Immigration Policy & the Triumph of Buypartisanship

To really see the sheer corruption of our political process, you have to look at the lies that simply refuse to go away in the face of overwhelming facts - the myths that are utterly and completely untrue, yet which are regarded as unchallenged truth in Washington because they serve to rationalize Big Money's agenda.

Regular readers of my writing know that two of those lies are the Great Education Myth and the Great Labor Shortage Lie. The first says that if only Americans obtained more skills and education, they would be able to obtain high-paying jobs. The second says that America faces a shortage of workers, which requires companies to import workers from abroad. Both of these fables have been thoroughly debunked by economic data and economic analysis from across the political spectrum.

The Great Education Myth and the Great Labor Shortage Lie converge in the debate over H-1B visas - the visas that the American government gives to corporations allowing them to import high-skilled workers from abroad. Lobbyists and the Members of Congress they have bought push for more H-1B visas by claiming that because Americans are not properly educated, they don't have the skills needed for high-tech jobs, and thus, there is a shortage of domestic high-tech workers to fill such jobs.

Again, this rationale has been exposed as a fraud. Duke University researchers this year definitively proved that there is, in fact, no shortage of engineers in the United States. Rochester Institute of Technology professor Ron Hira has published a study proving that the H-1B program accelerates job outsourcing. His study was verified by data showing that the companies that most use the H-1B program are those whose whole business is outsourcing. Meanwhile, top corporate lawfirms - hired by the very companies lobbying for more H-1B visas under the guise of the Great Labor Shortage Lie - have been caught on tape running seminars on how to abuse the H-1B system as a tool to lower American workers' wages, which the data again shows is exactly what the program does.

Yet, despite all of the facts and despite the 2006 election that saw Democrats promise to defend the economic interests of America's middle class, we get this story from Roll Call today:

A key bipartisan group of lawmakers is pushing for enacting a short-term boost in immigration visas by the end of the year...A letter from the New Democrats signed by 16 Members to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Monday urged a significant boost to the numbers of visas allowed for tech workers, nurses, agricultural workers and seasonal workers to alleviate a crush of demand from employers. The technology industry in particular has been vocal about its desire to expand the H-1B visa program for highly skilled immigrants...The push to add visas for high-tech workers has support even among some House Republicans...House Minority Leader John Boehner (Ohio) was among the 30 Republicans who signed a letter to Pelosi earlier this month calling for cutting red tape so that high-tech companies can get the workers they need. The Republican letter...said lawmakers should 'find a way to ensure that America continues to attract the best and brightest minds from around the world' and allow companies to do so 'without unnecessary delays and waiting periods.'...The New Democrats, meanwhile, have already had meetings with House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (Md.) in which they've made it clear that expanding visas is a top priority.

Understand how much of an admission of sheer corruption this really is. The United States Congress cannot find the courage to pass a comprehensive, humane immigration policy because both parties are polarized. Yet, the one immigration issue they can all come together on is a push to expand a visa program that the data definitively proves is designed to help tech companies (which are huge campaign contributors) drive American wages into the ground, exploit foreign workers, and accelerate job outsourcing. Most disgusting of all, this push is happening all under the guise of verifiable and is being championed by a group of Democratic lawmakers whose own fundraising arm brags in public newsletters about bringing together tech industry lobbyists and lawmakers at lavish bayside retreats.

This has, of course, become par for the course in this Congress. Democrats won Congress in 2006 on a promise to oppose NAFTA-style trade agreements. Yet with Congress unable to pass much of anything, they are edging closer to finding consensus on passing - shocker! - a whole new package of lobbyist-written NAFTAs. Congress cannot pass progressive tax reform to help the middle class, but as the Wall Street Journal today reports, Democrats are moving towards endorsing a plan to slash corporate tax rates.

As Congressional Quarterly reported this week, K Street lobbying firms are now staffed up with former Democratic congressional staffers. As all of this shows, they are verifying what Leo Hindery told me in my most recent nationally syndicated newspaper column: "The wealthy are now a political constituency unto themselves that is decidedly nonpartisan."

Hindery calls it "nonpartisan" - I call it buypartisan. Whatever you want to call it, it is fueled by the very corruption we are seeing on trade, taxes and now on immigration. This is the Democratic Party of Washington, D.C. - a party that seems more and more comfortable selling out the middle-class to make corporate lobbyists happy.

Cross-posted from Working Assets

Comments

[DemFromMem]

A pretty shallow piece and the two studies cited do not tell even a remotely accurate story. There are severe shortages across numerous professions that are documented not through biased studies by professors looking to make headlines in the blogosphere but by actual DOL data. Take a look at the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data at ftp://ftp.­bls.gov/pu­b/special.­requests/l­f/aat25.tx­t. The Duke professor says we have plenty of available engineers, but DOL is reporting unemployment in engineering is at 1.7%, one of the lowest of any occupation measured. Math and IT professionals have a 2.4% unemployment rate. Health care is at 1.4%. Teachers have a 2.4% rate.

