Date: Tue, 11 Apr 2006 23:48:03 -0700 From: Norm Matloff To: Norm Matloff Subject: Lind op-ed shows even brilliant people can be sadly misinformed To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter I consider Michael Lind to be a brilliant man. He's one of those rare people who can really think outside the box. I've quoted the phrase he once coined, "the Brazilianization of America" many times. But boy, did he screw up this time. In the enclosed op-ed they wrote in the New York Times, Lind and his coauthor Clemons basically endorse the new F-4 visa which is proposed in the current Senate immigration bill. Under F-4, foreign nationals who earn graduate degrees in tech fields at U.S. universities would get, in essence, automatic green cards. F-4 would have devastatingly adverse effects on U.S. citizen and permanent resident engineers and programmers. See for example my posting on this yesterday, at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/IEEEUSAHastensDemise.txt I'll get to the details on the op-ed presently, but first I wish to note some ironies: First, Lind's phrase, "the Brazilianization of America," refers to a process under which high levels of immigration eradicate America's middle class, leaving a huge underclass and a small very wealthy class. To be sure, Lind's comments about low-skilled immigration in the enclosed op-ed are consistent with that, but by allowing unlimited immigration of the young engineers, programmers and scientists in the world (there would be no cap on F-4), F-4 would decimate a major component of the middle class. Similar measures will finish off the remaining middle class. Second, Lind, whom I admire so much for refusing to accept conventional wisdom on most topics, has embarrassingly bought into every single piece of "conventional wisdom" that the industry and higher education lobbyists have in the lavish press kits they so widely disseminate. I don't know if he himself has been plied by the lobbyists, but he's obviously been talking to people who make these kinds of pitches. Who knows, maybe he's even been talking to IEEE-USA. All I know is that there is a certain Beltway crowd, consisting of people from both parties, who have bought into these notions without ever having made any effort to question them. Most people in this crowd DON'T WANT to question them, because it would endanger the huge campaign donations that industry makes to both parties. But I would have expected better from Michael Lind. Third, Lind's endorsement of the industry/academic lobby's claim of a shortage of engineers and programmers flies squarely in the face of what he has written in the past. In a 1996 piece in The New Republic, enclosed below after the op-ed, Lind wrote that while high levels of immigration is good for the Wall Street Journal crowd, * But not so great for poor Americans. And theyâre not the only ones under * threat. U.S. companies can legally hire 140,000 skilled foreign workers * each year. Business lobbyists have claimed that the U.S. computer * industry needs a never-ending supply of East Asian and Indian scientists * because there are not enough Americans able to do the work. Really? ... * Why can't American industry train native and naturalized citizens for * high-tech jobs? To his credit, Lind did strongly criticize the H-1B program in that piece, and in the current one. But the principle he expressed so well in 1996 is still true today: Americans CAN do the work; the industry just won't let them, because it considers Americans too expensive. And by the way, that 140,000 figure Lind cited is for green cards, not H-1B visas, and yet he now is extolling green cards. Does Lind have no memory? Or maybe he has been hanging around with the wrong crowd. His employer, the New America Foundation, is run by "usual suspects" who love to bring in foreign engineers. For openers, we have the Foundation's Chairman and CEO, Eric Benhamou, former CEO of 3-Com. Then we have Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, former CEO of Novell, and former CTO of Sun Microsystems. Etc. What happened to Lind's legendary ability for independent thinking? Now, let's look at some specific statements Clemons and Lind make in their op-ed: * IS the United States importing too many immigrant physicists and not * enough immigrant farm workers? You might think so, to judge from two * provisions that Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, * added to the comprehensive immigration reform package that just fell * apart in the Senate. Senator Feinstein insisted that the bill call for * some fees for foreign students applying to study at American colleges * and universities to be doubled, and also demanded that agribusiness This is vintage Feinstein. She makes a tiny proposal which would put no dent at all in the problem, so she can say she stood up for American tech workers, but then fully supports the major stuff that hurts them. See http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/FeinsteinModusOperandi.txt * British, Canadian, German and even French universities are overflowing * in undergraduate and graduate enrollment as they absorb the foreign * talent that America is repelling. I believe that British and Canadian numbers have been dropping too. This has caused Britain to scramble to staunch the hemorrhage, an action not in their best interests, for the reasons given above. The main example of increased foreign enrollment is Australia, where it is a disaster. Far from the Einsteins that the starry-eyed Lind imagines these students to be, many of the students Australia has tried so hard to attract have been so weak as to be literally scandalous: Scandals have arisen in which it turned out that professors had been pressured not to fail foreign students who were doing poorly in their classes. The irony here is that the REASON fewer tech foreign students are coming to the U.S. is that they understand that the long-term prospects for a tech career are lousy in the U.S.