention last time that VP Biden appointed Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute as chief economic adviser.   EPI, closely tied to labor, has generally been critical of H-1B and off-shoring.
 
Norm
---30---
 

2009-02-02 Patrick Thibodeau _InfoWorld_/_IDG_
MSFT lay-offs add fuel to H-1B fire: senator calls on MSFT to give priority to US citizens, but tech execs refuse
PC World

2009-02-02
Tom Lutey _Billings MT Gazette_
Interest sagging in ethanol as fuel
"The state has purchased nearly 200 hybrid vehicles since that ride in 2005 June, 158 of which are designed to run on E85, according to the state Department of Transportation.   E85 is a mix of 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline.   Each vehicle costs the state $700 to $1,200 more than comparable gasoline-only models.   The flex-fuel vehicles are mostly fleet sedans, which the state pays $15K to $17K for.   Three years ago, there were 5 places to get E85, which had found loyal customers in government motor pools.   Malmstrom Air Force in Great Falls, the state of Department of Transportation in Helena and the National Park Service in West Yellowstone had their own pumps.   Helena and West Yellowstone each had private gas stations with E85.   Both have closed...   Nationally, ethanol receives more than two-thirds of all federal subsidies for renewables, $3G in 2007.   Other energy sources fight for what's left over...   The costs of E85-friendly tanks and pumps can be $20K or more."

2009-02-02
_CBS_
Bailed-out Banks Increased H-1B Applications by One-Third Last Year While Announcing Over 100K Lay-Offs
"'The system provides you perfectly legal mechanisms to under-pay the workers.', said John Miano of Summit, New Jersey, a lawyer who has analyzed the wage data and started the Programmers Guild, an advocacy group that opposes the H-1B system.   'In this time of very, very high unemployment... and considering the help these banks are getting from the [tax-victims], they're playing the American [tax-victims] for a sucker.' --- senator Charles Grassley   David Huber of Chicago is a computer networking engineer who has testified to Congress about losing out on a 2002 job with the former Bank One Corp.   He learned later the bank applied to hire dozens of foreign visa holders for work he said he was qualified to do.   'American citizenship is being undermined working in our own country.', Huber said in an AP interview.   Beyond seeking approval for visas from the government, banks that accepted federal bail-out money also enlisted uncounted foreign workers, often in technology jobs, through intermediary companies known as bodyshops.   Such businesses are the top recipients of the H-1B visas...   JS of Yreka, California, a retired technical systems manager at [Bank of India] in Concord, California, said in 2004 she oversaw foreign employees from a contractor firm that also sent overnight work to employees in India.   'It had nothing to do with a shortage, but they didn't want to pay the U.S. rate.', she said, adding that the quality of the work was weak.   'It's all about numbers crunching.'"

2009-02-02
Frosty Wooldridge _News with Views_
Bail-Outs: A Complete Fraud on US Workers

2009-02-02
Rob Sanchez _Job Destruction News-Letter_ #1969
Bankers taking US government money using it to bring in guest-workers, sending it to India, buying stadiums and taking big bonuses for themselves
alternate link
 
Co-authorship of news articles can be a good thing, but only if the left foot knows what the right foot is doing.   Frank Bass and Rita Beamish published an article on banks that hire H-1Bs that exemplifies the left/right foot syndrome.
 
The story is very similar to the recent ones about how MSFT is laying off Americans while retaining H-1Bs.   Banks and other types of financial institutions are doing the same thing.   The bail-out is a whole different issue.   Bass and Beamish fall into a trap of trying to link the bail-out with the hiring of H-1B visa holders.
 
Banks have been hiring H-1Bs for a very long time so this article should be old news for those that have studied the H-1B issue for awhile. Bass and Beamish confirmed that banks have been hiring H-1Bs for a long time when they reviewed 6 years of hiring data.   In view of the data they reviewed, the following statement is a non-sequitur:
 
Banks collecting billions of dollars in federal bail-out money sought government permission to bring thousands of foreign workers to the U.S. for high-paying jobs, according to an Associated Press review of visa applications.
 
The evidence shows that banks hired H-1Bs with or without the bail-out.   Furthermore the article failed to discuss the far bigger outrage that the bail-out does nothing to stop the banks from hiring H-1Bs.   Neither does Obama's stimulus plan.
 
The entire article needs to be read to see the left foot right foot syndrome kicking in. Early on the article says:
 
The dozen banks receiving the biggest rescue packages, totaling more than $150G, requested visas for more than 21,800 foreign workers over the past 6 years for positions that included senior vice presidents, corporate lawyers, junior investment analysts and human resources specialists.   The average annual salary for those jobs was $90,721, nearly twice the median income for all American households.
 
At the end of the article they wrote:
 
Foreigners are attractive hires because companies have found ways to pay them less than American workers.
 
Both statements are true, but they seem to contradict each other.   On the one hand they say H-1Bs get paid a lot of money, and on the other end they say H-1Bs are cheap labor.   My guess is that the authors wrote these sections separately but didn't do a full editorial review.   Unfortunately the point was lost that an H-1B could be hired for $90k for a position that is worth at least $150k. It was a perfect opportunity to demonstrate how H-1B is used to depress wages.   Bass and Beamish were so close and yet so far from explaining this important concept.
 
Bill Gates made a similar argument to Congress when he said that all of their H-1Bs are paid high salaries while conveniently forgetting to mention how low the wages were compared to what a comparable American worker would expect to earn.   Of course nobody in Congress challenged him on that point either.
 
Several versions of this article are appearing in newspapers and on the Internet...   In [the longer versions] there are some thought-provoking quotes from David Huber, senator Chuck Grassley, Ron Hira, Michael Bloomberg, Arlene C. Roberts, and Jennifer Scott.
 
The [short version] is the one you will find in most newspapers.   It is a butchered version that lacks the quotes, and consequently most of its impact and meaning.
 
Bass and Beamish did some good research for that article.   Hopefully they will publish a better edited and longer version so we can get more insight into what they discovered about banks and H-1B.   It's a subject that isn't discussed nearly enough.
 
Addendum: Sorry about the negativity here.   I'm in a bad mood because the Cardinals lost to the Steelers.   I had most of this news-letter written before the game began, so the disappointing loss isn't the cause of my somewhat negative critique.   Actually the length of the game gave me more time to reflect on what the article was really saying.
 
Most of us in Arizona are in a dour mood, but we will get over it.   Considering the Cardinal's record over the years we are very happy that they had such a stellar season, and that the Superbowl was such a thriller all the way to the end.   I'll try to improve my outlook for the next news-letter -- I promise!
---30---
 

2009-02-02
Harold L. Cole & Lee E. Ohanian _Wall Street Journal_
How Government Prolonged the Great Depression

2009-02-02
Harvey Silverglate _Wall Street Journal_
SEC should respect Steve Jobs's health privacy... and everyone elses'

2009-02-02 15:39PST (18:39EST) (23:39GMT)
Rachael King _Business Week_
Violence putting a crimp in IT cross-border out-sourcing plans

2009-02-02
Lou Dobbs _CNN_
Stimulus Show-Down; Obama's Appeal; Daschle's tax Troubles; State of Emergency; Buy American

2009-02-02 (5769 Shevat 08)
Mark Steyn _Jewish World Review_
Stimulated right into being another Socialist Europe

2009-02-02 (5769 Shevat 08)
Steven Emerson _Jewish World Review_
CAIR's true colors
Investigative Project: CAIR-Hamas-Muslim Brotherhood links
Discover the Networks: Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)
anti-CAIR
Discover the Networks: Muslim Brotherhood (MB)

2009-02-02 (5769 Shevat 08)
Rabbi Doctor Asher Meir _Jewish World Review_
How much do the poor have to help the poor?
"Normally, a person should give at least ten percent of his income (after tax) to charity.   This practice is called maser kesafim, a tithe of money, and is analogous to the agricultural tithes that were given by Biblical command from produce in the land of Israel."

2009-02-03
_Dice_
Dice Report: 57,337 job ads

2009-02-04
Matthew Brown & Kahrin Deines _Billings MT Gazette_
Australians aim for $375M coal power and synthetic petroleum plant in SE MT
"Executives of Ambre Energy said Tuesday that the project would produce up to 4.4M tons annually of coal that had been stripped of moisture to increase its energy content.   The plant also would make 1.6M barrels annually of synthetic crude."

2009-02-04
Diane Cochran _Billings MT Gazette_
Sick economy hits hospitals as costs rise and revenues fall

2009-02-04
Chris Murphy _Beyond_/_Information Week_
U.S. IT Jobs Fall 260K, Unemployment Hits 3.2%

2009-02-04
Antone Gonsalves _Beyond_/_Information Week_
Seagate Cutting Jobs & Executive Salaries (no word on benefits and bonuses)
"it would reduce the number of employees worldwide by 6%, or about 2,950 people.   This number includes the 10% reduction in the U.S. work-force, or 800 workers, that the company announced earlier this week [and thus a net shift off-shore].   Seagate said it would slash the salary of its executive officers, including the CEO and executive VPs, by 25%...   The company said it would cut the salaries of senior VPs by 20%; VPs, 15%; and management, sales, supervisors, and professional employees, 10%."

2009-02-04
Rob Sanchez _Job Destruction News-Letter_ #1974
Brits stage strikes, protests of guest-workers having access to nuclear materials
 
Striking workers in Britain have had all they stand with salary depression and losing their jobs because of the importation of cheap foreign workers.   Wildcat strikes are breaking out across the nation.   Check out this video to see some interviews of the strikers.
 
That video was taken at the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant.   For those of you that might not know the significance of nuclear reprocessing -- they separate uranium, plutonium, and other fission products from spent nuclear fuel.   Plutonium is really handy when you want to make nuclear bombs.
 
So, Britain is using cheap foreign labor to work at a place that makes the most dangerous and toxic material known to mankind.   Many of their workers are coming from Italy which is a haven for Muslim immigrants.   I hesitate to call the British government stupid for allowing this to happen but the label really fits.   Of course the U.S.A. uses H-1Bs from Pakistan to run their nuclear power plants like Palo Verde so the British don't have a monopoly on stupidity.   At least their unions are doing something to stop the problem!
 
Common sense would dictate that responsible nation-states would never use foreign workers at a place like Sellafield -- especially since the track record at Sellafield isn't exactly spotless when it comes to keeping track of their plutonium.   In 2005 for instance, 30kg of plutonium was declared missing, which is enough to make seven nuclear bombs.   The British government concluded that the missing plutonium was just a paper-work problem with an audit.   Let's hope they are right!
 
Sellafield isn't the only nuke in Britain that uses foreign workers, as you will discover by reading the articles below.   There are other places the strikes are occurring, such as oil refineries and electric generating power plants.
 
The statement to the House of Lords by Lord Mandelson was particularly interesting:
 
He said it was important to "respect and guarantee" the principle of free movement, which was an "intrinsic part" of membership of the European Union.
 
Hmmmmmm.   Where have we heard that globalist term "free movement" before?   For starters try the trade agreements we are bound to such as General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and of course the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).   Those agreements are all bound to Mode 4 of GATS which defines the free flow of "natural persons".   This shows that we are much closer to being another EU than most people would care to believe.
 
The strikers made an interesting point.   They call for transparency of the hiring process of foreign workers, which many of us in the U.S. have demanded of our government without success.
 
One of the strikers, the GMB convener Willie Doggert, said: "All we want is a level playing field.   It's not just about foreign workers.   We need jobs to be advertised with transparency so that everybody gets a fair crack of the whip at getting them."
all about Sellafield
Programmers Guild Pushes for H-1B Transparency
London Times: Strikes over foreign workers spread to Sellafield as Mandelson ups stakes
Manchester Guardian: Nuclear power workers join wildcat strike action over foreign labour
BBC: Missing plutonium 'just on paper'
London Times: Strikes over foreign workers spread to Sellafield as Mandelson ups stakes
Luke Baker: Reuters: Oil refinery workers end strike over foreign labour

2009-02-04
Rita Beamish & Frank Bass _AP_/_Real Clear Politics_
Proposal seeks limits on bailed-out banks hiring H-1B guest-workers
Cybercast News Service
Sauk Valley IL
Bradenton FL Herald
Chicago IL Tribune
SC State
"The legislation by senators Bernie Sanders, I-VT, and Charles Grassley, R-IA, would apply to more than 200 banks that have accepted the government's aid...   Sanders said banks accepting U.S. government bail-out money should first attempt to hire the many laid-off American banking workers, although other industries may need the visa program for shortages in specific skilled positions...   Even as the economic collapse worsened last year -- with huge numbers of U.S. bank employees laid off -- the numbers of visas sought by the dozen banks in AP's analysis increased by nearly one-third, from 3,258 in the 2007 budget year to 4,163 in fiscal 2008...   The banks also hire uncounted foreign workers through contract companies and those visa numbers don't show up in the banks' applications to the government."

2009-02-04
Dick Armey _Wall Street Journal_
DC could use less Keynes and more Hayek

2009-02-04
George Russell _Fox_
Satyam/Oracle ERP project at WHO behind schedule and buggy
"Satyam ignored the instructions of the software's manufacturer, Oracle, for implementing the complex system; ran user tests that validated the system without 'being able to replicate a real-life situation', provided little or no training to WHO employees; and failed to adequately involve health care professionals..., among a host of other failings."

2009-02-04
Steven A. Camarota _Center for Immigration Studies_
Senate stimulus proposal could create 300K jobs for illegal alines: 15% of construction jobs could go to illegal aliens

2009-02-04
James Carlini _MidWest Business Technology News_
Infrastructure Stimulus Packages part 2: List of Top 10 Best Practices

2009-02-04
Freeman Klopott _DC Examiner_
Worker indicted in Fannie Mae malware case was in USA on H-1B visa

2009-02-04
Rob Sanchez _Job Destruction News-Letter_ #1973
Obama's appointees President Obama continues to surround himself with champions of "free" trade and open borders.   Fortunately Tom Daschle was forced to withdraw -- and I say fortunately because he is a pivotal figure in the H-1B fiasco.   I believe that's one of the reasons that Obama wanted him in the cabinet.   Obama's cabinet and other government appointments are transforming the executive into a solid block of H-1B advocates who want to expand the program.
 
Sen. Judd Gregg secretary of commerce is as bad as it gets.   Obama might as well have appointed Bill Gates.   Gregg gets a failing grade of F on guest worker visas from Americans for Better Immigration.
 
I wanted to punch him in the face as I watched a 5 minute video of senator Gregg at the Cato web site (link below). Among other things he wants to raise the number of H-1B visas to 150K.
 
Greg parrots the industry line on H-1B.   One of his favorites is to repeat the claim by Bill Gates that every H-1B creates 5 jobs for Americans.   Ron Hira asked the right question for Computerworld:
 
The five-jobs-per-H-1B-worker claim, said Hira, "is so absurd that Mr. Gregg should be laughed out of the room.   This is the kind of thoughtful leadership that Mr. Obama is bringing us?"
 
Ron Hira wrote a stinging article for EE Times where he said:
 
"Obama Administration has been in office just a few weeks now, but we already know how it will address the off-shoring of engineering jobs.   It will promote it.
 
Be sure to read the last part of Hira's commentary because that's the most important.
 
Unfortunately Gregg isn't the only bad appointee.   Diana Farrell was appointed by Obama for the National Economic Council and as deputy economic adviser to the president.   She has worked for the McKinsey Global Institute for a long time.   In 2004 Farrell said:
 
"People in the US are looking at it as a job issue.   They are not economists and therefore, they dont necessarily see the whole picture.   What's going to happen is that off-shoring is actually going to benefit US businesses even more than India."
 
Larry Summers and Ron Kirk are two other stinker appointments by Obama.   Summers will lead the president's National Economic Council and Kirk will be the chairperson.   So, Obama is stacking his entire administration with pro H-1B, pro "free" trade, and anti-worker dregs from industry and the Clinton and Bush administrations.
 
Last night Lou Dobbs had an excellent report on Gregg and it is available at the CNN site.   Ron Hira appeared on Dobbs so he has really been hitting the road to get the word out.
 
Lou Dobbs: Well this may be what we're going to see from the Obama administration.   That's a shame, because it's intellectual dishonesty.   It is absolute arrogance to continue to repeat the policies of the past. Larry Summers, all of these folks very capable people, that are absolutely part of the Rubin legacy.
 
It's devastating what's happening here.   The millions of people, working men and women who worked and supported and voted for Barack Obama for change in the direction of trade policies have to be extraordinarily disappointed, but fundamentally, if there is no change on the part of our elected officials, on the top policy choices, on "free" trade, on out-sourcing, and focusing on manufacturing, how to incentivize it and how to build our middle class, rather than destroy it, this administration will be remembered for something besides change and a disbelief in the change they brought, but rather the legacy will be further destruction of this economy, and that is intolerable to all of us.   Bill Tucker, thank you very much.
Video: Lou Dobbs and Bill Tucker, Gregg at Commerce
Video of Sen. Gregg
Secretary of Off-Shoring
What Judd Gregg bodes for high tech
H-1B, off-shoring supporters get key Obama Administration posts
Commerce Nominee Favors H1-B Visa Expansion
Opinion by Ron Hira: The Obama administration promotes out-sourcing
Daschle Withdraws; Is this Change?; Americans First?; Where is the Stimulus?