Do these numbers sound like American workers are being displaced? The OECD consider full employment in the US to be anything under 5.2% (http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/27/46/18464874.pdf) . Anything below that number is considered to have an inflationary impact on the economy tied to a scarcity of labor. Or are we throwing out basic economics now?

[SamThornton]

I'm having a real difficult time figuring out if our current form of government is a fascist dictatorship, a corporatocracy, a plutocracy, an oligopoly, or a kleptocracy. Or maybe it's a combination of all 5, a kind of "clusterfu­ckocracy," if you will.

[cynara]

I really wish David would find some other topic to persue. Immigration and trade are intertwinned, but tech visas are not the cause of the mass migrations or large scale outsourcing. The biggest cause of mass migration to the US are the economic conditions of the lower class in Mexico and Central America, almost all of whom migrate to the US via family visas, temporary farm work visas (not the tech visas) or illegally.

People complain about the loss of manufacturing jobs in the US, the depression of blue collar wages in jobs, like construction.

None of this has squat to do with Tech visas. I am a tech professional who has worked with half a dozen large tech firms, both here in the US and abroad on a, guess what, tech visa. None of my coworkers have ever complaining about H1B visas. Tech employees rarely complain about salary either. On average computer science majors earn $53,051 at their first position, the highest in seven years, and one of the highest average salaries for any industry. http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9040761&source=rss_topic56
According to E-Learning, in the Top 10 Best Jobs Based upon Average Salary, Growth, Job Openings, the top three positions are computer related.
http://community.elearners.com/blogs/elearnersnews/archive/2006/08/04/317.aspx

Check out average salaries, they are nothing to be upset about.

Is outsourcing a problem? Yes. But I disagree completely that importing high-tech workers causes outsourcing. In my experience, almost all H1-B visa employees were in skilled positions, and I would rather we imported brain power here to have the best possible team in the US, than outsource an entire company to india. We can't compete with India on labor cost, but we can compete on innovation, since we get the best and the brightest from everywhere on our team. Which is why the world's biggest tech companies, google, microsoft, etc, continue to be based in the US.

There is so much wrong with our immigration/trade systems, why protest the one aspect that works??

[SensibleAmerican]

With all due respect to you David and the Professor in Duke, the claim that there are enough Engineers in the US is erroneous. It's like saying that less people are under the poverty line by lowering the bar on the yardstick for "poverty line"

I work in the IT Industry and SOFTWARE ENGINEERS are at a premium. It is also false to state that only those companies hire H1B who simply want to outsource. There are OEMs in the Silicon Valley who have spent years in R&D and have stayed competetive because of the immigrant workers they hired from India, primarily. Software is taking over almost every conceivable facet of our lives and American Companies are vying to stay ahead of the curve. America produces a very small percentage of software engineers that it needs

With H1Bs slashed to less than half for over 6 years, American Companies are forced to outsource. Then, people complain that they are outsourcing!

It is lack of knowledge of the way this Industry works that a lot of companies are victims to "damned if you do and damned if you don't"!

[altohone]

It's hard to believe these issues can be ignored by the corporate media.

Pelosi shows her corporatist roots... so little changed when Dems gained the majority.

Whether it's fires or OJ or Lindsay, the American public gets no info on trade deals, ever shrinking coverage of Iraq, and endless sabre rattling on Iran rather than attention to issues that may galvanize a reaction that could prevent the sell-out.

In orders of importance, I'd be willing to overlook the trade/immigration efforts that undermine the middle class if we were seeing progress at ending the war and preventing another, but inaction in that arena makes the caving in to lobbyists that much worse.

[ORSunshine]

Thanks for this David. Though, I think the presentation on YouTube is probably focused on unique situations in which foreign nationals work for a company either inside or outside the US and the company wants them to be a permanent employee... then they have to go through the visa application process. It may be that the person they have been working with is uniquely qualified because their own intellectual property is involved in the product etc. (I'm thinking specifically about high-tech incubators on college campuses in which graduate students invent and develop a technology and wish to stay in the US).

Granted, the statistics show that there are many qualified workers in the US, and a push to provide mroe Visa's seems weighted in favor of corporations looking to offer lower wages (labor is afterall a supply-and-demand commodity). But I don't know if the entire piece here holds as much weight now that I've personally viewed the video and have some background in understanding why companies in the US may want to get an H1-B Visa for an employee.