--BECAUSE of the continual influx of younger foreign labor. Meanwhile, of course, job opportunities back home, in China and India, are booming. So, fewer are going abroad at all. * Whereas Senator Feinstein fears that foreigners are snatching places * at American universities from deserving American students, the fact is * that our universities are weakened when fewer talented international * students enter their programs. Who says they are talented? The industry/academia lobbyists do, in order to advance their own vested interests. But it's not true. How can Lind, the iconoclast, take the lobbyists' claims at face value? Let me say once again: A small percentage of foreign students at U.S. universities are indeed "the best and the brightest," and I strongly support rolling out the immigration red carpet for them. In fact, just today I was strongly arguing in a faculty meeting that our department should extend an offer to a young woman from China who recently interviewed for a faculty position with us, and who I thought was especially talented. I've done this kind of thing many times. But only a small percentage of foreign students are in that category. I go into detail on this in my university law journal article, at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/MichJLawReform.pdf MOREOVER, there already is a category for "the best and the brightest," the EB-1 visa. We don't need F-4 for this, and again, the vast majority of those coming in under F-4 would not be outstanding talents. * Will admitting more immigrants drive down the wages of American * workers? That may be true in unskilled jobs, since there is a fixed * number of bedpans to be emptied and restaurant meals to be cooked in * the United States. * But it isn't necessarily true for skilled workers, at least not in the * long run. That's because more talent means more innovation and * opportunities for all, immigrant and native alike. The growth The fact is that the influx of foreign workers into science and engineering has caused AN INTERNAL BRAIN DRAIN. American workers in this field are often discarded at age 35 because they are considered too expensive. Younger workers are hired in their place, and when the employers run out of young U.S. workers they hire young foreign workers. Lind wants to exacerbate this by bringing in a lot more young foreign workers. I've mentioned before a former student of mine. Lind would probably think this guy is highly employable: He has a Master's in computer science and several patents to his credit, is articulate and well-liked, he continually learns new technlogy, and there was even a writeup on his work in the Wall Street Journal. But he got laid off right around that magic age of 35 (maybe a year past it), and hasn't found steady engineering work since that time. He is just one of many examples of this nature. Lind, in his Beltway cocoon, doesn't understand this. As I've pointed out, the National Science Foundation, a government agency, actually planned all this. Their idea was to bring in a mass of foreign engineers in order to hold down PhD salaries. And it worked; the salary premium for a PhD in the field of computer science is much lower than for fields which haven't had much foreign influx. Even the industry-dominated National Research Council report made this point. Very, very disappointing. Say it ain't so, Michael. I'm still hoping it was someone else with the same name. Norm http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/10/opinion/10Clemons.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin New York Times Op-Ed Contributors How to Lose the Brain Race By STEVEN CLEMONS and MICHAEL LIND Published: April 10, 2006 Washington IS the United States importing too many immigrant physicists and not enough immigrant farm workers? You might think so, to judge from two provisions that Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, added to the comprehensive immigration reform package that just fell apart in the Senate. Senator Feinstein insisted that the bill call for some fees for foreign students applying to study at American colleges and universities to be doubled, and also demanded that agribusiness get the right to 1.5 million low-wage foreign guest workers over five years. Combined, the two proposals sent a message to the rest of the world: send us your brawn, not your brains. Whether Senator Feinstein's amendments will resurface in any reconstituted legislation on immigration reform remains unclear. But her priorities reflect in many ways those of Congress as a whole. Congress seems to believe that while the United States must be protected from an invasion of educated, bright and ambitious foreign college students, scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs, we