2009-02-04 14:28PST (17:28EST) (22:28GMT)
Janet H. Cho & Tom Breckenridge _Cleveland OH Plain Dealer_
Ohio has lost 262,383 jobs since 2000
"Cuyahoga county lost nearly 11% of its jobs from 2000 to 2008 -- and 26% of its manufacturing jobs...   The average manufacturing job pays $49,994, while the average non-manufacturing job pays $38,273, which means losing those jobs has made this recession deeper and more enduring than other recent recessions.   More than 28K of the 54,342 jobs Ohio lost between 2007 June and 2008 June were manufacturing jobs, and that doesn't include jobs lost after June, which means the totals are much worse, Zeller said...   El Centro, CA, topped the nation with a 22.6% unemployment rate, while Morgantown, WV, had the lowest rate at 2.7%.   The jobless rate for the Cleveland-Elyria-Mentor area was 7.1%, while the Akron metro rate was 7.5%."

2009-02-04
Peter Brimelow _V Dare_
Numbers the NY Times refuses to print

2009-02-04 (5769 Shevat 10)
Thomas Sowell _Jewish World Review_
Republicans as Democrats part 2

2009-02-04 (5769 Shevat 10)
Walter E. Williams _Jewish World Review_
National Ponzi Scheme
 
 

2009-02-05

2009-02-05 05:30PST (08:30EST) (13:30GMT)
Scott Gibbons & Tony Sznoluch _DoL ETA_
un-employment insurance weekly claims report
current press release
"The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 676,590 in the week ending Jan. 31, an increase of 56,478 from the previous week.   There were 380,138 initial claims in the comparable week in 2008.   The advance unadjusted insured unemployment rate was 4.3% during the week ending Jan. 24, unchanged from the prior week.   The advance unadjusted number for persons claiming UI benefits in state programs totaled 5,793,331, an increase of 62,724 from the preceding week.   A year earlier, the rate was 2.5% and the volume was 3,344,396.   Extended benefits were available in North Carolina, Oregon, and Rhode Island during the week ending Jan. 17."
graphs
more graphs

2009-02-05
Norm Matloff _H-1B/ L-1/ Off-Shoring News-Letter_
more on Obama appointees
 
Sen. Gregg has now been formally announced as Obama's choice for Secretary of Commerce.   As I reported recently, Gregg is a hard-core supporter of H-1B.   I also noted that McKinsey's Diana Farrell, a promoter of off-shoring, has also been appointed to the Obama administration.   Enclosed below are several pieces on the details.
 
It is interesting to compare the Computerworld take on this situation with the Hira op-ed.   Both note that the Gregg and Farrell appointments bode serious trouble for H-1B critics hoping that the Obama administration would bring Change.   But Computerworld's Pat Thibodeau sees Gregg as the bigger threat, while Professor Hira highlights Farrell.
 
I must say that Farrell may well end up just as harmful as Gregg, maybe even more so.   Gregg is very open in his view that business interests must take priority.   By contrast, Farrell, though clearly of the same school of thought, cloaks her writings in terms dear to the hearts of the Democratic Party -- jobs training.   Yes, off-shoring of tech work produces some American victims, Farrell concedes, but that can be handled via job retraining programs.
 
This is exactly the pitch that got the first H-1B increase through in 1998.   At the time, I and others (notably IEEE_USA, whith its excellent Misfortune 500 web site) pointed out that many older (age 35+) highly-educated programmers and engineers could not get tech work despite the Dot-Com Boom.   The industry claimed that this was due to a lack of up-to-date skills in those workers.   In response, Congress imposed a user fee on H-1B employers, with the proceeds to go to retraining programs.   I warned at the time that the skills issue was phony, just a pretext to replace the older workers by young H-1Bs, and that the retraining idea was thus a non-solution: Given a choice between the older/more expensive American who has just learned the Java programming language, and a younger/cheaper American with newly-acquired Java skills -- and an even cheaper young H-1B with Java -- the 35-year-old American will not be chosen.   Sadly, my analysis was later confirmed, both by a Dept. of Commerce study and a remarkably frank statement by Sun Microsystems to the press.
 
My point, then, is that Farrell speaks exactly the language that the Obama people want to hear, so she may actually be given more credence than Gregg, and thus present more of a problem to H-1B critics.   But Gregg will be pernicious from the viewpoint of H-1B critics too, of course, and not just in advice he gives to the president.   Under Gregg the DoC study I mentioned above may not have been undertaken in the first place.   Or it may have been suppressed by DoC, as DoC did to its off-shoring study during the Bush years.
 
Gregg's speech in the Cato video came right out of the industry lobbyists' list of talking points.   Among them is the notion that while there is some abuse in H-1B, "especially involving Indian-related companies and their basic flooding of the market in this area and then having people return to India with knowledge that they gained here... that can be corrected fairly easily with minor adjustments in the program".   By "minor adjustments" he means beefing up enforcement, and probably some cosmetic special rules for the Indian bodyshops.   This strategy -- blame the Indians -- has long been employed not only by the industry but also by their allies in Congress.   Rep. Zoe Lofgren of Silicon Valley, for example, actually ridiculed the Indian shops during a House Immigration Subcommittee hearing in 1998.   All of this is designed to give the false impression that the big main-stream U.S. firms are using the H-1B and green card programs properly, and most importantly, to distract attention from the core issue in H-1B and employment-based green cards, which is the loop-holes in the law.
 
I must say again that while emotionally I would like to see this young, inspiring president succeed, I've long predicted he would have a policy of Business As Usual on most major economic issues, and worse, he has a knack for symbolic gestures without substance.   Every time I remark along these lines with "I hope I'm wrong" Obama makes another move that shows I'm right.
 
Norm
---30---
 

2009-02-05
_Techs Unite_
While dumping US citizen employees and taking US tax-victim subsidy, Wells Fargo continues hiring at bodyshopping unit in Hyderabad, India

2009-02-05 14:43PST (17:43EST) (22:43GMT)
William Spain _MarketWatch_
Same-store sales reveal grim January
"The 35 chains tracked by Thomson Reuters had an average same-store sales drop of 1.8%..."

2009-02-05
Thomas E. Brewton _View from 1776_
A Simple, Inesapable Fact: Most kinds of corruption can be reduced only by reducing the size and power of the federal government
"At the most fundamental level, the problem is what lawyers call an attractive nuisance...   Another, less often observed corrupting factor engendered by the mammoth size of the Federal government, is that almost all legislation is initially drafted and negotiated between committees by members of Senators' and Congressmen's staffs.   Often the elected members of Congress are unaware of the details and loop-holes hidden within proposed legislation, simply because they haven't enough hours in the day to read and study everything carefully.   How could they, given the thousands of proposed bills and agency regulations that they are charged to oversee?   How could they, when they must be raising tens of thousands of dollars every single day to fund their next re-election campaigns?   It is entirely possible for an honest and public spirited member of Congress to have staff members who are less so, who are being directly influenced by lobbyists."

2009-02-05
Ed Frauenheim _WorkForce Management_
Deep Corporate Staff Cuts Heat Up H-1B Visa Debate
"H-1B visas rarely go to exceptional talent and often are used by bodyshops that provide contract labor to other companies, said Ira Mehlman, media director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform [FAIR] advocacy group."

2009-02-05
Rob Sanchez _Job Destruction News-Letter_ #1975
ON Semiconductor closing up shop in the USA
 
ON Semiconductor just announced that they will close down their Phoenix, Arizona fab.   The fab will be moved to Malaysia.   CEO Keith Jackson said that the company will save $36M a year by moving to Malaysia.
 
ON is also closing a facility in Pocatello, Idaho.   In 2007 December Pocatello-based AMI Semiconductor was bought out by ON Semiconductor.   As soon as the buyout was finalized about 60 AMI executives were sacked.   Since early 2008 employees have coninued to get whacked.
 
ON Semiconductor was a spin-off from Motorola who dumped all of their Arizona semiconductor fabs in order to move production to [Red China].   ON and Freescale is about all that was left of Arizona's Motorola semiconductor business.   Motorola used to be the #1 employer in Arizona.   That spot is now held by WM.
ON to close Phoenix plant, Chandler site safe
ON Semiconductor To Close Pocatello's Fab. 9 Sooner Than Expected: Be sure to watch video linked on right side
 
ON Semi lays off 1500, closes plants, forces unpaid time off
ON Semiconductor to close 1 Pocatello fab center
AMI-S Changes to ON Semiconductor

2009-02-05
Jacqueline Emigh _Beta News_
tech executives battle against US job protections in laws while importing cheap, young, pliant, low-skilled foreign workers with flexible ethics
"For its part, IBM has reportedly launched an internal program called Project Match, aimed at exporting some of its thousands of newly pink-slipped employees to the United Arab Emirates [UAE] and other countries, where they would work for much lower wages than in the USA.   Directly after Microsoft's own announcement of 5K job lay-offs, company CEO Steve Ballmer got a letter from senator Charles Grassley (R-IA), who has often criticized the tech industry's use of H1-B, a visa program aimed at importing workers into the US when qualified Americans are not available to fill specialized jobs."

2009-02-05
Bob Willis _Philadelphia Inquirer_/_Bloomberg_
CGC: January job cuts triple from 2008
Francine Knowles: Chicago Sun-Times/Joliet Herald News
Consumer Affairs
Rex Nutting: MarketWatch
Denise Dubie: NetworkWorld/PC World
Michael Credico: Cleveland Examiner
Elinor Comlay: Manchester Guardian
Patrick O'Connor: Centre for Research on Globalization
Alan Abelson: Barron's
Phyllis Korkki: NY Times
Moira Herbst: BusinessWeek/WTOL
"Firing announcements rose 222% last month from 2008 January, to 241,749, Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., a Chicago job-placement company, said yesterday. It was the largest monthly total since 2002 January, when job cuts reached a record of 248,475, Challenger said. The number of planned job cuts in the Challenger Gray report increased 45% last month from December's 166,348.
Between 1993 and 2008, January job cuts averaged 98,053, 10% higher than the 88,892 averaged in October, the next heaviest job-cut month.
Retail 53,968 (compared to 81,621 for the same month in 2008, and 51,036 for 2007 January); Industrial goods 32,083; Computer 22,330; Pharmaceutical 22,063; Defence 17,800; Telecomm 13:056; Electronics 11,050; Finance 1,458. With demand for new technology declining sharply, the pace of job-cutting by firms in the sector rose 167% in the second half of 2008. Employers in telecommunications, computers, and electronics announced 186,955 job cuts in 2008, 74% more than during the previous year.
NY 47,958. Illinois 39,713 from 3,896 a year earlier.
In November, for instance, BLS reports, a total of 2.1M workers were let go, representing about 1.6% of total employment. By comparison, 1.6M people quit their jobs voluntarily in November."

2009-02-05 (5769 Shevat 11)
Jonathan Rosenblum _Jewish World Review_
Beware of the smarties

2009-02-05 (5769 Shevat 11)
Victor Davis Hanson _Jewish World Review_
BTDT in the Middle East
"Can anyone distinguish Annapolis, Beirut, Camp David, Geneva, Madrid, Oslo, Taba or Wye River -- and all the other places that hosted much-heralded but failed meetings that we can no longer even recall?   Then there the billions of dollars (well over $100G) and euros for peace given by the United States and Europe to Egypt, Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians over the last half-century.   Not to mention all those ballyhooed United Nations decrees -- Resolutions 242, 338, 1397, 1515 and others -- likewise lost to our collective memory.   The Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai nearly 30 years ago was supposed to have led to a general peace.   So was the withdrawal from Lebanon.   So was the withdrawal from Gaza."
 

2009-02-06

2009-02-06
Brett French _Billings MT Gazette_
Black wolves closely related to Asian domestic dogs
"The study was based largely on genetic data gathered by Yellowstone National Park wolf biologist Doug Smith and his crew as part of their research to find out whether there was genetic exchange among wolves reintroduced in the park, those planted in Idaho and those that live in northwestern Montana...   Using a variety of genetic tests, the researchers found that the black-coat mutation was probably introduced into wolves by dogs sometime in the past 10K to 15K years, about the same time the first Americans were migrating across the Bering land bridge.   These humans were probably accompanied by dogs, some of which carried the black-coat mutation estimated to have arisen about 50K years ago."

2009-02-06
Chuck Baldwin _V Dare_
Do Americans cherish freedom anymore?
"Jefferson and the rest of America's founders, however, rightly understood that the only legitimate purpose of government was 'to secure these rights'.   The only legitimate purpose of civil government is to secure or protect the freedoms and liberties that have been given to man by our Creator...   Virtually everything we do and say is monitored by the great Nanny State.   Practically every service, every act is regulated by the State.   Ask any independent business owner how many regulations, laws, acts, etc., demand fulfillment, and how many fees, taxes, permits, etc., are required by various government agencies and bureaucracies before he can perform a single task.   For example, the federal government actually dictates how some restaurants can seat people or serve tables.   Farmers are told what and how much to plant—and even to not plant.   We cannot buy a gun, drive a car, marry the person we love, or even install a toilet without saying, 'Pretty please?' to a dozen despots."

2009-02-06
_National Center for Policy Analysis_
Some antarctic warming claims based on throwing data from multiple sites and different time periods with significantly different readings together

2009-02-06
Thomas E. Brewton _View from 1776_
Why Fed should raise interest rates
Robert P. Murphy: Ludwig von Mises Institute

2009-02-06 08:57PST (11:57EST) (16:57GMT)
Rex Nutting _MarketWatch_
Pay-rolls plunged by 598K
graphs

2009-02-06
_Science_
US Scientists concerned about security, conflicts of interest

2009-02-26
James Carlini
Best practices for infrastructure stimulu programs part 2

2009-02-06 (5769 Shevat 12)
Caroline B. Glick Wain _Jewish World Review_
Israel's fateful elections

2009-02-06 (5769 Shevat 12)
Rabbi Berel Wein _Jewish World Review_
Responding to evil humanely

2009-02-06 (5769 Shevat 12)
P.A. Madison _Federalist_
historical meaning behind "equal protection of the laws"

2009-02-06

DJIA	8,280.59
S&P 500	868.59
NASDAQ	1,591.71
10-year US T-Bond	2.99%
crude oil	$40.17/barrel
gold	$913.90/ounce
silver	$13.16/ounce
platinum	$1,004.30/ounce
palladium	$213.35/ounce
copper	$0.10178125/ounce
natgas	$4.775/MBTU
reformulatedgasoline	$1.2507/gal
heatingoil	$1.3598/gal
dollarindex	85.24
yenperdollar	92.00
dollarspereuro	1.2932
dollarsperpound	1.4797
swissfranksperdollar	1.1625
indianrupeesperdollar	48.725
mexicanpesosperdollar	47.202
MorganStanleyHighTechIndex	370.19

I usually get this info from MarketWatch and the "Commodities" and "Metals" and "Currencies" columns.
 
 
 

2009-02-07 Norm Matloff _H-1B/ L-1/ Off-Shoring News-Letter_
Senate ties TARP aid to H-1B restrictions
 
The Senate voted today to place restrictions on the hiring of H-1Bs by banks that accept government bail-out money.   The legislation, which was proposed by Senators Grassley and Sanders as an amendment to the economic "stimulus" bill, would in its original form have imposed a flat ban on hiring of H-1Bs by the TARP-aided banks.   It was weakened somewhat (details below), and of course may not survive conference committee etc., but it certainly sends a strong message.
 
The move was sparked by an AP story that ran in many major newspapers, investigating usage of H-1Bs by banks that had accepted bail-out funds.
 
One of the good things about that article was that it noted that paying H-1Bs below-market rates can be done perfectly legally.   Here is an excerpt from the article:
 
Foreigners are attractive hires because companies have found ways to pay them less than American workers.
 
Companies are required to pay foreign workers a prevailing wage based on the job's description.   But they can use the lower end of government wage scales even for highly skilled workers; hire younger foreigners with lower salary demands; and hire foreigners with higher levels of education or advanced degrees for jobs for which similarly educated American workers would be considered overqualified.
 
"The system provides you perfectly legal mechanisms to underpay the workers.", said John Miano of Summit, NJ, a lawyer who has analyzed the wage data and started the Programmers Guild, an advocacy group that opposes the H-1B system.
 
I've explained elsewhere the details of these and other loopholes.
 
Needless to say, the industry lobbyists were quick to react.   Note that the vanguard of the industry lobbyists includes the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), who have obvious vested interests.   Indeed, according to the immigration lawyers news-letter Immigration Daily, for many law firms H-1B and employment-based (EB) green cards form the lion's share of their business.   I'm [linking] below the press release from the AILA.
 
As always, the AILA press release cites work by the NFAP, a one-man organization run by Stuart Anderson, who is hardly an unbiased researcher.   He's been making a living writing articles supporting the H-1B program since the mid-1990s, and was the author of the lengthy 1997 report by the industry lobbying group ITAA that formed the basis for the doubling of the H-1B cap enacted by Congress in late 1998.   Anderson later worked as a Senate staffer, and was the author of that 1998 legislation, and then of a second act increasing the cap in 2000.   Though he does not say who his present employer (funder) is, the fact that the lobbyists who quote him the most are immigration attorneys would seem to point to the American Immigration Lawyers Association or their American Immigration Law Foundation is his main funder.
 
Anderson's job creation claim comes from a blatant statistical error.
 
The industry lobbyists love to portray any restriction on H-1B as blocking industry's ability to hire "the best and the brightest" from around the world.   But as I have shown in my writings, the fact is that only a tiny percentage of H-1Bs are of that caliber.   And if a bank does find someone of outstanding talent, they can hire the person under the O-1 visa program.
 
