Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2003 15:57:04 -0700 From: Norm Matloff To: Norm Matloff Subject: et tu, Bill Moyers? To: age discrimination/H-1B/L-1 e-newsletter The subscribers to this e-newsletter include both techies and non-techies. The non-techie component includes quite a few journalists, and as you journalists can imagine, I get a lot of mail from techies who think that the press is hopelessly in bed with the industry lobbyists concerning the H-1B/L-1 issue. My stock answer to them has always been that I've found the press to be balanced on this issue in 99% of the cases. The articles are sometimes factually incorrect (understandable, given the complexity of the issue), and usually lacking in depth, but they usually ARE balanced, both in the print and electronic venues. A number of good, balanced pieces on H-1B/L-1 have continued to appear in recent months. And yet: A number of people were rankled by the recent New York Times article, whose primary author is the son of a Silicon Valley CEO. Last weekend 60 Minutes showed its highly biased piece on the Indian Institute of Technology for the THIRD time; never once out of those three times has the show run any of the letters from viewers who objected to the show's characterization of IIT as "the best engineering school in the world," and to the piece's apparent link to the PR campaign the Indian entrepreneurs called "Brand IIT." Several journalists who used to write in-depth articles on H-1B/L-1 have "disappeared." Well, not literally, but they are no longer working for their previous employers. Sure, people do move around in the business, and many publications are having serious budget problems, but one has to wonder if there is cause-and-effect there, especially when the same publications suddenly stop writing much about H-1B/L-1. I ran across an odd statement in a court document today, which I won't go into here, but certainly was troubling. And now there is Bill Moyers, described as "one of the most recognized and respected journalists in America" by his show's Web page (http://www.npr.org/programs/now/, "NOW with Bill Moyers"). I used to agree with that description of Moyers, and like many people of my age, I've followed him throughout his career. Who could resist that thoughtful Texas twang? Moyers' recent multi-part PBS series on Chinese-Americans was absolutely first-rate, one of the best things I've seen on PBS. Well, count me out of the Moyers fan club now. Yesterday, a staffer with Moyers' show was busy contacting a number of people and organizations that are critical of H-1B/L-1/offshoring, looking for good "victims" to appear on camera for a piece to be run this Saturday on offshoring. Her criteria for selection were centered around the Kevin Flanagan tragedy. As you recall, Flanagan committed suicide in the parking lot of the Bank of America's Concord, CA data center, after being laid off and being forced to train his foreign replacement. (Moyers' staffer specifically mentioned Flanagan, and asked how to get in touch with his co-workers.) Some of us explained that offshoring was part of the much bigger H-1B/L-1/offshoring issue. In particular, most offshoring projects include a 20-30% ON-shore component, consisting of H-1Bs and/or L-1s. The BofA case is a good example of this. (For details on the BofA's abuse of H-1Bs, see the Programmers Guild's paper, How to Underpay an H-1B, http://www.programmersguild.org/archives/howtounderpay.htm. Also, see Ron Hira's paper on the key role H-1B/L-1 plays as a major component of the offshoring process, Utilizing Immigration Regulations As a Competitive Advantage, http://www.cspo.org/products/papers/ Bangalore.PDF, Columbia University Center for Science, Policy and Outcomes.) The Moyers staffer was especially interested in people who had been laid off and forced to train their foreign replacements. A number of us gave her leads on this. But later the staffer came back with the news that none of the leads had panned out, so I asked her to better specify what she wanted. She answered that what she hadn't made clear yesterday was that a firm criterion was that the "victim"'s job had gone overseas. As I said, due to the hybrid onshore/offshore model used by the offshoring companies, it would typically be almost impossible to tell whether the job had gone overseas, or was simply going to be done permanently by foreign nationals in the U.S. So, if she needed "pure" offshoring examples, she would find them hard to come by. The staffer replied that the show would be only on offshoring, 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 offshoring too, she then gave the real reason: "Immigration is too sensitive an issue for our show." So there you have it, folks. Bill Moyers, "one of the most recognized and respected journalists in America," will not touch the immigration issue. It's off limits, verboten, the Third Rail. Apparently Flanagan's death qualified as a tragedy only if his job went overseas. If his job merely went to an H-1B here in the U.S., then there was no tragedy, in the eyes of the Moyers show. Norm