can never have too many low-wage fruit-pickers and dishwashers. In making immigration laws, Congress caters to cheap-labor industries like agribusiness and sweatshop manufacturing while shortchanging the high-tech, high-wage industries on which the future of the American economy depends. Witness the Senate bill's provision to admit 400,000 temporary workers a year, or roughly four million a decade, in addition to the 12 million mostly low-wage illegal immigrants already here, many of whose status would be legalized. Few if any of those guest workers would go to universities, corporate campuses or innovation clusters like Silicon Valley. They would head straight to restaurants, hotels and plantation-like farms. While the United States perversely tries to corner the market in uneducated hotel maids and tomato harvesters, other industrial democracies are reshaping their immigration policies to invite the skilled immigrants that we turn away. Britain is following Australia and Canada in adopting a points system that gives higher scores to skilled immigrants with advanced education and proficiency in English. British, Canadian, German and even French universities are overflowing in undergraduate and graduate enrollment as they absorb the foreign talent that America is repelling. Whereas Senator Feinstein fears that foreigners are snatching places at American universities from deserving American students, the fact is that our universities are weakened when fewer talented international students enter their programs. In recent years, skilled immigration to the United States has been accommodated chiefly by the H-1B visa program. But like all guest-worker programs, the H-1B program pits American workers against foreign workers lacking full legal and political rights. Because H-1B workers depend on employer sponsorship to remain in this country, unscrupulous employers can blackmail them into working longer hours for lower pay than American workers. Skilled workers admitted under a points system, by contrast, would be able to quit their employers in the United States and find new ones at will without risk of deportation. Will admitting more immigrants drive down the wages of American workers? That may be true in unskilled jobs, since there is a fixed number of bedpans to be emptied and restaurant meals to be cooked in the United States. But it isn't necessarily true for skilled workers, at least not in the long run. That's because more talent means more innovation and opportunities for all, immigrant and native alike. The growth economist Paul Romer has spoken of the prospector theory of human capital. The more prospectors there are, the more likely it is that some will find gold. As the history of Silicon Valley and other tech centers proves, brain work migrates to where the brain workers are. It's a kind of Field of Dreams in reverse: You will build it, if they come. Even if a skill-based immigration system did reduce incomes for the elite, that would not be the end of the world. For a generation, college-educated Americans have enjoyed a seller's market in professional services and a buyer's market in the labor of landscapers and nannies. If skilled immigration were increased while unskilled immigration were reduced, the wages of janitors would go up while the salaries and fees of professionals would fall, creating a broader middle class and a more equal society. The United States can always use another Albert Einstein or Alexander Graham Bell. But with the vast pool of poorly paid, ill-educated laborers already within our borders, we do not need a third of a million new ones a year. What the space race was to the cold war, the "brain race" is to today's peaceful global economic competition. The comprehensive immigration reform America needs is one that slashes unskilled immigration and creates a skill-rewarding points system modeled on those of Australia, Britain and Canada. In encouraging skilled labor, Congress for a change might perform some of its own. Steven Clemons is the director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. Michael Lind is a senior fellow there. More Articles in Opinion » http://www.npg.org/footnote/lind.htm Huddled Excesses by Michael Lind The New Republic, April 1, 1996. No, Richard Strout, the eminent liberal journalist who wrote this column for several decades. Since Strout wrote those words in 1980, more than 10 million people have immigrated to the United States legally. The number of new immigrants and their higher-than-average birthrate recently forced the Census Bureau to revise its 1989 estimate of U.S. population in 2080 [sic: should be 2050] upward, by an additional 100 million ö to 400 million. But it is not numbers alone that should convert liberal immigration defenders. As Strout observed, the ãhuddled masses need jobs.ä According to a 1995 Bureau of Labor Statistics study, competition with immigrants has accounted for roughly half the recent decline in wages among unskilled American workers. According to University of Michigan demographer William Frey, competition for jobs with poorly paid Latin American and Asian immigrants is driving low-income whites and blacks out of high-immigration states like California and high-immigration cities like New York. No wonder Steve Forbes and Dick Armey favor high levels of immigration, and The Wall Street Journal has proposed a five-word amendment to the U.S. Constitution ö ãThere shall be open borders.