Now, what effect would the measure have if it survives the political process?   I have not seen the exact text yet, but according to press reports the provision would extend to all TARP-aided banks the rules now in force for H-1B-dependent employers.   The 2 main features of those rules are (a) that the employer must recruit Americans for a position before filling it with an H-1B and (b) employers may not hire H-1Bs during the period of 90 days before and 90 days after a lay-off.
 
Restriction (a) is not quite as strong as it sounds.   A similar provision in EB green card law is full of loop-holes, as the infamous YouTube videos demonstrated so dramatically.
 
However, there is a little-known technical difference between the American recruitment requirements in H-1B-dependent and EB law, with the H-1B-dependent version being somewhat more effective.   It is certainly worthwhile, and the anti-lay-off rule is quite worthwhile.
 
The provisions here were part of the Durbin/Grassley bill in the last Congress.   In addition, that bill addressed the real heart of the problems with H-1B and EB green cards, by setting a definition of prevailing wage that would reflect reality.   Due to these provisions -- U.S. recruitment, anti-lay-off and prevailing wage -- I strongly endorsed the bill.   (It also had some other parts that I felt were not important.)
 
A ComputerWorld article on today's vote is [linked] below, in addition to the AILA press release.   Patrick Thibodeau: ComputerWorld/IDG: Senate approves weak reforms on hiring H-1B workers: Bill sought to bar firms receiving bail-out money from hiring foreign workers but applied same rules as for "H-1B dependent" firms
AILA propaganda
NetworkWorld/IDG
InfoWorld/IDG
Birmingham AL Star
Greeley CO Tribune/AP
USA Today/Gannett/AP
Frank Bass & Rita Beamish: Oshkosh WI NorthWestern/AP
Frank Bass & Rita Beamish: Miami FL Herald/AP
Orlando FL Sentinel
Frank Bass & Rita Beamish: FL Sun-Sentinel/AP
Frank Bass & Rita Beamish: Los Angeles CA Daily News/AP
Frank Bass & Rita Beamish: Minneapolis MN Star Tribune/AP
Waterloo/Cedar Falls IA Courier
Iowa Politics
Richard Rubin: Congressional Quarterly
Moira Herbst: Business Week

2009-02-07
Tom Lutey _Billings MT Gazette_
Enrollments up at community colleges across Montana
 
 

2009-02-08

2009-02-08
Pat Vaughan Tremmel _EurekAlert!_
That gut feeling may actually reflect a reliable memory
PhysOrg
Genetic Engineering & BioTechnology News
Science Daily
Science web log
London Telegraph
Ars Technica
"During a special recognition test, guesses turned out to be as accurate or more accurate than when study participants thought they consciously remembered.   'We may actually know more than we think we know in everyday situations, too.', said Ken Paller, professor of psychology at Northwestern.   'Unconscious memory may come into play, for example, in recognizing the face of a perpetrator of a crime or the correct answer on a test.   Or the choice from a horde of consumer products may be driven by memories that are quite alive on an unconscious level.'...   Paller and Joel L. Voss, who received his Ph.D. at Northwestern and is now at the Beckman Institute, are co-investigators of the study.   'An Electrophysiological Signature of Unconscious Recognition Memory' will be published on-line Feb. 8 by the journal Nature Neuroscience."

2009-02-08
Norma Greenaway _Montreal Canada Gazette_
More Indian applications for Canadian visa rejected due to fake documents
Vancouver Canada Sun
Edmonton Canada Journal
"Kenney said he was 'floored' to discover the extent and frequency of the fraud perpetrated in Chandigarh by unscrupulous document vendors, counterfeit artists and fake immigration consultants who charge people thousands of dollars to help put together visas that get rejected by officers who are becoming increasingly wise to the fakery.   The going rate is between $12K and $15K, officials say.   At the Chandigarh mission in the 1st 9 months of 2008, more people had their applications for temporary visas to Canada rejected than accepted.   The split was 9,781 rejected, and 8,641 accepted -- a rejection rate of 56%, according to immigration department figures.   By contrast, the rejection rate in New Delhi, where more than 53K applications were processed during that period, was only 19%."

2009-02-08
Paul Craig Roberts _V Dare_
Was there ever intelligent life in DC?
"The pay-roll survey counts the number of jobs, not the number of employed as some people have more than one job.   The Household Survey counts the number of people who have jobs.   The Household Survey shows that 832K people lost their jobs in January and 806K in December, for a 2 month reduction of Americans with jobs of 1.638M [while the working-age population continued to expand]."

2009-02-08
Steve Sailer _V Dare_
Cochran and Harpending update Darwin: Human evolution is continuing
_The 10K Year Explosion_

2009-02-08
_Can Do Better_
skills migration has denied careers to Canadian engineering graduates: jobless figures should drive the last nail into high immigration's coffin
"A report by Engineers Canada (Ingeniéurs Canada) found that in 2006, well before the current economic crisis, Canada's seemingly thoughtless policy of acquiring practically unlimited numbers of engineers from all over the world had caused a massive glut of engineeers in Canada.   As a consequence, 'Two-thirds of persons with a Canadian university degree in engineering were employed outside engineering occupations.'   Yet, in spite of this and in spite of the global financial meltdown, Canada, like Australia, continues with its high immigration program...   On Friday, February 6, Statistics Canada reported that Canada had lost 129K jobs in January...   'Two-thirds of persons with a Canadian university degree in engineering were employed outside engineering occupations.   For those who obtained their degree outside of Canada, the proportion was over 80%.'...   As of 2008, Canada had more than 160K licensed professional engineers, and a great many more engineers without licenses...   The Engineers Canada study cites Statistics Canada figures which show that in 2001, 15,863 immigrant engineers entered Canada.   In the same year, Canadian universities graduated 8,733 engineers.   This total of 24,596 engineers could not be absorbed by the labour market...   2006 Census data indicate that there was already a surplus of Canadian-educated engineers relative to the needs of the labour market!...   around 45% of all of the engineers in Canada are immigrant engineers.   The Engineers Canada report further states that 'The (2006) Census data also strongly suggest that a significant number of persons with a university degree in engineering were working in occupations for which they were over-qualified.'...   The fact that less than 30% of Canadian graduates currently bother to go on to professional licensure, and that Ontario has for many years granted more licenses to foreign-trained engineers than to engineers who gained their education in Canada, should give any prospective student of engineering serious reason to reconsider their choice of the educational program they have enrolled in."
 
 

2009-02-09

2009-02-09
Thomas E. Brewton _View from 1776_
no president can pull an economy out of recession or guarantee continuous prosperity

2009-02-09 (5769 Shevat 15)
Mark Steyn _Jewish World Review_
Far from walking on water, president Obama seems all at sea
 
 

2009-02-10

2009-02-09 21:34PST (2009-02-10 00:34EST) (2009-02-10 05:34GMT)
Roger Simmermaker _World Net Daily_
They already aren't purchasing our stuff

2009-02-10
Patrick J. Buchanan
Buy American or Bye Bye America
V Dare

2009-02-10
Devoe Moore _Tallahassee Demagogue_
Exporting jobs is one way America has gone wrong

2009-02-10
_UPI_
Intel to invest $7G in USA on 32-nanometer fab plants in OR, AZ & NM
Mark Kellner: Washington Times
MarketWatch
Eamon Javers: Politico
Chippewa WI Herald
Silicon Valley/San Jose Mercury News

2009-02-10
Roy Beck _Numbers USA_
It's Official -- US Chamber of Communists would lobby for foreign workers during a depression
"Except for a small percentage of companies in very special circumstances, current law allows corporations to ignore the applications from American students and choose only foreign students for jobs.   It allows corporations to fire American workers and replace them with foreign workers.   It even allows them to force American workers to train their foreign replacements in order to get severance pay."

2009-02-10
Rob Sanchez _Job Destruction News-Letter_ #1978
Zazona: AILA and Chamber of Commerce join forces to destroy SA306
 
Roy Beck raised an interesting question today on his NumbersUSA blog, It's Official -- U.S. Chamber Would Lobby for Foreign Workers During a Depression
 
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce's reaction to a limited set of stricter rules for banks hiring foreign workers answers a bar debate that long has raged.   The question has always been whether if we had another Great Depression would the Chamber still continue to lobby for more foreign workers on the basis of worker shortages.   This week, the debate is settled YES, THEY WOULD!
 
Beck raised this question because the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Immigration Lawyers Association [AILA] haven't finished with Senate Amendment 306 in the "stimulus" bill. As explained in my previous news-letter, SA306 was watered down at the urging of AILA lobbyists who got it to the point that it will save at most 1K jobs.   You would think the greedsters wouldn't care to shoot it down again, but they do.
 
The big question is why?
 
After the Senate voice vote to amend SA306 (which watered the bill down) it would stand to reason that the USCoC and AILA would let dead dogs lie, but they aren't.   In order to understand why let's look at what SA306 will and won't do.
 
What SA306 will do:
 
1) Give us a symbolic victory that could be used as a marker in the future to fight H-1B.
 
2) Banks that receive TARP money will have a slightly bigger hassle getting H-1B visas because now they will automatically be declared H-1B dependent.   Companies that are H-1B dependent never fail to get the H-1Bs they want but there is slightly more paper-work that has to be filed.   Before SA306 was modified the banks wouldn't have been allowed to hire any H-1Bs for a year, which would have been a much bigger victory for us.
 
What SA306 won't do:
 
1) Prevent banks from hiring foreigners by using H-1B, L-1, or TN visas.
 
2) Prevent banks from using bodyshops like Tata or Infosys that use nothing but H-1Bs or L-1s.
 
3) Prevent off-shoring of bank functions or services.
 
4) Save jobs for Americans.
 
There are some dynamics going on that show that groups with slightly conflicting interests are willing to work together to gang up on SA306.   The USCoC loses a little if SA306 stands as is because H-1B dependency is a hassle that businesses don't want.   OTOH, AILA represents immigration lawyers that stand to gain slightly since companies would have to pay lawyers more to process the H-1B visas and for the additional legal advice that would be required to replace American workers.   Apparently these organizations are so obsessed with total victory in all things immigration they are willing to put aside minor differences in order to deny us a miniscule symbolic victory.
 
The corporatists and the sharks have obviously decided to spend resources in order to wipe SA306 off the face of the Earth.   From my observations many labor and immigration groups are confused about what is going on, and therefore divided.   So far the odds of SA306 getting through Congress seem to be quite bad unless opposition gets their act together quickly.
 
Be sure to read the USCoC letter to the Senate.
Chris Strohm: CongressDaily: Groups fight stimulus limit on workers with H-1B visas

2009-02-10
Scott Otto _DC Examiner_
Obama presses congress to bail out Red China

2009-02-10
Andrea Koncz & Pattie Giordani _NACE_
Salary Offers to College Class of 2009 Are Flat While Inflation Soars

2009-02-10
Thomas E. Brewton _View from 1776_
Under "stimulus" bill socialists will decide who lives and who dies

2009-02-10
Chuck Baldwin _V Dare_
President and congress grovel before the Fed

2009-02-10 (5769 Shevat 16)
Caroline B. Glick _Jewish World Review_
Obama's New World Order and Israel

2009-02-10 (5769 Shevat 16)
Quin Hillyer _Jewish World Review_
Defiance

2009-02-10 (5769 Shevat 16)
Thomas Sowell _Jewish World Review_
De-Programming Students
Town Hall
 
 

2009-02-11

2009-02-11
_UPI_
Canada, prompted by high unemployment, may cut immigration
"Canada's planned immigration rate of 265K for 2009 may be scaled back if unemployment remains high, the federal minister says."

2009-02-11
Norm Matloff _H-1B/ L-1/ Off-Shoring News-Letter_
AILA, Chamber fight Sanders/Grassley amendment
 
As many of you will recall, last week I reported on the Sanders/Grassley amendment to the economic stimulus package now being considered in Congress.
 
The amendment, which passed unanimously in a voice vote, would place certain restrictions on hiring of H-1Bs by financial institutions receiving TARP bail-out money.
 
The industry lobbyists, most notably the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), apparently lobbied strongly against the amendment last week, succeeding in greatly weakening it.   Originally the measure placed a flat ban on H-1B hiring by the TARP recipients, but in final form it merely imposed the same restrictions on them that currently apply to the H-1B dependent employers.   As I will explain below, that represented a major weakening of the amendment, but according to the article enclosed below, the AILA et al are still not satisfied, and are pushing for the amendment to be deleted from the bill.
 
The major restrictions to which H-1B dependent employers are subject are (a) Americans must be given hiring priority over H-1Bs and (b) employers are not allowed to hire H-1Bs within 90 days before or after a lay-off.   General H-1B employers do not have these restrictions, but the Sanders/Grassley amendment would extend them to TARP recipients.
 
This would be a step toward implementing a portion the provisions of the excellent Durbin/Grassley H-1B reform bill introduced in the last Congress, which would have extended the H-1B dependency restrictions to all H-1B employers.   I strongly endorsed that bill, because I approve of that portion of the Durbin/Grassley bill, though I regarded the prevailing wage reform part of the bill to be its most important feature.
 
After I made the above posting to this e-news-letter, a number of readers e-mailed me with comments pointing out that the TARP recipients could still hire from the bodyshops, thus circumventing the intent of Sanders/Grassley.   I had not mentioned that in my posting, as I had assumed it would be obvious, as are other ways of getting around the restrictions, such as hiring L-1s; but of course it is an issue.   Though I believe there is too much emphasis on the bodyshops in the H-1B debate, they are definitely important, but I will leave that issue to a major posting on it that I currently have in preparation.
 
You might ask, though, if the TARP recipients are going to get access to foreign workers through the bodyshops anyway, which they already do in sizable numbers, why would the AILA be so worried?   The answers to this question are quite significant.
 
First, the bodyshops hire H-1Bs in bulk, and likely do so with a pretty small set of lawyers.   Indeed, one can use a single H-1B application to request permission to hire many H-1Bs.   So, when the bodyshops hire H-1Bs, only a tiny percentage of AILA members get any business.   Second, unlike many other employers, bodyshops sponsor very few of their H-1Bs for green cards.   Since a lawyer charges 5 or 6 times as much for green card applications as for H-1B cases, that again is quite a loss in income for AILA members.
 
But even those considerations pale in comparison to the core issue, which I believe is the historic, symbolic significance of the Sanders/Grassley amendment.   For the first time since the establishment of the H-1B program in 1990, a house of Congress (the Senate here) has gone on record as characterizing H-1B to be a Bad Thing.   The amendment puts H-1B on par with exhorbitant salaries for CEOs who run their companies into the ground, and with the purchasing of cheap foreign steel.
 
The statements made by those who want to limit TARP recipient CEO salaries, including president Obama, are along the lines of, "Normally we would consider those high salaries for poor work to be stupid but well within the rights of boards of directors to pay them, but we draw the line when [tax-victims'] money is involved."   The Sanders/Grassley amendment's analog of this statement would be, "We've been reluctantly allowing you to hire H-1Bs instead of Americans, but no way will we let you do this if you're receiving a [tax-victim] bail-out."   IOW, the Sanders/Grassley amendment is an admission that H-1B is fundamentally wrong-headed.
 
The amendment also is an admission by the Senate that H-1B is about cheap labor, by analogy with the proposals that recipients of the stimulus package funds not be allowed to buy cheap foreign steel.   Though Congress has implicitly admitted that the bodyshops hire H-1Bs for the purpose of acquiring cheap labor, it has never admitted that this is true for main-stream firms too.   By imposing limits on big, household name financial institutions regarding H-1Bs, the Senate is tacitly admitting that they too use the H-1B program for cheap labor.
 
(I've of course written about this at length.   Some of the mainstream firms may hire a higher class of workers, but they still pay them less than comparable Americans.)
 
Seems to me that this symbolism is huge.   I believe the lobbyists may go all out to get the amendment deleted, or at least get it greatly watered down.   They may, for example, push for an exception for foreign workers who have graduate degrees from U.S. universities.   As I've written before, such an exemption would NOT be justified--most such workers are of only moderate talent, and employers can hire the few exceptions through the O-1 visa program -- but sadly, pushing this Education Button has usually proved effective with gullible people on the Hill.   One way or the other, this amendment does not seem likely to remain intact, and will likely be deleted altogether.
 
It will be interesting to watch.
 
Norm
Chris Strohm: CongressDaily/NextGov: Groups fight stimulus limit on workers with H-1B visas
"It would place limits on any company receiving funds under the $700G Troubled Asset Relief Program [TARP] from hiring skilled foreign workers under the H-1B visa program.   The provision is primarily intended to prevent financial institutions from replacing laid off workers with foreigners.   'Wall Street [driven by Congress demanding that they give out unsound loans] caused the crisis, millions of people lost jobs, including 100K in financial institutions.   Now they want to bring in foreign workers.', Sanders said.   'Talk about adding insult to injury.'...   Companies would still be able to hire workers through the H-1B program [in those extremely rare cases in which no able and willing US citizen can be found, or the many means have been applied to declare all able and willing US citizens to be 'disqualified'].   But under the Grassley-Sanders language, they must actively recruit U.S. workers, ensure they do not displace American workers and ensure that American workers are not laid off in favor of foreign workers.   Grassley and other advocates say the intention is to ensure that U.S. workers are given priority in hiring.   'With the unemployment rate at 7.6%, there is no need for companies to hire foreign guest workers through the H1-B program when there are plenty of qualified Americans looking for jobs.', Grassley said.   'Our common-sense amendment simply ensures that recipients of American [tax-victim] money make American workers their first priority as they look to hire new employees.'...   major U.S. financial institutions hired only up to 0.74% of foreigners under the H-1B program in 2007 [but it is a significant gesture to unemployed and under-employed US STEM workers nonetheless]."
 

