To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter Tue Mar 12 21:03:54 PDT 2013 Back in 1998, IEEE-USA (which had not yet done its U-turn on the foreign tech worker issue), commissioned a Harris Poll on the issue of H-1B expansion. It was a fair, proper poll, with respondents being presented with the views of both sides of the issue. The results were overwhelmingly AGAINST expansion of the work visa. See http://www.ieeeusa.org/communications/releases/_private/1998/pr091698.html By contrast, recently two polls had just the opposite results: a Field Poll in California, and a Zogby Poll nationwide. The former was commissioned by the Sacramento Bee, while the latter was done for TechNet, an industry lobbying firm that pushes for expansion of foreign tech worker programs. See http://capitolweekly.net/article.php?xid=118n5qwuo2e5k63 http://www.technet.org/new-technet-survey-americans-support-high-skilled-immigration-reform/ When asked for details of the Field Poll, its director, Mark Dicamillo, immediately gave me the link http://media.sacbee.com/smedia/2013/02/21/17/20/4JXnZ.So.4.pdf I asked Zogby for details yesterday, and have heard nothing from them as of the time I write this. So, did the American populace radically change its views on foreign tech worker programs since 1998? That seems extremely doubtful. Economic conditions are terrible now compared to 1998, with the news these days being full of surveys showing that large numbers of new college graduates (not specific to tech) aren't getting jobs; I really doubt that the populace is in the mood to bring in more white collar workers. Every time there is a radio talk show on the H-1B topic, almost all the callers are negative; see a recent example in the Bay Area, at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/NationOfDisconnects.txt So if the views of the populace didn't change, why did the two recent polls come out so differently from the one in 1998? The first answer is obvious: The pollsters didn't give the respondents any context. In stark contrast to the Harris Poll, neither the Field Poll nor (apparently) the Zogby Poll presented arguments from the pro and con sides of the H-1B issue. The second answer is also fairly obvious: The Field Poll asked just one H-1B question, amidst an OCEAN of questions on amnesty for unathorized immigrants. The strategy is to trigger respondents into comparing the "value" of foreign tech workers to farm workers. This is known as the "anchor effect"--the message sent to the respondents, or at least received by them, was, "While you may have concerns about giving amnesty, you certainly would support giving visas to engineers with advanced degrees, wouldn't you?" Then what about the Zogby Poll? This one is the most important, in my view, as it illustrates what I've been saying for years: The industry lobbyists (which, remember, includes not only the industry itself but others with major vested interests, such as the American Immigration Lawyers Association and the university lobby) have been engaging in an all-out campaign to implant in the consciousness of the U.S. public that we have a STEM labor shortage. There have been countless articles on this in the press, for instance. These come directly or indirectly from the lobbyists, who meet with newspaper editorial boards, provide lavish "education packets" for journalists, and so on. Just in the last week or so, the Board of Supervisors of Santa Clara County (i.e. San Jose etc.) passed a resolution in support of expanding H-1B, and Mayor Ed Lee of San Francisco signed on to the March on Innovation, the latest industry lobbying effort. This did not happen spontaneously. All this does WORK. The Zogby Poll found, according to TechNet, that "A majority (63%) of Americans believe that the U.S. faces a shortage of high skilled workers and that immigration policy should encourage highly skilled workers to stay in the country (63%)." The fact that those two numbers came out identical is cause and effect, and shows just how effective the industry's PR campaign has been. (I'm surprised the numbers were not even higher.) Get people to believe we're not producing enough STEM graduates, and of course they will be open to remedying that "shortage" with foreign workers. I've been getting a lot of calls from the press in the last few months, and when one asks what we should do about the tech labor shortage, I ask in response, "Wait a minute. Why are you so sure there is a shortage in the first place?" The answers have all been interesting. One of the most remarkable was, "They don't teach us to question in J school" (!), but the most important was one I got just last week. That reporter's answer was, "We must have a shortage, because Obama said so in his speech"! We don't seem to have many Edward R. Murrows these days, or even many Woodwards and Bernsteins. In Gillian Tett's book on the financial crash of 2008, she aims to answer the classic question, "What did they know, and when did they know it?" Was it greed? Was it denial? Or was it just plain stupidity? But most interestingly, Tett starts by citing the work of social scientist. Before becoming a journalist, Tett earned a PhD in social anthropology, and "...one of the writers I studied who made a big impact on me was Pierre Bourdieu, an anthropologist-cum-sociologist...In his seminal work Outline of a Theory of Practice, Bourdieu observed that the way that elites tend to control a society is not simply by controlling the physical means of production (money and other resources), but also by influencing the cultural discourse, the way that society talks about itself..." This is remarkably similar to the language I've been using over the years (repeated earlier in this post), that the industry lobbyists have been engaging in "an all-out campaign to implant in the consciousness of the U.S. public that we have a STEM labor shortage." I've found that among members of the press, for instance, it's just taken for granted that we have such a shortage; people just "know" it. Augustus Fragomen, probably the most prominent immigration lawyer in the U.S., once wrote that the AILA "commissions academic studies to support our positions." The public doesn't realize this, and don't think to ask whether a certain outcome for a study had been "purchased"; they trust universities. They trust the tech industry too; the Zogby Poll found that. I've noticed this too. I've mentioned before that one can assert that Intel aggressively uses every loophole in the tax code, and everyone will say, "Of course," but if one says that Intel is just as aggressive in exploiting loopholes in immigration law, well, "No, Intel wouldn't do anything like that." TechNet notes that the Zogby Poll also found that "Nearly 43% of Americans believe the next major technology or innovation product will come from China while 30% believe it will come from the United States..." To my knowledge, there haven't been ANY major technologies or products from China as of yet, so how do the respondents "know" that Next Big Thing will come from China? The answer is the same one the reporter gave: Obama (more or less) said so in his speech. Quite apart from the H-1B issue, isn't this all a little scary? If people with hidden agendas can mess with our minds like this (especially the journalists), genuine democracy is impossible. Norm