Students

 

Congress: A Reverse Robin Hood; Stealing from the Middle Class

  Congress wants to expand a program that is intended to drive down middle class wages and every year gives 88,000 jobs, paying three times Virginia's median wage, to ordinary immigrant workers. Is this the time for you to give up a job or pay raise so that billionaires at Facebook ans Google  can profit?

In 2011 I got to know a young woman, Katie, who was working as a checker at Giant. Pleasant, willing to work, intelligent, she is easy to like. When she went off to college, I gave her enough money to buy couple of books. I figured I would likely never hear of her again, but she seemed better prepared than I was many years before so I was hopeful that she would do well. Then I read a report by the Economic Policy Institute “Two-thirds of college seniors who graduated in 2011 had student loan debt, with an average of $26,600 per borrower. Unemployment for young college graduates remained high at 8.8 percent in 2011, and almost 38% of college educated workers were doing jobs that do not require a college education”. I can and would pay off her loans. A good job would mean a lot more.

 

Corporate profits and the stock market at all-time highs, corporations are just sitting on billions. The cost of labor is low due to high unemployment, while tens of millions of US citizens can not find jobs, and yet The Daily Caller are reporting,the coming immigration bill bill ”will reportedly provide conditional legalization to 11 million illegals, and allow companies to annually bring roughly 1 million foreigners into the country to take blue-collar and white-collar jobs at low wages in the professional, manufacturing, construction, retail, restaurant and hotel sectors.The bill may also bring in more than 250,000 low-wage farm-workers, and allow them to apply for the valuable prize of citizenship after several years, according to The Associated Press. Roughly 20 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed. Partly because of immigration, the wages of most Americans have stalled or shrunk since 1990, widening the wage gap between blue-collar workers and professionals.” (Neil Munro)

Today, in the DC area, the technical workers in some agencies are almost 100% foreign born, leading some experts to question if the U.S. Has any future in technology. Now is not the time for the USA to give thousands of jobs (at least 4,000 in Virginia each year) when Congress does not even know the qualifications of those getting the jobs, and what they are doing. One study (Matloff) says, “Ordinary people, doing ordinary jobs.”

Currently Congress is discussing immigration reform, and that includes giving foreign students in math and science who study in the USA,more than two years to find a job (competing with your child) and allow another 88,000 H-1B visas for ordinary students from (usually) low wage countries to immigrate to USA after a period of indentured service, driving down the wages of US workers. A National Science Foundation (NSF) study said that programs like H-1B discourage US citizens from getting STEM degrees. 

Economists like Alan Greenspan who feels that the middle class are overpaid felt that depressing middle class wages was good for Wall Street. No credible study has ever shown a shortage US citizens ready to do any science or technology job, but industry and the stock market like an oversupply of unemployed workers.

Who writes the bills? Lobbyists. Why so many loopholes?

Here are some thoughts by Dr. Norman Matloff, University of California at Davis:
 But where do loopholes come from?  The answer is that the stork brings them  execpt that the "stork" here is the industry lobbyists.  You all know about the lobbyists, but you may not realize the level of detail they often get involved in during the drafting of the bill.  The Politico article quoted Robert Hoffman, one of the most powerful lobbyists, for instance, and indeed, he was involved in weakening the Durbin/Grassley bill in a past Congress. Even after a bill is enacted, the lobbyists' work is far from done. They then lobby the executive branch of the government, to make sure the regulations that implement the new statute are to their favor. So the lobbyists to a large degree are primary factors in the shaping of a law and its implementation.  In some cases, they literally write the law!  And such a case appears to be occurring right now:
http://dailycaller.com/2013/03/21/rubio-hires-democratic-lawyer-to-help-write-immigration-bill/
  
"The devil is in the details," and Rubio's lawyer consultant, Enrique Gonzalez, is from the largest immigration law firm in the nation, Fragomen..."  Rubio's consulant, the former Fragomen lawyer Gonzalez, will make sure that nothing goes wrong.  Every detail of every proposed provision  will be scrutinized by Gonzalez, and by Hoffman, to ensure that  employers maximize their access to cheap, immobile labor, and  immigration lawyers maximize their income."  
(end Matloff quote)

You may be tempted to think that in view of our national population of 300 million, 88,000 jobs given away each year is a small number.  It be over 4,000 new good paying jobs in Virginia each year; you might get one of them.  