2009-02-11
Peter Brimelow _V Dare_
America's egalitarian temptation - Stalinism's unquiet ghost

2009-02-11
Norm Matloff _H-1B/ L-1/ Off-Shoring News-Letter_
new working paper on H-1B by Kerr and Lincoln
 
Professors William R. Kerr and William F. Lincoln of the Harvard Business School just released a study in which they claim that Chinese and Indian H-1Bs, especially the Chinese, are highly innovative, and that "shocking" (their term) our economy with a large in-flow of H-1Bs would be greatly beneficial [despite the obvious fact that the humongous in-flow of the last 20 years has been greatly harmful].   The paper is already making the rounds -- Kerr will speak at the Center for Immigration Studies on Feb. 13, and [former bodyshopper] Vivek Wadhwa lauds it in his BusinessWeek column -- and is sure to be highly cited by the industry lobbyists.
 
The authors' finding that the Chinese are the most innovative might strike some readers as odd?   Aren't East Asians known for lack of innovation?   Actually, the governments of [Red China], Japan, South Korea and Taiwan themselves believe this, and have publicly wondered how to reverse it.   Nobel physicist C.N. Yang has said, "...[those] trained in the Orient tend to be too [intellectually] timid...   This attitude prevents them from jumping over hurdles to make important contributions...   This too timid attitude is a handicap later in life when they want to be more creative or more imaginative."   I must assure you that there are indeed many East Asians that are fantastic innovators (Yang himself of course being a prime example) -- but at the same time, I share the views of the abovementioned governments and Dr. Yang.
 
As I will explain, the study is indeed fundamentally flawed.   It is impressive looking, 50 pages in length, extensive data analysis, lots of references, and math that goes beyond the capabilities of people on the Hill (i.e. logarithms).   But, sadly, it makes a number of major errors.
 
Professor Kerr kindly e-mailed me a draft of the study, asking for comments, and I responded with a detailed list of suggestions.   Some of them involved important aspects of H-1B that he seemed to be unaware of, while others were methodological.   (I am a former statistics professor, and continue to do research and consulting in the field.)   But as far as I can tell, he did not heed any of my comments in the final version of his paper, though of course he does cite my work, primarily "On the Need for Reform of the H-1B Non-Immigrant Work Visa in Computer-Related Occupations" N.S. Matloff _University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform_ 2003 Autumn, Vol36 #4 pp 815-914.
 
Where, then, did the authors of this study go wrong?   The most glaring error is their failure to properly account for the relation of H-1B hiring to the boom/bust nature of the tech field.   They do note that boom/bust nature, but don't understand the implications.
 
Clearly, there is more patenting during boom times and less during busts.   During booms, there are more jobs, in particular more R&D jobs, since R&D is a luxury for almost all firms, and thus more patents.   Moreover, there is much more venture capital available during booms, and since startup firms tend to be more innovative, this makes the boom/bust variable even more important.
 
This ties directly to the number of H-1Bs.   Congress has been willing to expand the H-1B program during times of boom in the tech sector, and has declined to expand it during times of bust.   Thus the authors' analysis boils down to showing that more patents are produced during booms, rather than showing a direct H-1B effect on patenting.
 
This is of course already a central problem in the study's analysis.   But in addition, I pointed out to professor Kerr that this in turn exacerbates a methodological problem called multicollinearity, in which the variables are so intercorrelated that it can change regression coefficients from positive to negative and vice versa.   No need to go into the details here (the Wikipedia entry is actually a pretty good exposition of the issue if you want a basic summary), but the point is that since the author's entire analysis rests on the signs of these coefficients -- positive meaning that H-1Bs have a positive effect on U.S. innovation -- the authors have real statistical problems in addition to the "common related variable" flaw due to the boom/bust pattern discussed above.
 
One aspect the authors were especially interested in was whether Americans were "crowded out" of the field -- i.e. displaced -- or "crowded in", meaning that the presence of the H-1Bs actually enhanced the innovation efforts of the Americans.   They find that there appears to be a crowding-in effect, though they mention that it is not statistically significant, i.e. their sample size is not large enough to be very sure.   What they don't mention, though, is that the confidence intervals they have for those regression coefficients suggest almost as strongly that the coefficients are negative.
 
Also on the crowding-in/out issue, the authors cite the work of fellow Harvard professor George Borjas that "natives are crowded-out from graduate school enrollments by foreign students, especially in the most elite institutions, and suffer lower wages after graduation due to the increased labor supply".   The authors say that Borjas' findings don't jibe with other work on this topic, but in fact the papers they cite don't address the Borjas issue at all, a serious, disturbing logical error.
 
Moreover, the National Science Foundation (one of the funders of the Kerr/Lincoln study) itself stated at the time Congress was considering instituting the H-1B program that the program would indeed crowd OUT the Americans.   In the paper I've quoted often here, the NSF said that "A growing influx of foreign PhDs into U.S. labor markets will hold down the level of PhD salaries...   [If] doctoral studies are failing to appeal to a large (or growing) percentage of the best citizen baccalaureates, then a key issue is pay...   A number of [the Americans] will select alternative career paths."   That of course is exactly what happened in the subsequent years; enrollment by Americans in tech grad programs has gone way down, and tech PhD salaries have not kept pace with those of comparable professions, exactly as Borjas found.
 
So the crowding-out is quite clear and, as mentioned, actually forecast by the NSF.   That invalidates Kerr's and Lincoln's regression analyses right at the outset, because they are based on data that doesn't account for the crowding-out at the graduate school level, which the authors agree is the source of most of the later patent activity.
 
Another key issue is that the authors do not address the counterfactual.   What if natives were to hold the positions taken by H-1Bs?   Would the number of patent applications filed be the same as, greater than or less than the number we now see?   Again, failure to address those questions renders the authors' findings invalid.
 
Aside from all these problems with the study, it showed an insensitivity that I tried (unsuccessfully) to warn professor Kerr about.   It counted everyone with a Chinese or Indian surname as foreign-born, and by implication, a current or former H-1B.   This ignores the huge numbers of Chinese- and Indo-Americans who were born here or immigrated as minors with their families.   OTOH, anyone with a British surname is counted as a U.S. native, and the authors repeatedly describe U.S. natives in this manner, using terms such as "English inventors", "English patenting", "English ethnicity", and so on.   While I can understand why the authors might find it convenient to use such proxies, I pointed out that it might be offensive to some (especially given the "English" surnames of the two authors).   But the authors made no change.
 
Norm
* Are there bright people who were born in Asia and India?   Yes.
* Are more than single-digit percentage of the people who come from India and Asia to the USA on H-1B visas gifted?   No.
* Are more than a tiny fraction of them innovative when they first arrive, bringing fresh new insights to the USA?   No.
* Do some of them become more creative and flexible in their thinking after some amount of assimilation into the culture of the USA?   Yes.
* Is there a shortage of gifted, creative US citizens?   No.   There is a vast surplus of bright, creative, industrious US citizens who are unemployed and under-employed.
Abstract of Kerr & Lincoln paper
Kerr & Lincoln paper (pdf)
Commnets
Matloff: revised comments

2009-02-11
James Carlini _Midwest Business Technology News_
Media Bias: Where can you really get credible news today?

2009-02-11
Tim Mahaffey _Anderson IN Herald Bulletin_
Congress needs to remove knives stuck in US workers' backs
"We need millions of long-term full-time jobs to get out of this hole."

2009-02-11
Karen Freifeld _Bloomberg_
top 4 Merrill Lynch bonus recipients got $121M

2009-02-11 (5769 Shevat 17)
Thomas Sowell _Jewish World Review_
Random Thoughts
Town Hall

2009-02-11 (5769 Shevat 17)
Walter E. Williams _Jewish World Review_
Should the federal government be doing any of the things in the "stimulus" bill?
"In explaining the Constitution, James Madison, the acknowledged father of the Constitution, wrote in Federalist Paper 45: 'The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined.   Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.   The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce.'"
 
 

2009-02-12

1809-02-12 Abraham Lincoln was born.

2009-02-12 05:30PST (08:30EST) (13:30GMT)
Scott Gibbons & Tony Sznoluch _DoL ETA_
un-employment insurance weekly claims report
current press release
"The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 706,267 in the week ending Feb. 7, an increase of 24,091 from the previous week.   There were 377,457 initial claims in the comparable week in 2008.   The advance unadjusted insured unemployment rate was 4.4% during the week ending Jan. 31, an increase of 0.1 percentage point from the prior week.   The advance unadjusted number for persons claiming UI benefits in state programs totaled 5,940,432, an increase of 133,551 from the preceding week.   A year earlier, the rate was 2.5% and the volume was 3,328,590.   Extended benefits were available in North Carolina, Oregon, and Rhode Island during the week ending Jan. 24."
graphs
more graphs

2009-02-12
Norm Matloff _H-1B/ L-1/ Off-Shoring News-Letter_
Tom F chimes in on Kerr & Lincoln paper
 
I've revised and extended my posting yesterday on the Kerr/Lincoln study (the one that claims great innovative prowess for the H-1Bs).   I've added some new points, and included the e-mail message I had sent Dr. Kerr back in December when he had asked for my comments on the draft of his study.   You may find that e-mail message interesting, as he ignored all my comments, making me wonder why in the world he had asked for them in the first place.   You can read my revised/extended posting.
 
It turns out that the prominent New York Times columnist Tom Friedman also mentioned the Kerr/Lincoln report yesterday.   Indeed, a well-known journalist who is very savvy on the workings of U.S. politics told me today he thought the Kerr & Lincoln study would become a land-mark in the H-1B debate, a possible game changer in Congress.   He may well be right.
 
The journalist also asked me how I felt that such fundamentally flawed study would attain such status.   The fact is, I'm used to it.   Indeed, the industry lobbyists actually commission university studies to give "impartial" academic cover to the lobbyists' selfish agendas.   Please note that I am NOT saying that Kerr and Lincoln have been bought, but it definitely happens, and as I said, Congress can be suckers for academic studies, even (or especially) the badly-flawed ones.
 
Austin Fragomen, head of the nation's largest immigration law firm (this is of course the same firm that was helping Cisco to avoid hiring American workers last year, though as usual, in full compliance with the law), told Workforce Magazine in 1996 March (emphasis added):
 
"[When Congress was considering clamping down on the H-1B program in 1996], the business community mobilized, forming American Business for Legal Immigration (ABLI), a Washington, DC-based lobbying group that represents a number of associations and employers, and commissions academic studies to support its position."
 
Which brings me back to Tom Friedman. Is he just a an independent reporter, thinking up his globalist ideas on his own, with no personal vested interests? Well, no. No way. Friedman was extensively "tutored" by Silicon Valley executives in preparation for his "Flat World" book extolling globalization, and I think it's a safe bet that he didn't seek insights from experts on the other side of this issue.   He is known to be a member of the consulting firm Intellibridge, undoubtedly a lucrative gig, and I suppose he consults for other firms as well.   His book has sold millions of copies, and I'm sure he commands fat speaking fees.   Good for him, and he may well believe the things he writes -- but he has highly powerful incentives to write them, and to ignore information to the contrary.   See article 1 about T. Friedman's writings and this second article for some details, and for my explanation of the fundamental flaw in one of his favorite examples.
 
As to Friedman's remarks below, they sound quite plausible, but his premises and sources are wrong.   Yes, it's great to bring in "the best and the brightest" from around the world, but as I've shown both statistically and qualitatively, the vast majority of H-1Bs are not in that league (pdf).   Yes, it's nice to have great entrepreneurs, but even Friedman's source, [former bodyshopper] Vivek Wadha agrees that the immigrant engineers and the natives have the same rates of entrepreneurship; having immigrants in Silicon Valley instead of natives has not increased the number of start-ups.
 
Norm
Bill Tucker: CNN "the study does not prove that H-1B workers or even foreign-born workers were the recipients of the patents.   It establishes a correlation of patents being granted to recipients with non-English names.   The study's author says he understands and welcomes the arguments surrounding his study...   Now Kerr says he'll be happy if the impact of his study is to generate more research into the H-1B program... [100% of his funding came from the Harvard B-school.]"
---30---

2009-02-12
_CNN_
special masters court rules that there is no causal link between vaccines and autism
Los Angeles Times/AP
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
San Jose CA Mercury News
Geneva CH Lunch
MedScape/WebMD
Science web logs
London Telegraph
Med Page Today
UPI
Atlanta GA Journal Constitution
MarketWatch
WebMD
Town Hall
News Max
Fox
"The ruling came from a panel of 'special masters' who began hearing 3 test cases in 2007 involving children with autism -- a disorder that their parents contend was triggered by the vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella combined with vaccines containing thimerosal, a preservative containing mercury...   the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said it continues to support research 'to better understand the cause of autistic disorders and develop more effective methods of treatment...   [However] the medical and scientific communities... have found no association between vaccines and autism'."

2009-02-12 08:27PST (11:27EST) (16:27GMT)
Rex Nutting _MarketWatch_
Retail sales rose seasonally adjusted 1% in January

2009-02-12
Charlene Bielema _Clinton IA Herald_
11 arrested for visa/mail fraud
Michael J. Crumb: Forbes/AP
Springfield MA Republican
ICE press release
Moira Herbst: Business Week
"Vineet Maheshwari, 35, and Fazal Mehmood, also known as Fazal Awan, 49, and 9 others in 6 states have been arrested as part of investigations into visa and mail fraud.   In connection with the case, FBI agents, immigration officers and Clinton police on Wednesday afternoon were among the agencies probing 211 Fifth Ave. South, which houses Worldwide Software Services Inc. and Sana Systems Inc., Vision Systems Group in Coon Rapids, IA and NJ.   Agents accuse him of providing a false employment history.   They say that in 2008 March he was to give an accurate 5-year employment history and that he falsely stated he had been employed by Network Resource Group of Springfield, IL, since 1999, when in fact he had been employed at Sana Systems and Worldwide Software Services in Clinton until at least 2006.   Mehmood, a native of Pakistan, is accused of misusing a Social Security number from 1990 Nov. 6 through 2005 Nov. 30 and for making a false record in relation to the registry of aliens, the criminal complaint states.   Prosecutors allege that he received 2 different Socialist Insecurity numbers (SINs) under 2 separate names, applying for one in 1989 and the other in 1990.   The documents claim he opened accounts and got a driver's license using differing SINs.   Documents state that he sought an adjustment in status from an H-1B non-immigrant to permanent resident.   That request was made in 2000 by Worldwide Software Services on behalf of Fazal Mehmood.   'We allege those workers were actually on the coasts working in much higher-wage jobs although they were receiving wages that were the prevailing wage in Iowa and thereby, we allege, dislocating and displacing United States workers that could have done those jobs in those locations.,' one US attorney said.   The government also is seeking the forfeiture of $7.4M in proceeds raised through the alleged offenses.   Others arrested include Shiva Neeli in Boston, MA; Ramakrisna Maguluri in Atlanta, GA; Villiappan Subbaiah in Dallas, TX; Suresh Pola in Philadelphia, PA, Chockalingham Palaniappan in San Jose, CA; Vijay Myneni in San Jose, CA; Venkata Guduru in NJ; Amit Justa in NJ; Karambir Yadav in Louisville, KY; Vishnu Reddy in Los Angeles, CA; Praveen Andapally in NJ; some of whom are from Pakistan and India."
Kim Berry: Programmers Guild
 
The Federal Government implies in announcing this bust that U.S. workers are NOT displaced when foreign workers are placed within the "jobs and terms of the DoL H-1b Labor Condition Certification".
 
That is absurd.
 
The DoL LCA certification in no way protects U.S. workers from displacement.   There is not even a provision or requirement to advertise to try to fill positions with U.S. workers before DoL [approves] the LCA.   There is not even an "attestation" that no U.S. workers are being displaced.
 
The LCA "prevailing wage" has 4 levels.   Most H-1b use "level one" which is 17th percentile of U.S. wages -- $10k to $15k below what average-skilled Americans get paid.
 
I have personally witnessed contracts positions being awarded to H-1b workers, even when the U.S. worker applicants were more qualified.   The distinction was that the bodyshops that submitted the H-1b resumes asked a lower bill-rate.   The Americans were not even asked if they would accept the lower rate.
 
The major Indian consulting firms openly admit that their competitive advantage is that they are able to pay their H-1b workers 20%-25% below what they would have to pay Americans.
 
