To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter Wed May 1 10:31:26 PDT 2013 Excellent, must-read article by Beryl Benderly in the august Columbia Journalism Review, on the culpability of the press in acting as an unwitting PR agent for the tech industry: http://www.cjr.org/essay/it_doesnt_add_up.php Just yesterday I was interviewed by a local radio program, whose host said (this more or less verbatim), "We in the media have always taken it for granted that there is a STEM labor shortage. We don't even treat it as a question." So he didn't give me any pushback when I said that the press was miserably failing its responsibilities. Just from a journalistic point of view, there is a HUGE story here that the press is totally ignorant of. The bill by the Gang of 8 would give an UNLIMITED number of green cards to ALL foreign students earning advanced degrees in STEM at U.S. schools, with NO labor certification. All they would be required to have is a job offer "in a related field" (clerk at Radio Shack?), and they get the green card right away. The potential for gaming the system would be enormous, but even that would pale in comparison to the impact on the STEM job market. Wages, already stagnant (see the recent paper by Costa and the one by Salzman et al), would drop considerably. The remark by Georgetown University's Anthony Carnevale, "If you're a high math student in America, from a purely economic point of view, it's crazy to go into STEM" would be greatly magnified. The Dickensian conditions for lab scientists found by a blue ribbon commission appointed by the federal National Institutes of Health last year would become absolutely untenable. This transformative (in the highly negative sense) nature of the Gof8 bill ought to be of high interest to the press. So, where are they? The recent EPI paper by Salzman et al was covered to some degree by the press, but incredibly, not one news account asked anyone in the Gang of 8 for their opinion on this. Why not? As many of you know, I've been warning for years of the dangers of the "green cards instead of temporary visas" pushed by IEEE-USA and others, and the naivete of other activists who think the main problem with foreign worker programs is abuse by the Indian outsourcing firms. I've pointed out just how much H-1B is about AGE, and that "stapling green cards to the diplomas" of the foreign students would not solve the age problem at all, since new grads are YOUNG. But even I never envisioned such an extreme situation as we have before us now: UNLIMITED green cards, in ALL disciplines in STEM, with NO labor certification. It is truly mind boggling, and again, something that sharp journalists ought to be on top of. Norm Archived at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/BenderlyColumbia.txt