In 2000, Rep. 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." Rep. Davis said his constituent mail was seven to one against H-1B. And in2008, then candidate Obama had dinner with CEOs seeking more H-1B visas and collected $7.8 million in campaign contributions. In 2009, Obama invited many of the same CEOs to the White House and Larry Summers assured them they would their visas despite high unemployment.

The excuse most often given for the H-1B program is that the immigrants are better workers than US citizens.  There is no proof of that at all. No study has ever shown that US workers are not as good or better. The only "proof" is that immigrant workers are paid less. They get access to benefits you pay for, in addition to their salary. You already have those benefits, so you do not thank the employer for giving them to you. Dr. Norman Matloff at the University of California at Davis has done a study that shows immigrant workers are just ordinary people, doing ordinary jobs. Read about his study.

Do the "Best and Brightest" get good pay? read how employers conspire to drive even immigrants wages down. virginia10th.blogspot.com/2013/04/h1bbrightest.html 

Why can Congress get away with this? In economics, this called “ moral hazard” a principal-agent problem, “The agent usually has more information about his or her actions or intentions than the principal does, because the principal usually cannot completely monitor the agent. The agent may have an incentive to act inappropriately (from the viewpoint of the principal) if the interests of the agent and the principal are not aligned.”(Wikipedia, “moral Hazard”)) When a Senator is getting campaign funds from a lobbyist wanting lower labor costs, you can be sure that your interests and your senator's are not aligned.  Read about moral hazard

"Good for America" almost always means, "Good for Wall Street", and  almost never means all of Americans. Someone has to pay, there is still no free lunch. When the whole truth is replaced by a half-truth and silence, the silence is a lie. Ask your representative who pays?

More competition, 88,0000 college educated immigrants are not good news for college graduates looking for jobs where they can use what they paid to learn.  When students are pushed out of one field, like many unemployed, they migrate to other areas and increase the supply of labour there, driving those labour rates down. Why is congress so determined to make employers the winners and workers the losers?  Workers don't write big checks for political campaigns?

No evidence, no DOL study, no statistics, no examination of visa applications support the existing H-1B program. Anecdotal testimony of immigration attorneys and CEOs wanting to pay lower wages is not enough to justify bringing in 88,000 low wage immigrants to do jobs that out of work American citizens are already trained to do. Congress wants to bring in more ordinary college graduates when " 37.8 percent of recent graduates are working in jobs that do not require a college degree." (NBC news) James Burke, in his book "Connections", demonstrated that genius is not a single person working by him or herself, but many people sharing knowledge,each adding a vital part. When a Fannie Mae or Homeland Security hirealmost 100% low wage immigrant workers (or H-1B graduates) they deny thatcommunity to the vast majority of American citizens, and risk our futureeconomy and security.

I do not know if Katie even needs help, I do know that if she is typical she has a very hard path to an education and a good job.We can't fix the lack of jobs one student a time. It is only by working together that we can improve the chances of all students, and their parents.

we need level the playing field for all our students, and employers. We can't let those employers who hire U.S. citizens be at a disadvantage compared to those who replace citizens with immigrants. See how employers underpay H-1B workers

Call Senator Mark Warner at 202-224-2023 and Senator Tim Kaine senator at 202) 224-4024 and ask them to end the H-1B program. If those workers are better than US citizens, the program started in 1990, where is the proof?  This legislation will be voted on soon, if you wait, it may be too late,

 (Italic text is added to original print copy)