According to the Hindustan Times in 2006 September, a top user of H-1b within the U.S. admitted to substantially under-paying their H-1b workers, citing that under-payment as their "competitive advantage":
 
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) vice president Phiroz Vandrevala even admitted that his company enjoys a competitive advantage because of its extensive use of foreign workers in the United States on H-1B and L-1 visas.   "Our wage per employee is 20%-25% less than US wages for a similar employee.", Vandrevala said.   "Typically, for a TCS employee with 5 years experience, the annual cost to the company is $60K-$70K, while a local American employee might cost $80K-$100K.   "This (labour arbitrage) is a fact of doing work on-site.   It's a fact that Indian IT companies have an advantage here and there's nothing wrong in that.   The issue is that of getting workers in the US on wages far lower than the local wage rate."
class action against Tata

2009-02-12
Jack Stripling _Inside Higher Education_
Interstate Commerce in University Students
"About 66% of Vermont's freshmen came from out of state this year, continuing a practice that is designed in part to make up for relatively low state funding levels.   But as the economy softens, others may follow suit.   Institutions in states like Florida and Ohio are stepping up efforts to lure non-state residents, who are likely to bring both strong academic credentials and a willingness to pay higher tuition rates...   About 16% of first-time under-graduates at public colleges across the nation come from out of state, according to the U.S. Department of Education.   At a number of state universities, however, out-of-state students make up more than 30% of the freshman class...   Even so, there's little question that non-state students are a boon to Michigan's bottom line.   Michigan residents pay $11,037 in tuition and fees in their freshmen and sophomore years, compared with $33,069 for non-state residents.   Furthermore, Michigan has a policy of meeting full demonstrated financial need for in-state under-graduates, but doesn't extend that policy to those who come from other states.   As a result, 80% of state residents receive some form of financial aid -- compared with 52% of non-state residents...   Miami University's campus in Oxford, Ohio, has seen out-of-state enrollments grow from 30% of under-graduates in 2000 to 36% in 2008...   [Florida] mandates that no more than 10% of the under-graduate population across the 11-campus system be non-resident.   In 2007, 5% of the students in the system were from out of state...   Vermont admitted 71% of in-state first-year applicants this year, but about 75% of the enrolled class of 2,468 students ended up being from out of state...   As for out-of-state students [at VT universities], tuition is nearly $29,700, and 28% of those students pay full freight with no aid...   For every 100 out-of-state students that come to Colorado, the institution generates an extra $1M, according to university officials."

2009-02-12
Paul Craig Roberts _V Dare_
How will federal deficits be financed?

2009-02-12
Ryan Byrnes _Cybercast News Service_
Feds Have Built Only 32 Miles of the Totally Inadequate 700 Mile Double-Border Fence Originally Mandated by Congress
"One reason DHS has been able to do this is an amendment that senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) slipped into an omnibus appropriations bill that Congress passed on 2007 December 18...   Hutchison's 2007 amendment...said: 'Limitation on Requirements. -- Notwithstanding subparagraph (A), nothing in this paragraph shall require the Secretary of Homeland Security to install fencing, physical barriers, roads, lighting, cameras, and sensors in a particular location along an international border of the United States, if the Secretary determines that the use or placement of such resources is not the most appropriate means to achieve and maintain operational control over the international border at such location.'"

2009-02-12
Edwin S. Rubenstein _V Dare_
Recession finally causing immigrants to self-deport -- but job displacement remains massive (with graph, table)

2009-02-12
Bill Snyder _InfoWorld_
The H-1B visa has got to go

2009-02-12
_NASA_
Gettysburg national military park
 
 

2009-02-13

2009-02-13
Fay Hansen _Work-Force Management_
Companies that bring on new workers while laying off others increase the risk of a discrimination law-suit

2009-02-13 07:32PST (10:32EST) (15:32GMT)
Ruth Mantell _MarketWatch_
UMich consumer sentiment from 61.2 in January to 56.2 in early February

2009-02-13
Patrick Thibodeau _Computer World_/_IDG_
Limits on H-1B hiring by bail-out recipients still in economic "stimulus" bill
IT World
Moira Herbst: BusinessWeek
"'We know that many, if not all, of these banks have human resource practices where they force their American workers to train foreign replacements, and subsequently lay off the American workers.', Hira said.   That practice 'sometimes results in tragedy', he added, citing the 2003 suicide of a former [Bank of India Corp.] programmer who reportedly was laid off after training his replacement."

2009-11-13
Joe Guzzardi _V Dare_
"Octomom", immigration and California's crisis

2009-11-13
Butch Heman _Carroll IA Times Herald_
11 arrested for visa/mail fraud: New Jersey firm charged with having fake office at Coon Rapids
Times of the Internet/UPI
Fred Love: Waterloo/Cedar Falls IA Courier
MarketWatch/UPI
Grant Schulte: Des Moines IA Register
Patrick Thibodeau: ComputerWorld
InfoWorld
"The arrests took place in Massachusetts, Georgia, Texas, Pennsylvania, California, New Jersey and Kentucky."

2009-02-13 (5769 Shevat 19)
Rabbi David Aaron _Jewish World Review_
Living Life's Greatest Joy

2009-02-13

DJIA	7,850.41
S&P 500	826.84
NASDAQ	1,534.36
10-year US T-Bond	2.89%
crude oil	$37.51/barrel
gold	$913.90/ounce
silver	$13.625/ounce
platinum	$1,061.00/ounce
palladium	$216.50/ounce
copper	$0.10178125/ounce
natgas	$4.452/MBTU
reformulatedgasoline	$1.2063/gal
heatingoil	$1.30/gal
dollarindex	85.964
yenperdollar	91.86
dollarspereuro	1.2887
dollarsperpound	1.4370
swissfranksperdollar	1.1671
indianrupeesperdollar	48.67
MorganStanleyHighTechIndex	351.71

I usually get this info from MarketWatch and the "Commodities" and "Metals" and "Currencies" columns.
 
 
 

2009-02-14

2009-02-13 20:35PST (2009-02-13 23:35EST) (2009-02-14 04:35GMT)
Jerome R. Coris _World Net Daily_
Federal obligations exceed world GDP: Does $65.5T terrify anyone yet? (with table)

2009-02-14
_Billings MT Gazette_/_AP_
representative Cynthia Lummis and senator Mike Enzi of Wyoming say "stimulus" bill won't help economy, only grow federal government

2009-02-14
Dustin Ensinger _Op Ed News_
Judd Gregg, Secretary of Off-Shoring

2009-02-14
Weaver
Science & Engineering Grads Not Employed

2009-02-14
_Tech Toil_
Tech Degrees are Not Worth the Time, Money, and Effort
 
 

2009-02-15

2009-02-15
Norm Matloff _H-1B/ L-1/ Off-Shoring News-Letter_
some recent events
Here are some updates on some of my recent postings:
 
1. Professor Bill Kerr, one of the authors of the Harvard Business School study on H-1B patenting, has replied to my critique of his study with an 8-page letter in PDF format.   I suggested that I post the letter here, with my comments, and he agreed.   I'll do so when I get a chance, which will probably be in a week or so.
 
2. As some of you know, last week a New Jersey employer was indicted on charges of H-1B fraud.   However, I almost never report on such incidents, as I regard them as irrelevant to the big H-1B picture.   The central problems of H-1B and employment-based (EB) green cards involve fully legal abuse via loopholes in the law, as opposed to violations of the law, and the large household-name firms are just as culpable as the "bodyshops".   Indeed, the industry lobbyists love it when the feds crack down on violators of H-1B law, as it gives them a chance to distract Congress and the press from the real issues (the loop-holes), and to distract attention away from the big-name firms.
 
3. The Sanders/Grassley amendment to the economic "stimulus" bill survived conference committee.   Recall that the amendment extends to recipients of TARP bail-out money the H-1B hiring restrictions that normally apply only to H-1B dependent employers.
 
As I explained in previous posts, the restrictions are rather mild.   And they too have loop-holes.   Nevertheless, they will have some practical impact, and much more importantly, have major symbolic impact, as they are tacit admission by Congress that the H-1B visa program is fundamentally a Bad Thing.
 
In the past, Congress' message -- and I mean the word "message" literally, in the form of the politicians' public statements and letters to constituents -- is that H-1B is basically a Good Thing, remedying tech labor shortages and enabling the import of "the best and the brightest" from around the world.   Members of Congress continued to make such statements in spite of the facts that:
 
* Congress' own study, commissioned as part of the 1998 legislation that nearly doubled the yearly H-1B cap, found that it could not confirm the industry's claim of a shortage studies.   None of the other studies then and since, including that of the Dept. of Commerce (but excluding industry-sponsored studies), found a shortage either.
 
* Two congressionally-commissioned reports, as well as various academic studies, found that use of H-1Bs as cheap labor is commonplace.   The GAO report also made the point that loop-holes make it fully legal to pay H-1Bs less than comparable Americans.
 
* It has been shown quantitatively in several different ways that only a small percentage of the H-1Bs are in the "best and brightest" league.
 
* The YouTube video, made by a prominent law firm to show its prominent clients (i.e. main-stream firms rather than bodyshops) how to circumvent the EB green card law requiring employers to [go through the motions as though they were recruiting] Americans before sponsoring a foreign worker for a green card, was widely circulated by members of Congress.
 
Yet, Congress has continued to ignore the mountain of information against H-1B and EB green cards, and continued to discuss those programs as Good Things.   The one small concession they've made has been to demonize the bodyshops.   Those firms present an easy target, especially since they tend to be owned by Indian-Americans and Indian parent companies (Congress is not above appealing to xenophobia, as representative Zoe Lofgren unwittingly demonstrated in a House hearing), and as I said, such demonization serves the purpose of distracting attention from the big main-stream U.S. firms that make the big campaign contributions to both major parties.
 
Recall that when Congress enacted another H-1B increase in 2000, senator Robert Bennett remarked, "Once it's clear (the visa bill) is going to get through, everybody signs up so nobody can be in the position of being accused of being against high tech.   There were, in fact, a whole lot of folks against it, but because they are tapping the high-tech community for campaign contributions, they don't want to admit that in public.", and the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee Chair, representative Tom Davis, said, "This is not a popular bill with the public.   It's popular with the CEOs...   This is a very important issue for the high-tech executives who give the money."
 
So, in light of Congress' past refusal to acknowledge the fundamental statutory bankrupcy of H-1B and their steadfast protection of their patrons in the tech industry and the American Immigration Lawyers Association [AILA], their passage of the Sanders/Grassley amendment is quite remarkable.   Again, this is not because the tangible impact will be huge, but because it implicitly acknowledges that H-1B is a Bad Thing used for Bad Purposes by main-stream firms (in this case, the big financial institutions being bailed out by TARP).   It places H-1B on par with exhorbitant salaries made by TARP-recipient CEOs and cheap foreign steel, both also under discussion now.   Again, the CEO salary issue has never bothered me, but my point is that by approving the Grassley/Sanders amendment, Congress is finally recognizing H-1B for what it is, an awful program abused by almost everyone.
 
[Linked] below is a BusinessWeek article on the amendment.   I have comments on a couple of passages:
 
The amendment falls short of preventing large banks from using H-1Bs brought into the U.S. by out-sourcing firms like India-based Infosys (INFY), Wipro (WIT), and Tata (TCS.NS), which are among the top recipients of petitions for the H-1B visa program.   IOW, a bank could still legally force a laid-off American employee to train a replacement worker who is on an H-1B visa on an out-sourcing firm's pay-roll.
 
These are some of the large bodyshops.   As I mentioned last week, I am currently preparing a major study on the bodyshops.   This is a bit ironic, as I believe too much of the H-1B discussion centers on them, when in fact the mainstream firms are just as culpable, but for that very reason I feel the need to go into the issue in depth.
 
For now, though, I wish to point out that most bodyshops are officially deemed to be H-1B dependent, and one of the restrictions on such employers is that they are not allowed to displace U.S. workers even at client firms, i.e. firms to which the bodyshops rent out their "bodies".   As usual, there are a number of loopholes here, but the situation is not quite as stark as the reporter writes above.
 
Also, the article notes:
 
Rising unemployment is leading to more scrutiny of the H-1B visa program and its effects...
 
True, but I wish to point out again that unemployment rates do not tell the real story in the tech field, for two reasons.   First, those rates don't count the people who have been driven out of the field by H-1Bs; as Gene Nelson famously put it, the former software engineer now working as a security guard counts in BLS data as an employed security guard, not as an unemployed software engineer.   Second, a very substantial fraction of techies work as independent contractors; H-1Bs cause their business to go down, yet they (the contractors) don't count as unemployed either.
 
The article [is linked] below.
 
Norm
Moira Herbst: BusinessWeek: Stimulus: Tighter H-1B Controls on Bailed Out Banks
Tata median salaries by city
Wipro median salaries by city
Infosys median salaries by city

2009-02-15
Steve Sailer _V Dare_
The minority mortgage melt-down: Charting the CRA crack-up (with graphs)
"As the [graph] shows, $4.2T in CRA dollars was committed from 1992 through 2005.   In contrast, $8.8G was negotiated from 1977 through 1991.   When measured in terabucks, the Community Reinvestment Act was negligible until the 1990s. And it was still small potatoes until the Clinton 'reforms' of 1995 and the rise of well-organized pressure groups of the kind affiliated with the NCRC.   But the biggest flood of CRA assurances came during the presidency of George W. Bush, who repeatedly called in 2002-2004 for 5.5M more minority home-owners by 2010.   Cumulative bank pledges (typically doled out over 10 years) grew from $1.85T in 2002 to $4.20T in 2004.   Indeed, total CRA commitments increased by $1.63T in 2004 alone, the first year of the Housing Bubble."

2009-02-15
Lornet Turnbull _Seattle Times_
USCIS report found fraud in 20% of H-1B applications

2009-02-15
_American Engineering Association_
National Engineers' Week: In Honor of the American Engineer

2009-02-15
Lornet Turnbull _Seattle Times_
Down-turn conflict: Guest-workers, unemployed and under-employed US professionals
"The U.S.A. last year allowed in nearly 800K foreign workers under a string of employment-based visas representing virtually every letter of the alphabet."
 

2009-02-16

2009-02-16
Paul Craig Roberts _V Dare_
Clinton, Bush & Obama: presidents of/by/for special interests
Prison Planet
CounterPunch
On-Line Journal
V Dare
Baltimore MD Chronicle & Sentinel
Axis of Logic
Economy in Crisis

2009-02-16 (5769 Shevat 22)
Mark Steyn _Jewish World Review_
So far, it's been Obamateur Hour

2009-02-16 (5769 Shevat 22)
Max Singer _Jewish World Review_
Why time is on Israel's side

2009-02-16 (5769 Shevat 22)
Michael Feldberg _Jewish World Review_
Lincoln's fight for Jewish chaplains
 
 

2009-02-17

2009-02-17
Jan Falstad _Billings MT Gazette_
Denny Rehberg: "Stimulus" bill won't help much
"The House members were given no chance to amend the compromise that came over from the Senate and no time to read the 1K-plus pages, Rehberg said.   Despite promises that the legislation would be posted on-line 48 hours before the vote, he said the language wasn't available to House members until 23:00 Thursday, 10 hours before the debate started.   That amounted to 24 seconds per page, if they stayed up all night."

2009-02-17
Walter Berns _Wall Street Journal_
Why America Celebrates Lincoln: Liberty and union

2009-02-17
Jim Kouri _Miami Examiner_
11 indicted in multi-state visa fraud operation

2009-02-17
"Eyer" _Associated Content_
H-1B visa malpractices negatively affecting US economy

2009-02-17
Robert Reich
The "stimulus" and auto bail-out: Don't confuse American companies with American jobs

2009-02-17
Michelle Malkin _V Dare_
ACORN and Obama together again

2009-02-17 (5769 Shevat 23)
Caroline B. Glick _Jewish World Review_
Israel's last ditch effort to destroy itself

2009-02-17 (5769 Shevat 23)
Rabbi Doctor Asher Meir _Jewish World Review_
Border-Line Poor
 
 

2009-02-18

2009-02-17 18:41PST (2009-02-17 21:41EST) (2009-02-18 02:41GMT)
Jim DeFede _CBS 4 Miami_
Giving Away American Jobs part 1
"the St. Regis Resort, a trio of oceanside glass towers built by developer Jorge Perez...   In a move that is angering local workers as well as members of Congress, one company received permission from both the state of Florida and the U.S. Department of Labor to bring workers in from Mexico to install the air conditioning and heating ducts -- even though there are more than a thousand unemployed sheet metal workers right here in South Florida.   'This is really a terrible situation what's going on.', said U.S. representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, whose congressional district includes the St. Regis site.   'How can you bring folks from another country -- no diss on Mexico -- to do this construction project when you have so many folks here who could use the work?'...   H-2B"

2009-02-17 20:14PST (2009-02-17 23:14EST) (2009-02-18 04:14GMT)
Jim DeFede _CBS 4 Miami_
Giving Away American Jobs part 2
"When she released their latest report, the head of the [Florida Agency for Work-Force Innovation], Monesia Brown -- an appointee of governor Charlie Crist -- said her staff was doing everything it could to 'generate new job opportunities to advance Florida's economy'.   Unfortunately, many of those new job opportunities weren't for Americans.   They were for foreign workers who the state helped in securing visas to replace American workers like Bob Orr, an unemployed sheet metal worker from here in South Florida...   In 2008, 22,195 jobs in the state were approved for foreign workers.   The vast majority of those jobs were for house-keepers and waitresses, but included in that 2008 Florida list were 1,145 construction workers, 119 roofers, 10 electricians and 6 brick-layers...   CYVSA applied to the Agency for Workforce Innovation for the right to use foreign labor on 2008 September 30.   The next day, October 1 at 09:05, the state agency, following federal rules, opened a ten-day recruitment period to find U.S. workers.   During those ten days, CYVSA was required to contact the local union and place ads in the Miami Herald.   But the company waited until the second half of the ten-day period before it ran the ads and near the end of the timeline before contacting the union.   And the company never said there was a deadline to apply.   The union provided the CBS4 I team copies of certified mail receipts marked October 10 for resumes they said they sent to the state.   Despite their efforts they were too late.   By the time they were mailed, the state had officially closed the recruitment period at 09:16 on October 10 -- literally 16 minutes into the tenth day.   The state then notified the federal government that no Americans applied for the jobs and the Department of Labor subsequently 'certified' CYVSA's request for 30 foreign workers.   And what happened to the resumes sent by the union postmarked on the 10th?   The union said when they never heard from the folks in Tallahassee or anyone from CYVSA, the called the state agency on October 27 and that's when they were given the news.   'She said [if they don't arrive on time] we throw them out.', said Daniel Villarruel.   'And that's when I jumped out of my seat and said, ''What are you talking about you throw them out?''   She said, ''Yes sir, because it was after the job order closed.'''"