ä Itâs great for business. But not so great for poor Americans. And theyâre not the only ones under threat. U.S. companies can legally hire 140,000 skilled foreign workers each year. Business lobbyists have claimed that the U.S. computer industry needs a never-ending supply of East Asian and Indian scientists because there are not enough Americans able to do the work. Really? Why can't American industry train native and naturalized citizens for high-tech jobs? Some companies do the reverse. In 1994, the American International Group Insurance Company fired more than 250 American computer programmers and replaced them with Indian workers brought in under the H-1B visa program (which allows firms to pay only the foreign prevailing wage plus a living allowance). To add insult to injury, the laid-off workers, on pain of losing their severance pay, were forced to train their foreign replacements for sixty days. To add insult to injury... The greatest gain in income by the American middle and working classes, both white and black, took place during the era of immigration restriction, from the 1920s to the 1960s. Not coincidentally, this was also the heyday of union membership, which is inevitably hampered when mass immigration produces a workforce divided by ethnicity. And, of course, it was the golden age of public support for universal entitlements and anti-poverty efforts. Coincidence? Not likely. The most generous and egalitarian countries in modern times have been culturally homogeneous nation-states admitting few or no poor immigrants, like those of northern Europe and Japan (where corporate paternalism substitutes for social democracy). The equation of social justice and national solidarity seems much less compelling in the modern U.S., where immigrants overall are much more likely than native-born Americans to receive welfare benefits. (In Chinese-speaking Asia, one widely distributed book tells potential immigrants how to obtain SSI and other benefits of the American welfare state.) There is, then, a liberal case for immigration restriction that has nothing to do with the absurd and offensive claims of some conservatives that growing numbers of nonwhites threaten our civilization (Patrick Buchanan) or our gene pool (Charles Murray). Whatâs more, the obsession with illegal immigration on the part of politicians like Pete Wilson evades the main issue. Each year, 300,000 to 400,000 illegal immigrants arrive in the U.S. to stay, a fraction of the roughly 1 million legal immigrants who take up permanent residence each year. We can and should crack down on illegal immigration ö with a stronger border patrol, fences and a computerized national employment verification system ö but legal immigration represents the greater threat to American wages and unions. Even a slight majority of Hispanics... Reducing legal immigration is a perfectly legitimate liberal cause ö if ãliberalä means protecting the interests of ordinary wage-earning Americans. Unfortunately, for thirty years the Democratic Party has not acted like a liberal or social-democratic party. It has acted as a coalition of ethnic patronage machines (each seeking to enlarge the number of its group eligible for affirmative action) and affluent white social liberals (whose lifestyle in many cases depend on a supporting cast of low-wage Latin American maids and nannies). Unlike free-market conservatives, who can at least invoke a principled libertarian viewpoint, pro-immigration liberals have no theory, merely the ãpiece of poetryä of which Strout wrote ö and the N-word (nativist). But now that majorities of black Americans and even a slight majority of Hispanics, according to a Roper poll commissioned by Negative Population Growth Institute [sic], support reducing immigration to less than 300,000 a year, it will no longer do to accuse all supporters of immigration reform of racism and xenophobia. As Strout concluded in a critique of immigration policy back in 1981, ãpeople must face facts, whether they like them or not.ä A brave minority of liberal Democrats, including Wisconsin Congressman David Obey, have done so, signing on as cosponsors of the immigration reform bills introduced by Alan Simpson in the Senate and Lamar Smith in the House. Though the bill wisely cut back on extended-family reunification ö a Ponzi scheme that has resulted in escalating immigrant numbers ö they would reduce legal immigration by only a third, to about 700,000 a year. Thatâs still much too high. The numerical cap envisioned by the original Kennedy-Johnson reform in 1965 ö 290,000 a year ö would do more to bring U.S. population growth in line with other developed countries and to raise U.S. wages, particularly at the bottom of the income scale. Yet there would still be room for plenty of humanitarian refugees, spouses and children of Mexican-American citizens, Taiwanese grad students and English journalists. Though the U.S. would no longer take half the worldâs legal immigrants, we would still have the worldâs most generous immigration policy. TRB was right. Genuine liberals should unite with populist conservatives to reform an immigration policy that benefits few Americans other than exploitative employers. It is easy to talk in poetry. But it is necessary to govern in prose.