To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter Tue Feb 19 13:05:25 PST 2013 One slogan heard constantly in the Great Immigration Debate is "America is a Nation of Immigrants," a magic slogan that somehow is intended to end all debate. Me, I live in a Household of Immigrants, and in fact have done so my entire life. I'm the son of one immigrant and the husband of another. I grew up in a household where the adults spoke one foreign language (Yiddish) and live in another where our "official language" is Chinese. Non-mainstream holidays, non-mainstream foods, even non-mainstream senses of humor--hey, this has been my life. Need I add my early childhood in Latino East LA? So maybe we are a Nation of Immigrants. But what we are becoming is a Nation of Disconnects. I was told this morning that people on the Hill are falling all over themselves to pass huge expansions to skilled foreign worker programs (H-1B, green cards)--all while the populace, at least those in tech work, are diametricly opposed to it. This morning NPR ran a pretty good--though of course short--piece on H-1B. It did have a horrible error--it said H-1B requires employers to show they tried but failed to fill the job with an American--but it was a good piece that was quite balanced. But look at the listener comments! http://www.npr.org/2013/02/19/172373123/older-tech-workers-oppose-increasing-h-1b-visas The feeling is so strong that some of the listeners are actually accusing NPR of whitewashing the problem! Yesterday the local NPR affiliate, KQED of San Francisco, ran a show titled "What Does Silicon Valley Want From Obama's Second Term?" The answer to the question, of course, involved immigration and tax breaks. Well, guess what! Almost all the listeners calling in talked about H-1B, and they were all victims. See http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201302180900 For a nation that is so anxious to promote democracy throughout the world, Congress' plans for H-1B and green cards, in spite of popular opposition (again, among those who are aware) has to be the Mother of All Disconnects. Today's NPR piece originated from Seattle, and thus prominently featured Microsoft. As I've often said, you could tell people that Microsoft takes advantage of every loophole in the tax code, and they would immediately believe you. But if you tell them Microsoft takes advantage of huge loopholes in H-1B code, they won't believe you. The industry PR machine has people mesmerized to that degree. Well, that's exactly what happened yesterday on the KQED show. The show's host, Michael Krasny, is a professor, not a journalist, and thus doesn't go for sound bites and has an academic's healthy skepticism. And yet, he seemed to believe the Valley's claim to "need" H-1Bs (e.g. he bought into the false claim that "We're sending the foreign students home after graduation!")--while at the same time being skeptical of the industry's demand for tax breaks. Another disconnect. Speaking of disconnects, Vivek Wadhwa was a guest on that KQED show, and made various statements that are directly at odds with his past stances. For instance, one caller said he was unemployed in spite of a background with Apple, Sun Microsystems etc. and two startups of his own, has trouble finding work now. Vivek replied that age is not a barrier in Silicon Valley and that it's only a question of having the latest skills. Both statements are contrary to what Vivek has said in the past; he once wrote an entire column on problems of older tech workers, and he has explicitly stated that even if an older worker has the latest skills, he/she will be passed over for the younger one. Remember, the overwhelming majority of the H-1Bs are young. One caller said she had been laid off by Oracle and replaced by a younger H-1B at half her salary. Vivek replied that Silicon Valley firms need "the best and the brightest," but the caller, still on the line, broke in and said, "Not true, they want the cheapest," and repeated that the H-1B was being paid half her salary. Some of you will recall that when a TI executive testified to Congress in 2011, she said that there is no shortage of American engineering graduates at the bachelor's degree level. And then a few minutes later, she said that TI is working at the K-12 level to get more kids into engineering, so alleviate the engineering shortage. Another disconnect! And no one at the hearing called her on this disconnect. (She did claim there is a shortage at the postgraduate level, a very misleading claim as I've shown before, but the point is that if TI really does want people with postgraduate degrees, why not put its efforts into promoting advanced study?) And if we are a Nation of Immigrants, why is Congress so anxious to bring harm to the immigrants' kids? Anyone who has visited an undergraduate computer science class at any large university knows the demographics: At least half the enrollment consists of Asian-American (not Asian foreign student) kids--Chinese, Indian, Korean, Vietnamese and so on. Most of these are children of immigrants, often from blue collar families. Their parents came to the U.S. for the classic reason--to get better lives for their children. One more disconnect. Some years ago I was invited to "testify" on H-1B to the student mock Congress at Berkeley High School. When I arrived, the teacher said to me, "You're really brave to speak negatively about immigration here in politically liberal Berkeley." I replied that his premises were wrong, and sure enough, the kids--a very diverse group both racially and socioeconomically--loved me. What's the big mystery? This is their careers we're talking about, so of course the H-1B worries them. President Obama keeps saying, "It makes no sense to send foreign students home [sic] after we've educated them." Does he think it makes sense to impede the careers of our own young people after educating them? One more disconnect, I guess. Norm