2009-02-18
Brian Sommer _Ziff Davis_/_CNET_/_CBS_
Repairs needed to the H-1b and L-1 visa programs
track-back link

2009-02-18
Marianne Kolbasuk McGee _Information Week_/_UBM_
"Stimulus" package provision temporarily requires a small number of financial-sector H-1B sponsors who receive TARP bail-out funds to pay "prevailing wages" and promise to go through motions of pretending to try to recruit US workers whether they intend to do so or not
Matt Ackermann: Bank Investment Consultant

2009-02-18
Tina Marie Macias _Louisiana Advertiser_
Motion to help cheap foreign teachers get green cards is on Lafayette parish school board agenda
Advocate
"There are 30 teachers in the parish with J-1 visas and 16 with H-1B visas, Lilly said."

2009-02-18
Roy Mark _eWeek_
More IT bodyshops make H-1B fraud list

2009-02-18
Steven A. Camarota _Center for Immigration Studies_
Economic/job markets picture bleak
Earth Times
Right Side News
"Among U.S.-born blacks and Hispanics without a high school degree, unemployment is 24.7% and 16.2% respectively -- 2 to 3 times the national [average] rate."
tables

2009-02-18
Norm Matloff _H-1B/ L-1/ Off-Shoring News-Letter_
Why don't they listen?
 
The subscribers to this e-news-letter consist of journalists, academics, Capitol Hill staffers and of course most of all, programmers/engineers.   This posting will discuss the first and last of these categories, and among other things will post a query to the first.
 
I will end below by posing questions to the journalists.   I hope they read all the way through this somewhat longish posting, but if they wish to skip right down to the questions at the end, that's fine too.
 
I often receive e-mail from programmers and engineers, asking why the issue of foreign workers (H-1B, [E-3, F, J, L], employment-based green cards) does not get more traction from the press and Congress.   The message enclosed below, posted here with the permission of the author (though I've removed identifying information anyway), is typical of such queries.
 
The easy answer to the question is that the pro-H-1B lobbyists give lots of money to congressional campaigns, and spend lots of money on the best PR people, who then "educate" Congress and the press.   The types of groups lobbying include:
 
* the tech industry (several [executives,] big organizations, and lots of lobbying by individual firms)
 
* the American Immigration Lawyers Association
 
* academia in general
 
* the National Association of Foreign Student Advisers
 
* Indian-American political activist groups (who, like most ethnic activists, do NOT represent the views of their putative constituents)
 
Spending money on the Hill works, of course.   Let me repeat the quotes I gave a couple of days ago (and often in the past): When Congress enacted an H-1B increase in 2000, senator Robert Bennett remarked, "Once it's clear (the visa bill) is going to get through, everybody signs up so nobody can be in the position of being accused of being 'against high tech'.   There were, in fact, a whole lot of folks against it, but because they are tapping the high-tech community for campaign contributions, they don't want to admit that in public."   The Republican Congressional Campaign Committee Chair, representative Tom Davis, said, "This is not a popular bill with the public.   It's popular with the CEOs...   This is a very important issue for the high-tech executives who give the money."
 
I normally do not initiate contact with people in Congress (though sometimes I do so at the request of the Programmers Guild and other H-1B critic activists).   Thus I cannot claim to be an expert in all aspects of how H-1B is viewed by Congress.   But I've seen enough to understand quite well that it really is a case of "Follow the money" as exemplified in the quotes above.
 
The case of Ellen Tauscher, my own congressperson, is instructive.   Another one of representative Tauscher's constituents met with her and suggested that she hold a district hearing on the H-1B issue.   She indicated that she was well aware of the video made by a prominent law firm to teach their clients how to exploit the loop-holes in H-1B and green card law.   She initially agreed to hold some kind of public forum in the district, but subsequently kept hedging and stalling, and finally reneged outright.   According to the constituent, she also refused his suggestion that she meet with me.   What is she afraid of?   Even representative Zoe Lofgren, "queen of H-1B", met with the Programmers Guild, a meeting I attended as well.   Why Tauscher's reluctance?
 
The case for reform of H-1B and employment-based green cards is, I submit, overwhelming, including strong findings from 2 congressionally-commissioned studies, plus a number of academic studies.   The analyses show clearly that the H-1Bs are typically under-paid, that they are hired instead of qualified U.S. citizens and permanent residents, that the vast majority are not "the best and the brightest", that the abuse occurs in big mainstream firms rather than just the "bodyshops", that the claimed "skills shortage" is phony, etc.   Yet the issue of genuine reform is shunned on the Hill.
 
A few in Congress have embraced the issue.   Durbin, Grassley and Sanders are notable examples in the Senate, and there are representatives Pascrell and DeLauro on the House side.   Yet their bills attracted virtually no co-sponsors, and never made it to committee.   The recent unanimous (albeit voice vote) passage of the Sanders/Grassley amendment regarding H-1B hiring by TARP recipients may be a harbinger of better things to come, but this is not yet clear, and in light of history, is doubtful.
 
Needless to say, the H-1B critics need to become more vocal and more organized.   Programmers and engineers, as a group, tend to be reticent people who are not comfortable with speaking out.   Many fear retribution.   But clearly, campaign money is an obvious, accurate, and I believe 90% complete explanation for Congress' actions.
 
But why the press?
 
Why hasn't the press jumped on this issue?   Mind you, I'm not saying the press has been biased.   There have been a very small number of exceptions (two mentioned below), but the vast majority have [at least made some token gesture toward fair coverage].
 
Fair, yes, but typically superficial.   Usually the reporter is on a dead-line, needs a quick quote from both sides of the issue, and will file his/her story, never to return to the subject.   It's not really their fault, what with newspapers and magazines already being in big financial trouble.   But many of my readers wonder why what they see, with considerable justificaiton, as an outrageous threat to the long-term viability of the middle class, enacted and repeatedly revalidated by our own elected leaders, has not provoked some journalist, somewhere, somehow to convince his/her editor/ publisher/ broadcaster to really get to the bottom of this issue, and expose the entire sordid story once and for all.
 
Indeed, the press is hardly covering the issue at all these days.   By contrast, in 1998, they were all on the story.   There was repeated coverage on all the network evening news shows, in the New York Times, the Washington Post and so on.   Ditto for 2000.   After that, though, there has been almost nothing.
 
There have been a few who've stayed with the topic.   Computerworld is an obvious example, and BusinessWeek has also consistently covered it since 1998.   The quality has been good in both publications, with a bit more detail in Computerworld.   The San Jose Mercury News, though running openly biased editorials supporting an expanded H-1B program, has also generally had good coverage.   The remarkably tenacious Lou Dobbs won't give up on the issue.
 
But for the rest, it's not that the quality is poor, but rather that they are not covering the issue at all.   Why not?
 
I normally don't initiate contact with journalists either (though I've written op-eds), so again I must make the disclaimer that I don't have enough information to make firm statements here.   Below I will call for the journalists on the distribution list of this e-news-letter to give me their thoughts.   Having said that, though, here are mine.
 
In some cases there is rank "censorship".   Last year, for instance, the Washington Post ran an op-ed by Bill Gates calling for an expanded H-1B program.   When I submitted an op-ed manuscript in response (the Post had run an op-ed of mine back in 2000), the op-ed editor made it clear that no opposing pieces would be run, from me or anyone else (I suggested professor Ron Hira).   Gates' wife sits on the board of the Post.
 
There may be other "Mrs. Gates" cases in the print and electronic media, as well as censoring advertisers.   But in general, I think the major obstacle is the "I-word" -- immigration.   The press, I believe, simply does not want to publish anything that is critical of any aspect of legal immigration.   They have become especially interested in avoiding offending major ethnic groups associated with immigration, which in the case of H-1B means Indian-Americans.
 
The latter point is ironic, since far more Indian-Americans are being harmed by the H-1B program than are benefitting by it, a point known only too well by my Indian-American subscribers.   Yet I believe that this is what was at work, for instance, in the case of the 60 Minutes piece alluded to in the e-mail message enclosed below.
 
60 Minutes had actually run a critical segment on H-1B back in 1993.   But when (according to the producer) "an Indian doctor" suggested they run a piece on the "IITs" -- the Indian Institutes of Technology -- a couple of years ago, the show chose not only to run such a piece, but made sure it would be a puff piece.
 
The IITs indeed deserved a 60 Minutes episode.   They are excellent institutions, a real Indian success story.   I have several excellent faculty colleagues who are IIT alumni, and we've had a number of high-quality graduate students from the school.   However, to present the IITs as some sort of uberschool, with uberprofessors teaching uberstudents, is just plain wrong.   The IIT curriculum is pedestrian, and most of their faculty is undistinguished in research.   The students themselves are bright, but no brighter than an A student at any of the University of California campuses, for instance.
 
Fine, 60 Minutes can overdo it sometimes.   But in this case the program [along with CNBC] clearly arose as a component of the PR campaign under-way at the time, called "Brand IIT", one of whose purposes was clearly to promote off-shoring to India and raising the H-1B visa cap.   In spite of viewer complaints, 60 Minutes never ran a single letter of dissent in its Letters segment, and on the contrary chose to re-run the show on several occasions.   One angry viewer contacted the producer, and eventually I was brought into their e-mail conversation.   It was clear from the producer's comments that this IIT show was a sacred cow, no pun intended, with no dissenting opinion allowed.   The week before, 60 Minutes had run a segment on Stephen Hawkings, the severely disabled physicist, and yet in spite of Hawkings' enormous courage etc., 60 Minutes had still felt it necessary to add "balance" by quoting a rival physicist who said that Hawkings' research work wasn't that great.   Yet 60 Minutes felt no need for balance in the IIT piece, even as little as running a dissenting viewer letter.
 
A couple of years ago a producer for Bill Moyers contacted me on the off-shoring issue.   When I said that H-1B was having at least as large an impact on American workers as off-shoring, and that also the 2 are connected, the producer replied that the show would be only on off-shoring, and would not mention H-1B/L-1 at all.   At first she said that this was because "The H-1B/L-1 subject has been covered a lot already by the press."   When I said that that was true for off-shoring too, she then gave the real reason: "Immigration is too sensitive an issue for our show."
 
So, I ask journalists who read this e-news-letter: What are your thoughts on the above?   Is much of the press consciously reluctant to touch the H-1B issue?   If so, is it because it deals with legal immigration?   If you reply, please let me know whether I should use your name/affiliation, or for that matter whether I may quote you at all.   Thanks in advance.
 
Norm
 
Date: Mon, 2009 Feb 16 13:11:46 -0800 (PST)
From: ***********************
Subject: Re: some recent events
To: Norm Matloff
 
Norm, my wife thinks those of us with a concern here (me specifically) should quit bitching about H-1B issues and get it publicized.   She thinks if the public knew about it the outrage would pressure Congress.
 
I e-mail support to those journalists who present the truth, and e-mail criticisms (it's the money!!!!!!!, not the best and brightest or a labor shortage or bad American education).
 
But it seems to me journalists have bought the corporate BS hook, line and sinker.   I recall Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes going to India and being fed the best & brightest BS and buying it without argument.   I also note Tom Friedman's rather uncritical assertion that the rest of the world will eat us alive in part because they equal or surpass us in educational quality.
 
Rather, I'm inclined to think the public, relatively indifferent to the plight of millions of workers in the manufacturing sector, could care less about a few hundred thousand highly paid hi-tech types.   The only chance we might have is for H-1Bs to be seen as one more "Bad Thing" example of corporate greed and indifference to average American workers.
 
How do we get the media to see this and present it to the public?
 
Cheers
---30---

2009-02-18
Rob Sanchez _Job Destruction News-Letter_ #1979
 
In the previous news-letter I explained how the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) ganged up together to crush the "Employ American Workers Act" (SA306) amendment to the "stimulus" bill.   For a short recap read my op-ed:
 
Bad Week for American Workers
 
For some unexplained reason K street lobbyists failed to stop SA306!   It's still in the final version of the bill that President Obama signed.
 
To see for yourselves, go the Employ American Workers Act and scroll to page 494 Section 1611...
 
HR1; Obey; "Stimulus" bill
 
So far I haven't seen a good explanation why the amendment made it into the final bill.   Perhaps it was a small consolation for the watering down of the "Buy American" amendment or the defeat of E-Verify, or more likely it somehow got lost in the shuffle of the 1K+ page bill.   Obama has made it very clear that he wants to expand the H-1B visa program so the inclusion of SA306 was a pleasant surprise.
 
One thing for sure, some heads are going to roll at the USCoC and AILA.   I'm sure Charlie is more than just disappointed.   LOL!
 
On the other hand, Charles Kuck, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, expressed disappointment at the inclusion of the hiring restrictions in the compromise "stimulus" bill.
 
Keep in perspective that SA306 is purely a symbolic victory.   It's highly unlikely that a single H-1B visa will be affected.   All the amendment does is to re-classify banks that receive TARP money as "H-1B dependent".   These banks will merely have to jump a few extra hoops to hire an H-1B, which usually means they will probably have to file a few more forms, and they might even have to put a fake ad in the newspaper to appear like they are giving "good faith" efforts to hire Americans.
 
For banks that are pigging out on TARP money, hiring an H-1B will be slightly easier than sponsoring a foreigner for a green card, which isn't very difficult at all!   Another way to look at it is this: banks that are receiving billions of dollars of bail-out money might have to hire a lawyer to process the forms instead of using an HR flunky.   In that regard the "stimulus" bill will succeed in getting jobs for Americans -- in the immigration business.
 
Articles about SA306 abound, and many of them are already perpetuating myths that need to be debunked.   Here are a few examples, both good and bad.
 
Businessweek had a very good article on SA306.   This excerpt is particularly poignant:
 
The amendment falls short of preventing large banks from using H-1Bs brought into the U.S. by out-sourcing firms like India-based Infosys (INFY), Wipro (WIT), and Tata (TCS.NS), which are among the top recipients of petitions for the H-1B visa program.   IOW, a bank could still legally force a laid-off American employee to train a replacement worker who is on an H-1B visa on an out-sourcing firm's pay-roll.
 
Those out-sourcing firms mentioned are more commonly called bodyshops.   The ones mentioned are already H-1B dependent because they employ H-1Bs from India almost exclusively.   Allowing bodyshops to contract to TARP banks is a gaping loop-hole in SA306.
 
Patrick Thibodeau of Computerworld is one of the best writers on the subject of H-1B, and his article on SA306 is no exception, but he goofed here:
 
The "stimulus" bill, once it is approved by the senate and signed by president Barack Obama, will require firms that take bail-out funding to make a good-faith effort to hire U.S. citizens before people who are in the country on H-1B visas.
 
All employers are required to make a "good faith effort" to hire qualified American workers before sponsoring an H-1B.   Being H-1B dependent doesn't change that, but it does require employers to jump a few more hoops to game the system.   The problem is that "good faith" means different things to different people.   Take for example this quote from one of the most infamous immigration lawyers in the business:
 
"When employers feel the need to legalize aliens, it may be due to a shortage of suitable U.S. workers, but even in a depressed economy, Employers who favor aliens have an arsenal of legal means to reject all U.S. workers who apply." --- Joel Stewart 2000 April 24 Immigration Daily Legal Rejection of US Workers
 
Stewart was actually talking about green cards, which have far more stringent regulations than H-1B dependent employers.
 
Indian web-zines and newspapers are going ballistic over SA306.   Here are 2 reactionary examples:
 
US President Barack Obama will be signing the "stimulus" bill into law on Tuesday.   The bill also includes a clause that restricts American companies receiving bail-out money to hire foreign skilled workers on H-1B visas -- a temporary work permit needed for foreigners to work in the US.
 
American companies aren't going to be restricted from hiring H-1Bs.   Only banks and financial institutions that receive TARP money will be classified "H-1B dependent", which does nothing from stopping them from hiring H-1Bs.   Let me repeat again in case somebody missed it: SA306 DOES NOTHING TO STOP BANKS FROM HIRING H-1BS!   Only 1% of the employers in the U.S. are H-1B dependent and they never have a problem hiring H-1Bs -- if they did have a problem the Indian bodyshops wouldn't be able to staff themselves mostly with Indian nationals.
 
This latest measure has Indians in America worried as they make up a major chunk of the H1-B visa holders.
 
Indian nationals, and any other foreigner, have nothing to worry about because the ones already here have visas, and the ones that want to come here that don't have visas will have no more problems than usual to find a company that will sponsor them for a visa.   All H-1B visa holders are subject to the 65K + 20K a year cap and in 2009 and 2010 the caps will reach their limit because employers are scrapping for every visa they can get.   SA306 will not affect the number of H-1B visas granted because cheap foreign labor is still very desirable by U.S. employers.
 
The United States Congress has barred companies receiving government bail-out from hiring Indians and other foreign workers through the skilled worker visa (H1-B) programme, if they are replacing American workers.
 
Indian newspapers are becoming very paranoid because SA306 doesn't mention a particular nationality.   Indians comprise about 65% of the total visas handed out each year, so it could be argued that they receive a disproportionate share of the visas, and they will continue to do so unless the Chinese over-take them.
 
The provision prevents companies supported by the troubled asset relief programme (Tarp) from applying for H-1B visas for highly skilled foreign workers if they have recently laid off US employees.
 
SA306 doesn't stop companies from doing this, but they are restricted 90 days before or after a major lay-off.   Unfortunately there are big loop-holes in the regulations because the definition of "lay-off" is kind of fuzzy.   For that loop-hole and others, read:
 
"Legality of Replacing Americans With H-1Bs, A Study of What the Law Says"
 
"These banks may not be looking to hire lots of new workers any time soon.", said Edward Alden, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.   "It is the signal that it sends to the rest of the world that is troubling.   We are enshrining the principle that in tough economic times it makes it harder to hire foreign workers."
 
***** CONCLUSION *****
 
Actually the "stimulus" bill is business-as-usual when it comes to hiring illegal aliens, off-shoring jobs, and allowing the importation of foreign guest workers.   Nothing changes except our level of national debt and our trade deficits.
 
So, by now you may be asking if the inclusion of SA306 is reason enough to support Obama's "stimulus" bill in order to realize a symbolic victory on the H-1B issue.   The very last commentary in this news-letter gives some insight into the wisdom of the bill.
 
Lou Dobbs had a very good story about SA306.   At the time of the show it was not known if the amendment would make its way into the final bill.   Be sure to watch the video.
---30---

2009-02-18
Alexia Cameron _Economy in Crisis_
Loss of manufacturing base will make recovery more difficult

2009-02-18
Thomas E. Brewton _View from 1776_
Sticking My Neck Out: What I expect from the "stimulus" package
Mark Nugent: DoubleThink On-Line: Bail-Out Blues
Jeffrey Tucker: Ludwig von Mises Institute: Two on Hayek

2009-02-18
_Midwest Business Technology News_
How to take full advantage of the time between jobs

2009-02-18 (5769 Shevat 24)
Richard Meryhew _Jewish World Review_
Recruiting for jihad in Minneapolis?

2009-02-18 (5769 Shevat 24)
Thomas Sowell _Jewish World Review_
The rush to wait
Town Hall

2009-02-18 (5769 Shevat 24)
Thomas Sowell _Jewish World Review_
Upside-Down Economics
Town Hall
"It was precisely government intervention which turned a thriving industry into a basket case."

2009-02-18 (5769 Shevat 24)
Walter E. Williams _Jewish World Review_
Economic Miracle
"The idea that even the brightest person or group of bright people, much less the U.S. Congress, can wisely manage an economy has to be the height of arrogance and conceit."
 
 

2009-02-19

2009-02-19 05:30PST (08:30EST) (13:30GMT)
Scott Gibbons & Tony Sznoluch _DoL ETA_
un-employment insurance weekly claims report
current press release
"The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 615,232 in the week ending Feb. 14, a decrease of 94,921 from the previous week.   There were 325,754 initial claims in the comparable week in 2008.   The advance unadjusted insured unemployment rate was 4.5% during the week ending Feb. 7, an increase of 0.1 percentage point from the prior week.   The advance unadjusted number for persons claiming UI benefits in state programs totaled 5,959,930, an increase of 10,719 from the preceding week.   A year earlier, the rate was 2.5% and the volume was 3,315,409.   Extended benefits were available in Alaska, Michigan, North Carolina, Oregon, Puerto Rico, and Rhode Island during the week ending Jan. 31."
graphs
more graphs

2009-02-19
Harry Kerrigan _Orlando Sentinel_
Program encourages immigrants, handicaps US citizens
"Tuesday's front-page article ('Lay-offs stoke anger toward immigrants') spoke of the legal and illegal immigrant workers taking jobs from Americans.   What the article failed to mention was the high-paying jobs not going to our own college graduates but to foreigners under the H-1B program.   The original intent of this program was to allow large corporations such as MSFT to apply for work visas for hundreds of foreigners annually in technical fields because there was a shortage of these graduates within our own college system.   Now, through the efforts of lobbyists and the naivete of our elected representatives, the original program has been amended to include numerous sub-categories, one of which would allow tens of thousands of work visas annually to be applied for by U.S. corporations to bring foreign workers into the U.S.A.   Is it any wonder why our college graduates are still working at McDonald's?   I would like to see the Sentinel do some investigative reporting on the H-1B program to include the names of our representatives who voted for it.   And I challenge the readers to get on the phone with their elected federal representatives and ask hard questions about this program.   I'm sure there are lots of parents who aren't happy to be spending tens of thousands of dollars on their child's education, only to see his or her job go to a foreigner."

2009-02-19
Jill L. Gershen & Linda Kilcrease _Washington Times_
Stimulus for whom?

2009-02-19 12:14PST (15:14EST) (20:14GMT)
Laura Mandaro _MarketWatch_
Some dolts who don't remember stagflation say flood of money means economy is recovering (graph)

2009-02-19 13:05PST (16:05EST) (21:05GMT)
Simon Kennedy _MarketWatch_
Robert Allen Stanford curried influence in DC with political cash

2009-02-19 13:34PST (16:34EST) (21:34GMT)
Kate Gibson _MarketWatch_
U.S. stock slide propels Dow industrials under 7,500; Blue-chip barometer finishes lowest in over 6 years

2009-02-19
Anupreeta Das _Reuters_
Foreign tech workers touchy subject in U.S. down-turn

2009-02-19
Rob Sanchez _Job Destruction News-Letter_ #1980
Import of cheap teachers continues
 
Lexington, Kentucky just hired a bunch of H-1B school teachers in Kentucky to teach STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) classes.   Importing Filipino teachers is nothing new as this newsletter has been reporting about it for years.   The article below calls what is going on a trend:
 
Recruiting foreign teachers to fill critical shortage areas has been a trend in American elementary and secondary education for about a decade.
 
Of course as we all know there are many un-employed and under-employed STEMs in the U.S.A. that are qualified and willing to teach these subjects in school.   The problem is that the schools won't hire them, even if they get certified to teach.   Schools want teachers that are young, cheap, compliant, and of course multi-lingual.
 
The news article below contains a contradiction that can be difficult to catch if you don't pay attention. Read this paragraph in the front part of the article that says they can't find "certified teachers".
 
Home, for Dacles, is Manila, the Philippines.   Now, however, he is one of 16 Filipino teachers working in the Fayette County Public Schools, all recruited from over-seas to teach in subject areas such as math, science and special education, where certified teachers [allegedly] are hard to find.
 
Later in the article it says the Filipinos aren't certified to teach those subjects either!   In other words, they are no more qualified than Americans to teach the subject.   In most cases the Filippinos are less qualified because they got their educations in substandard schools and diploma mills in the Philippines.
 
Kentucky shuns American teachers but it is more than happy to give Filippinos fast track certifications so that they can get into the classrooms quickly.
 
As a result, the school system sometimes had to get emergency certifications for people to teach STEM classes even though they lacked background in those subjects, he said.
 
For those of you that think Indian when you hear the word body shop, perhaps this will broaden your outlook because many countries besides India have set up shop here to import foreign labor.   [And don't forget that in addition to cross-border body shop there are domestic bodyshops.]   The body shop Kentucky hired to import the teachers is called "Avenida International Consultants", which supposedly covers the cost of getting the teachers certified in Kentucky and it pays for the other expenses related to travel and moving.   What the article forgot to mention is that this bodyshop is infamous for taking training money and visa fees out of the pockets of their Filipino employees.   That company has had lawsuits against their blatant indentured labor policies but it hasn't put them out of business -- in fact it appears that they are doing better than ever.
 
Avenida International Consultants is owned by a slaver named Ligaya Avenida. Her clients include West Contra Costa Unified, San Jose Unified, Oakland Unified School District, West Palm Beach, Florida, Ravenswood Unified, California, Memphis Unified, Columbia Public Schools, and Baltimore.
 
Here is Avenida's web site, and if you want to read more about her look up these news-letters in the archive:
Ligaya avenida
2005-01-10 Baltimore Schools Circumvent H-1B limits
2005-01-11 Ligaya Avenida imports Filipino teachers for California
Jim Warren: Lexington KY Herald-Leader: Cheap Filippino teachers imported to Lexington
European Medical Staffing
Baltimore school admins turn their noses up at US teachers and travel to Philippines to recruit
Filipino-American Development Foundation received $784,757 in gov't grants, $192,812 in donations
---30---

2009-02-19
Harry Kerrigan _Orlando Sentinel_
High-paying jobs not going to our own bright college graduates due to H-1B program
"Tuesday's front-page article ('Lay-offs stoke anger toward immigrants') spoke of the legal and illegal immigrant workers taking jobs from Americans.   What the article failed to mention was the high-paying jobs not going to our own college graduates but to foreigners under the H-1B program.   The original intent of this program was to allow large corporations such as MSFT to apply for work visas for hundreds of foreigners annually in technical fields because there was a 'shortage' of these graduates within our own college system.   Now, through the efforts of lobbyists and the naivete of our elected representatives, the original program has been amended to include numerous sub-categories, one of which would allow tens of thousands of work visas annually to be applied for by U.S. corporations to bring foreign workers into the U.S.A.   Is it any wonder why our college graduates are still working at McDonald's?   I would like to see the Sentinel do some investigative reporting on the H-1B program to include the names of our representatives who voted for it.   And I challenge the readers to get on the phone with their elected federal representatives and ask hard questions about this program.   I'm sure there are lots of parents who aren't happy to be spending tens of thousands of dollars on their child's education, only to see his or her job go to a foreigner."

2009-02-19
Thomas E. Brewton _View from 1776_
The Long and Short of It

2009-02-19
Paul Craig Roberts _V Dare_
From One Assault On The Constitution To Another

2009-02-19
Mike Shedlock _Global Economic Analysis_

2009-02-19
Mario J. Rizzo _Ludwig von Mises Institute_
The MisDirection of Resources and the Current Recession

2009-02-19 (5769 Shevat 25)
Jessica Yadegaran _Jewish World Review_
Beard boom

2009-02-19 (5769 Shevat 25)
Jessica Yadegaran _Jewish World Review_
It's ironic that Hollywood film-makers can describe the human condition so vividly while seeming to have so little understanding of it
 
 

2009-02-20

2009-02-19 16:04PST (2009-02-19 19:04EST) (2009-02-20 00:04GMT)
Jim DeFede _CBS 4 Miami_
Giving Away American Jobs part 3

2009-02-20
Gary North _Ludwig von Mises Institute_
Economic Fascism and the Bail-Out Economy

2009-02-20
Chuck Butler _FX University Daily_/_World Currency Watch_
Dolts! (All of Them)

2009-02-20
Ed Burnette _Ziff Davis_/_CNET_/_CBS_
Yale Patt from UTA says multi-core is not the holy grail, most programmers are stupid, and there should be lots of low-level interfaces for the non-stupid ones to use
"Ok, he didn't actually use the word 'stupid' but he did suggest that the purpose of higher level abstractions and parallel languages is to protect dumb programmers from themselves.   He wants to see most of the effort going into direct programming hooks exposed for each layer of the hardware and software, and he believes that everyone who is 'capable' of programming at that level should be doing so."

2009-02-20
"n65321" _Detroit News_
H-1B visas facilitate off-shoring of work US citizens are able and eager to do
"The H-1B law does require employers to pay 100% of the prevailing wage but that requirement does NOT eliminate cost as a motivation.   The reason is that the rules for determining the so called 'prevailing wage' result in a wage that is well below what the employer would have to pay an American.   Over the typical employment of an H-1B the employer saves the better part of $100K.   Cost is the prime reason to hire an H-1B.   Mr. Kennedy is also wrong when he says 'the application process asks sponsoring firms to show that they have searched for and cannot identify American workers with the skill set to fill the position'.   There is no such requirement as can be seen on the application form ETA 9035 (pdf).   According to the Department of Labor [pdf] (page 36, second paragraph).   'H-1B workers may be hired even when a qualified U.S. worker wants the job, and a U.S. worker can be displaced from the job in favor of the foreign worker.'   The H-1B is a license to steal an American job.   Moreover in promotes out-sourcing by allowing foreign companies to have customer contact people here to gather requirements for work to be done off-shore."

2009-02-20 00:20PST (03:20EST) (08:20GMT)
Bill Bush _Columbus OH Dispatch_
40K foreigners have come to Franklin county Ohio within the last 8 years

2009-02-20
Joe Guzzardi _V Dare_
So Long, California—Thanks For The Memories!

2009-02-20
Joe Guzzardi _V Dare_
Pink Slips for Teachers While Spending on Education of Illegal Aliens Continues

2009-02-20

DJIA	7,365.67
S&P 500	770.05
NASDAQ	1,441.23
10-year US T-Bond	2.68%
crude oil	$38.94/barrel
gold	$1,002.20/ounce
silver	$14.49/ounce
platinum	$1,095.70/ounce
palladium	$212.50/ounce
copper	$0.08875/ounce
natgas	$4.01/MBTU
reformulatedgasoline	$1.07/gal
heatingoil	$1.20/gal
dollarindex	87.782
yenperdollar	94.26
dollarspereuro	1.26377
dollarsperpound	1.4295
swissfranksperdollar	1.1548
indianrupeesperdollar	49.72
MorganStanleyHighTechIndex	326.47

I usually get this info from MarketWatch and the "Commodities" and "Metals" and "Currencies" columns.
 
 
 

2009-02-21

2009-02-21
_Billings Gazette_
deal for JBS of Brazil to buy out National Beef Packing of Kansas City, subsidiary of US Premium Beef, is off after anti-trust challenges

2009-02-21
Thomas E. Brewton _View from 1776_
limitations of econometric models

2009-02-21
Thomas E. Woods _Campaign for Liberty_
Tooth Fairy Economics
"Beyond that, pro-stimulus thinkers show remarkably little curiosity about why the so-called idle resources are idle in the first place.   They are idle because of some previous entrepreneurial miscalculation.   What might have caused systemic miscalculation of this kind?   Could it be the Federal Reserve's manipulation of interest rates, which leads investors to make incorrect assessments of profitability and provokes false economic booms, as F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing in 1974?...   We should not want to 'stimulate' an economy based on debt and overconsumption back into existence.   We should want to restructure it along sustainable lines."
home-work
 
 

2009-02-22

2009-02-22
Patrick Thibodeau _Computer World_/_IDG_
Ill-Begotten Monstrosities plans IT center in Dubuque, IA -- and job applications pour in
"Mike Blouin, president of the Greater Dubuque Development Corp., said that as part of the deal IBM is obligated to offer salaries that begin in the low-$30K range and go all the way up to $70K [below the industry mean] or so, with the average salary in the mid-$40K...   IBM has already received some 3K applications for positions so far, with a third meeting basic requirements for work, said Blouin.   Hiring will begin this Spring...   A labor group, the Alliance@IBM, said that more than 4K IBM employees have been laid off in recent months...   According to the Foreign Labor Certification Data Center On-Line Wage Library, whose prevailing wage data is used by companies that hire H-1B workers, an entry-level computer programmer job in Des Moines starts at around $42,800.   That same job in the Newark, NJ area would begin at $55K."
Rob Sanchez: Job Destruction News-Letter #1981
"Patrick Thibodeau's [articles above and below make] some interesting points, but his message might be confusing because he didn't mention the fact that MSFT contracts with the same bodyshops that are the top H-1B users.   What that means in a practical sense is that the data-base shows MSFT with 1037 approved H-1B visas, but the number of H-1B visa holders they actually hired is much higher.   We don't know how many of the H-1Bs from the bodyshops were hired by MSFT, but the percentage is substantial.   As an example, in 2008 Tata got 1539 visas.   While we don't know how many of those 1539 H-1B visa holders went to MSFT to work, there is no doubt the 2 companies are very cozy.   [Infosys and Wipro also have big deals with MSFT.]"
class action against Tata

2009-02-22
Sam Diaz _Ziff Davis_/_CNET_/_CBS_
MSFT dumped 1,400, paid them severance, and now wants part of it back

2009-02-22
Thomas E. Brewton _View from 1776_/_Wall Street Journal_
Oxymoron of the day
"The European leaders of the Group of 20 agreed that all financial markets, products and participants including hedge funds must be regulated, and any measures that might distort competition must be minimized."
 
 

2009-02-23
Donna Healy _Billings MT Gazette_
New pilot project teaches West High students to explore nature through science

2009-02-23
_Billings MT Gazette_/_AP_
Made in Montana, better than COOL

2009-02-23
Grant Gross _IT World_/_IDG_
MSFT announced a tech training program aimed at 2M in the USA
Ina Fried: Ziff Davis/CNET/CBS
"The Elevate America announcement comes a month after MSFT said it planned to lay off 5K employees over the next year and a half.   This weekend, there were news reports that MSFT sent letters to some recently laid off employees, saying it had overpaid their severance package and asking for the money back."

2009-02-23
_London Telegraph_
Police fear a "summer of rage" with middle-class protests

2009-02-23
Paul Craig Roberts _V Dare_
How the Economy Was Lost
Baltimore MD Chronicle & Sentinel
On-Line Journal
Michigan Live

2009-02-23
Patrick Thibodeau _Computer World_/_IDG_
Indian cross-border bodyshoppers and off-shorers joined by MSFT at top of list of H-1B visa users in 2008
"Infosys receiving approval for 4,559...   Wipro... 2,678 [2,567 in 2008]...   Satyam... 1,917 [1,396 in 2007]   Tata... 1,539 [797 in 2007]   MSFT 1,018 [959 in 2007]   Google... 248"
class action against Tata
Tata median salaries by city
Wipro median salaries by city
Infosys median salaries by city

2009-02-23
Alexia Cameron _Economy in Crisis_
Notorious Cross-Border Body Shop Seeking "Stimulus" Funds

2009-02-23
Frosty Wooldridge _News with Views_
Transition

2009-02-23
_NASA_
All-American canal along the California-Mexico border

2009-02-23 (5769 Shevat 29)
Rabbi Doctor Asher Meir _Jewish World Review_
Ethics of allowing a Needy Person to get the Job you want

2009-02-23 (5769 Shevat 29)
Mark Steyn _Jewish World Review_
Going wobbly in the West
 
 

2009-02-24

2009-02-24
_Yahoo!_/_AP_
Conference Board reports consumer confidence down again
Conference Board
"Those saying jobs are currently 'hard to get' increased from 41.1% in January to 47.8%, while those saying jobs are 'plentiful' fell from 7.1% to 4.4%...   The percentage of consumers expecting fewer jobs in the months ahead increased from 36.9% to 47.3%, while those expecting more jobs declined from 9.1% to 7.1%.   The proportion of consumers expecting an increase in their incomes declined from 10.3% to 7.6%."

2009-02-24
Steven Saw _Op Ed News_
H-1B program fails to benefit the American economy: 5 for 1

2009-02-24
Lou Dobbs _CNN_
State of the Nation Speech; Legalize Marijuana?; Freedom of Speech

2009-02-24
Hugh McInnish _V Dare_
Does Alabama Have "A Republican Form Of Government"?   Can Western Civilization Be Preserved?

2009-02-24 (5769 Shevat 30)
Caroline B. Glick _Jewish World Review_
What's needed for Bibi to be Bibi

2009-02-24 (5769 Shevat 30)
Thomas Sowell _Jewish World Review_
"Not One of Us"
Town Hall

2009-02-24 (5769 Shevat 30)
Thomas Sowell _Jewish World Review_
A fatal trajectory
Town Hall
 
 

2009-02-25

2009-02-25 05:43PST (08:43EST) (13:43GMT)
Todd Bishop _Puget Sound Business Journal_
MSFT slashes pay 10% for bodies shopped, blaming bad economy, still whines "talent shortage"
Roy Schestowitz: Boycott Novell

2009-02-25
"RM" _Programmers Guild_
H-1B situation worse than many believe
Like you I'm pleased at their consideration but these people need a lot of help from us.   Shortly after midnight I sent them the following comment for posting, since their web portal would not acknowledge the correctness of my reading of their anti-spam:
 
1. Thanks for a good video, but I regret that you have so under-stated the situation.   The visas are three-year visas renewable for another 3 years, and thereafter [extended] at 1-year intervals if permanent residence has been sought by the fifth year, and renewals [and extensions] don't count against the cap.   The uninformed will wonder why an increase of 59 visas is even worth a yawn for a company as large as MSFT.
 
Focusing on the 1,037 figure cited, most people would never guess that MSFT might have over 5K imported workers on H-1B at any given time; wouldn't know that many earlier H-1Bs were converted to permanent residents and are no longer counted as H-1Bs; that MSFT imports another 130-150 managers a year on L-1 visas; and now that the F-1 student visa has been extended to permit 29 months of employment stateside on the trumped up grounds of an emergency shortage of H-1B visas, MSFT has been able to give a leg up to thousands more foreign applicants at the expense of skilled American applicants, permitting them to hire and train cheaper labor eager for US residence.   In addition there is no information on how many additional guest workers work at MSFT as contractors from "bodyshops" that won additional H-1B visas.
 
The last time I was at MSFT, one would have thought that Asians developed integrated circuits, computers, operating systems, programming languages, most software, and the Internet, while Americans played only a peripheral role.
 
After years of study and student loans, American grads can hardly find employment in their field of study, many excellent achievers having to settle for jobs in sales rather than in their area of interest.
 
2. Though the justification for the H-1B visa was always the claim that American companies couldn't find enough qualified American workers, the law never required even an attestation that the company attempted to hire American workers.
 
3. Even these comments grossly under-state the matter.
---30---

2009-02-25
Patrick Thibodeau _InfoWorld_/_IDG_
As U.S. IT jobs are cut, H-1B use by off-shoring vendors/cross-border bodyshops rises
Network World
ComputerWorld
"The U.S. government's H-1B visa usage data for fiscal 2008 shows that off-shore out-sourcing firms based in India are employing a growing number of H-1B workers -- a hiring trend that is affecting the IT work-forces in communities such as Oldsmar, FL.   Oldsmar is the home of a technology center operated by The Nielsen Company, which measures TV audiences, consumer trends and other metrics for its clients.   Nielsen last year began laying off workers at the facility after announcing in 2007 October a 10-year global out-sourcing agreement valued at $1.2G with Tata Consultancy Services.   And while Nielsen cut employees, Mumbai, India-based Tata was increasing its hiring of H-1B workers..."
class action against Tata

2009-02-25 10:38PST (13:38EST) (18:38GMT)<
_CIO_
My wife just got laid off along with 50 co-workers and replaced by H-1B guest-workers
"My wife just got laid off from her job, along with 50 co-workers and some were replaced by H-1B VISA workers from India, which are being paid less.   I just received some important information from a friend concerning people coming over from india, with multiple people living in one house teaching H-1B VISA workers from india SQL server, UNIX, C++ etc. and coping americans resume experience and coaching them on how to interview for jobs.   Why isn't the media reporting this fraud that's costing americans jobs."

2009-02-25
Roy Mark _eWeek_
Dominoes keep falling in H-1B visa fraud schemes

2009-02-25
Terence Jeffrey _Town Hall_
Obama's Deficit Charade

2009-02-25
George Reisman _Ludwig von Mises Institute_
Economic Recovery Requires Capital Accumulation, Not Government "Stimulus Packages"

2009-02-25
Lou Dobbs _CNN_
Obama's Big Government; Spending Binge; UN threat; Sharpton v. Murdoch; Pay-back for Unions?; Free Speech Fight; RKBA Fight

2009-02-25 (5769 Adar 01)
Andrea Simantov _Jewish World Review_
Where We Live

2009-02-25 (5769 Adar 01)
Richard Z. Chesnoff _Jewish World Review_
Did ya' ever hear the one about Cohen and the Iranian Jews?

2009-02-25 (5769 Adar 01)
Walter E. Williams _Jewish World Review_
A Nation of Cowards
 
 

2009-02-26

2009-02-26
Tom Kaneshige _ComputerWorld_/_IDG_
Signs everywhere point to the plight of the laid-off tech worker
InfoWorld

2009-02-26 05:30PST (08:30EST) (13:30GMT)
Scott Gibbons & Tony Sznoluch _DoL ETA_
un-employment insurance weekly claims report
current press release
"The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 602,730 in the week ending Feb. 21, a decrease of 17,221 from the previous week.   There were 329,925 initial claims in the comparable week in 2008.   The advance unadjusted insured unemployment rate was 4.6% during the week ending Feb. 14, an increase of 0.1 percentage point from the prior week.   The advance unadjusted number for persons claiming UI benefits in state programs totaled 6,098,530, an increase of 126,384 from the preceding week.   A year earlier, the rate was 2.5% and the volume was 3,298,510.   Extended benefits were available in Alaska, Michigan, North Carolina, Oregon, Puerto Rico, and Rhode Island during the week ending Feb. 7."
graphs
more graphs

2009-02-26
Joby Warwick _Washington Post_
Economy added to threates to US security in CIA daily briefing to White House

2009-02-26
Bill Snyder _InfoWorld_/_IDG_
IT deserves better than the meanness of Ill-Begotten Monstrosities and MSFT

2009-02-26
Linda Thom _V Dare_
Illegitimacy Rates Surge -- Driven In Part By Third World Immigration

2009-02-26 08:25PST (11:25EST) (16:25GMT)
Todd Bishop _Puget Sound Business Journal_
Body shopped starts campaign against MSFT cut-backs
Joseph Tartakoff: Seattle WA Post-Intelligencer

2009-02-26
Stephen Dinan _Washington Times_
Raid on employer of illegal aliens dismays Obama backers

2009-02-26
James Carlini
Chicago tea party

2009-02-26
Lou Dobbs _CNN_
free speech under attack, obese federal appropriations

2009-02-26 (5769 Adar 02)
Gabriel Schoenfeld _Jewish World Review_
Obama's Intelligence choice shows profound lack of it

2009-02-26 (5769 Adar 02)
Steven Emerson _Jewish World Review_
Hamas takes advantage of US diplomacy
 
 

2009-02-27

2009-02-27
Dennis Pousak _Detroit News_
No need to recruit Americans when using H-1Bs
"I have been a practicing immigration attorney since 1992...   Kennedy writes that while the ability to show that the employer searched for but was unable to find a qualified U.S. worker 'is not a requirement for approval, leaving it out is a sure way to have an application denied'.   I have likely filed several hundred H-1B petitions with the relevant federal agency and have never listed recruitment efforts and have never been denied approval for such a reason.   Also, his language concedes that it is not required by law.   As Kennedy notes, the H-1B program is vital to our economy, but the debate needs to be fair and honest.   Moreover, I find his assertion offensive to those who adjudicate such petitions.   They, for the most part, adhere to the laws and should not be accused of creating their own requirements."

2009-02-27 07:10PST (10:10EST) (15:10GMT)
Ruth Mantell _MarketWatch_
UMich consumer sentiment index fell from 61.2 in January to 56.2 in early February then rose a tick to 56.3 in late February

2009-02-27 07:36PDT (10:36EDT) (15:36GMT)
Rex Nutting _MarketWatch_
GDP fell 6.2% in 2008Q4 according to revised figures
BEA

2009-02-27 08:54PST (11:54EST) (16:54GMT)
_MarketWatch_
PriceWaterhouseCoopers attempts to cash in on financial crisis

2009-02-27
_Visa Bureau UK_
Indians try to raise a stink about UK's visa rules
"The new UK visa rules mean that skilled professionals looking to move to the UK through the tier 1 category need at least a master's degree or a previous job's salary of £20K plus, if they do not have a job already lined-up in the UK."

2009-02-27
Eric Knorr _InfoWorld_/_IDG_
Rather than indulge in knee-jerk lay-offs and cut-rate out-sourcing, companies should try to use the down-turn as an opportunity for transformation

2009-02-27
_Trading Markets_/_McClatchy_
India's IT bodyshops received maximum H-1B visas

2009-02-27
Maya Shenwar _Truthout_
The push to down-size defense

2009-02-27
Frosty Wooldridge _Denver CO Examiner_
Death of the Rocky Mountain News

2009-02-27
David Weigel _Washington Independent_
Scenes from the New American Tea Party

2009-02-27 (5769 Adar 03)
Caroline B. Glick _Jewish World Review_
Entrapping Netanyahu

2009-02-27 (5769 Adar 03)
Rabbi Berel Wein _Jewish World Review_
Worthless "righteousness"

2009-02-27

DJIA	7,062.93
S&P 500	735.09
NASDAQ	1,377.84
10-year US T-Bond	3.04%
crude oil	$44.76/barrel
gold	$942.50/ounce
silver	$13.085/ounce
platinum	$1,085.30/ounce
palladium	$194.85/ounce
copper	$0.095375/ounce
natgas	$4.203/MBTU
reformulatedgasoline	$1.3725/gal
heatingoil	$1.2675/gal
dollarindex	88.056
yenperdollar	97.70
dollarspereuro	1.2683
dollarsperpound	1.4302
swissfranksperdollar	1.1685
indianrupeesperdollar	50.69
MorganStanleyHighTechIndex	326.47

I usually get this info from MarketWatch and the "Commodities" and "Metals" and "Currencies" columns.
 
 
 

2009-02-28

2009-02-28
Norm Matloff _H-1B/ L-1/ Off-Shoring News-Letter_
H-1B/age connection, CNN illustration
alternate link
 
I am deeply grateful to a reader for calling my attention to a CNN report that aired on February 21.   Though it is not about H-1B, it goes to the very heart of the H-1B issue.   I'll discuss the CNN clip below, but first, please bear with me while I lay the ground-work.
 
Ever since 1992, when I started writing about H-1B, I've been stressing that not only is H-1B centrally about cheap tech labor, cheap tech labor is in turn centrally about age.   Younger workers are cheaper than older ones, both in wages and health insurance costs.   Of course, in addition, the younger H-1Bs are even cheaper than the younger Americans.   Result: An employer may hire a 24-year-old H-1B instead of a 24-year-old American, and usually will hire that 24-year-old H-1B instead of a 35-year-old American.
 
In my article for California Labor & Employment Law Review (pdf) I showed the stark difference in the computer field:

group	25th percentile	median	90th percentile
new grads	$45,000	$50,664	$61,5000
all workers	$65,070	$82,120	$120,410

This is a savings in the 30-50% range, which is larger than the 15-20% difference I found between H-1Bs and Americans of the same age.   Getting a young H-1B is of course the best of all from a thrifty (though short-sighted) employer's point of view, but the savings in hiring the H-1B come even more from the age factor than from the exploitation aspect.
 
Valued readers, please note carefully: By subscribing to this e-news-letter you presumably have serious interest in the H-1B issue.   If so, constantly remind yourself of this fact -- the H-1B program is fundamentally about age.   Employers use the program as a means of avoiding hiring the older (age 35+) Americans.   THE H-1B PROGRAM IS FUNDAMENTALLY ABOUT AGE.   It is impossible to consider reform, or even academic analysis, of H-1B without having this fundamental issue at the forefront of the discussion.
 
Which brings me to the CNN video [with Tony Harris], titled "Students Worry about Economy" filmed at Georgia Tech.   (I prefer to down-load streaming videos, rather than watch them in choppy form, so I use DownloadHelper in Firefox.   If you do this, I suggest you go to the AOL site instead of CNN)
 
CNN undoubtedly chose Georgia Tech as their interview venue because the campus is only a couple of miles north of CNN head-quarters, but it's also a great example for my points below, in that there are many foreign students there.   I'll return the latter point later.
 
In the video, a Chinese-American student, Christine Liu, talks of her engineer dad, an immigrant from China (emphasis added):
 
Currently the job market with my dad, because he's an engineer, is hard, really hard, to stay up because we have all these Georgia Tech students who are up with the new information and stuff like that.   THEY'RE COMING IN AND TAKING THE OLDER PEOPLE'S JOBS, so my dad doesn't have the opportunity to get a job.   He's a really smart guy, so he's considering going back to China and starting up a job there.   That should never be an option!...   To see it right now is almost heart-breaking...   It makes me angry and it makes me little sad to think about it...
 
I have several points to make, which I'll number for emphasis:
 
1.   The employers' love of the H-1B program comes, more than anything else, from a desire to avoid hiring the older (again, even 35 is "old") engineers and programmers.   The reason employers don't want to hire Ms. Liu's father is not for the reason they are giving him -- i.e. it is not because he supposedly doesn't have the latest skills -- but rather it's because employers regard him as too expensive.   New/recent grads in general, and young H-1Bs even more so, provide the employers with cheap alternatives to Mr. Liu.
 
2.   The "latest skills" issue is a pretext.   It's phony.   I've gone into this in great detail, e.g. in the CLER link I cited above, and in my University of Michigan article cited in the CLER article.
 
3.   Given that he is an engineer, Mr. Liu is almost certainly a former H-1B who first came to this country as a foreign student.   That does add some irony here, but he at least has a green card and is likely a naturalized citizen, thus is -- and definitely should be -- entitled to reasonable access to the job market.   By flooding the market with young foreign workers and young foreign students, the latter a deliberate plan by National Science Foundation to keep engineering salaries low as I've explained before, Congress is maintaining a program that is harming Mr. Liu and many other Americans.
 
4.   Some universities actively recruit foreign students, and Georgia Tech is likely one of them, as its proportion of foreign students is, I believe, substantially higher than average.   IOW, Georgia Tech is crowding out Ms. Liu's father, and to add insult to injury, is making him pay more and more for his daughters' education.   Ms. Liu states,
 
My tuition here [at Georgia Tech] is actually -- [even] with the HOPE [scholarship] -- is more expensive than my sister's was, and my sister is only 4 years older than I am...   That's a lot of pressure on me to keep up that level of perfection that you need to have in order to make it in this country.
 
5.   These considerations show that recent proposals in Congress to give "fast track" green cards to foreign students in STEM are thoroughly wrong-headed.   We certainly don't have a shortage of STEM people, as Ms. Liu notices and is well documented by the Urban Institute study.   Worse, the foreign students, like their American counterparts, are YOUNG, so they are exactly the type of worker that is displacing Mr. Liu.
 
Norm
Rob Sanchez: Job Destruction News-Letter #1983

2009-02-28
Thomas E. Brewton _View from 1776_
Family farms, micro-businesses are losers in "stimulus" pork bill

2009-02-28
Frosty Wooldridge _Denver CO Examiner_
What if America opened its borders to unlimited immigration?
 
 

2009 February
Keith Larson _American Society of Employers_
Lay-offs at MSFT stir more resentment over abuse of H-1B visas
"MSFT, which uses more H1-B visas than any other organization based in the U.S.A., is in the process of showing the door to as many as 5K employees.   Some of their employees are claiming the company is laying off U.S. employees before foreign ones, and they have gotten the ear of some prominent politicians."

2009 February
American Recovery and ReInvestment act of 2009/ARRA/ Crony Socialist Porkapalooza included funding for electricity idiot-grid, "renewable energy" tax cuts list of USA energy-affecting legislation
 

2009-02-31
 
 

Proposed Bills 2009

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