Scholars Debunk Claims of High-Tech Workers Shortage, Question Industry’s ‘Free Pass’

Hi Gang:
On May 16, 2014 Breitbart posted an article with a crystal clear title:

Please forward this e-mail to as many folks as you can and urge them to do the same.  I am attempting to create a “Bucket Brigade of Truth!”
An informed electorate is vital to America and Americans and Election Day is coming!  Furthermore- many states have yet to hold their primaries.  This is one “dance” Americans cannot afford to “sit out!”
There are all too many Congressional representatives who are undermining American citizens whom they were elected to represent and look out for.  If our elected representatives will not act to help Americans keep or get good jobs, then those politicians should not be able to keep their jobs either!
On Election Day the determining factor for voters must not be about “Conservative” vs “Liberal” or about Democrat vs Republican but about whether or not the politicians seeking elected office truly represent the best interests of America and Americans!
Here are some important quotes from the Breitbart article beginning with the terrific work of Senator Jeff Sessions who has, once again made it clear that he stands with American workers, American students and their families- the obvious question is “Where are our other elected ‘representatives?’ “
On a Friday conference call that was organized by the office of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), who has been relentless in standing up for American workers and their interests during the amnesty debate, Hal Salzman, a Rutgers University public policy professor, said current wages in the high-tech and information technology (IT) industries do not reflect a labor shortage.Matloff said the high-tech industry has gotten a “free ride” from the media and enjoys a very “positive image” in this debate, which he said has “really been a non-debate.” 

The article went on to note:

The myth that there are such widespread labor shortages in the high-tech industry has been debunked in numerous studies, but Republicans and Democrats have continued to, as the scholars noted, perpetuate it without being challenged on their specious claims. High-tech lobbies like Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us have poured in millions of dollars in high-profile campaigns to secure more high-tech visas. 

And they have partly been succeeding. The Senate’s amnesty bill that passed last year would double and possibly triple the number of high-tech visas and, as Breitbart News has reported, House Judiciary Committee Chair Rep. Bob Goodlatte’s (R-VA) “SKILLS” Act that that passed out of his committee would double the number of H-1B visas.

Ron Hira, a public policy professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology who has worked on these issues for more than a decade, said on the conference call that the H-1B visas that are filling the supposed “gaps” are “doing more harm than good” to the U.S. science and engineering workforce. 

He noted that the majority of the H-1B visas are being used for “cheaper workers” from abroad and mentioned that offshoring firms used 50% of the cap last year to further their business model of bringing in “lower-cost H-1B workers to replace American workers.” Salzman said that even after American software engineers train their replacements, they cannot speak out about their experiences for fear of being blackballed or having to forfeit their severance payments.

Hira said that the H-1B program has run amok because “Congress sets the wage floors way too low” and “far below the market wages for American workers” while not placing any “requirement to look for or recruit American workers first, so there is no displacement of American workers.”

“As a result, you are basically inducing companies to game the system to bring foreign workers to undercut American workers,” Hira noted. “Instead of complimenting the U.S. workers as it should, it’s substituting for the U.S. workforce and taking away future opportunities by shifting the work overseas.”

Here is an additional quote from the article:

He also mentioned that IT guest workers are on pace to make up 30-40% of the entire IT workforce even when there are 50% more graduates than job openings in the STEM fields.

Further, Matloff emphasized that H1-B visa holders earn 5-10% less on average than American workers and there is a high churn rate that gives companies a “never-ending supply of new hires,” allowing them to replace workers over the age of 35 while weakening the “bargaining position of current workers.” The Senate bill, Matloff said, exacerbates this problem by providing 150% of the visas that the IT industry has said they needed at the beginning of the debate.

“You are replacing more innovative people with less innovative people, which also will amount to a net loss for the U.S. economy,” Matloff said, saying, for instance, that there are fewer patents per capita produced by those from abroad than those in America.”

As a result, fewer Americans are able to move up the economic ladder through the high-tech fields. And the problem has gotten worse since the H-1B spigots were opened in the 1990s.

Senator Ted Cruz, however, is truly leading the charge against American STEM (Science, Technology Engineering and Math) professionals.  He has been consistently very specific about what he wants where H-1B visas are concerned. He provided an amendment to S.744 referred to as “Cruz 5” which, incredibly, provides for a 500% increase in the cap for H-1B visas. His amendment would have increased the current annual cap of 65,000 such visas to an outrageous 325,000 high tech workers.  the video of statements by Cruz   at a Senate hearing on this issue make his anti-American worker position abundantly clear.

I have been hammering this aspect of the immigration issue nearly as often as I have raised the issue of the way that the ongoing failures to secure our borders and enforce our immigration laws with real integrity undermine national security and public safety.
It is crazy to imagine that the solution to not having enough jobs for Americans to bring in many more foreign workers.  This defies commonsense!
Published reports indicate that since 2007 the executives of Silicon Valley have pumped more than 1.5 billion dollars into a massive lobbying effort to flood the labor market with huge numbers of foreign high tech workers and flood our schools with hundreds of thousands of new students.
On May 7, 2014 ICE issued a news release about the enrollment of foreign students in the United States.
Here is the key paragraph from that presser:

As of April 1, almost 1.02 million international students were enrolled in nearly 9,000 U.S. schools using an F (academic) or M (vocational) visa. This marks a two percent increase from January. Seventy-five percent of all international students were from Asia, with 29 percent from China. Saudi Arabia and India had the greatest percentage increase of students studying in the United States at 10 and eight percent, respectively, when compared to January statistics. The top 10 countries of citizenship for international students included: China, India, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, Mexico and Brazil.
I am concerned about the vetting process for these students and those 9,000 schools.  Note that Saudi Arabia is among the top ten countries of citizenship for foreign students.  
While it would be wrong-headed to blame all citizens of Saudi Arabia for the terror attacks of 9/11, it is worth noting that on December 20, 2-13 ABC News posted the report:
During the campaign Mitt Romney claimed that we need to staple green cards onto the diplomas of foreign students.  Why on earth would we want to educate foreign students and not educate American students?  This is a betrayal of America and Americans!
My latest article appears in  The Spring 2014 Edition of that publication and is:

Additionally, you may wish to check out some of my previous articles that have been published in “The Social Contract.”

The Winter, 2014 Edition of that quarterly journal also includes one of my articles:
The Spring, 2012 edition of the “The Social Contract” included my article: 

Immigration — The Modern Day “Gold Rush”

In that article I explored the many industries businesses that profit tremendously by the influx of foreign workers who are increasingly displacing American workers and driving down the wages of workers in a wide array of industries.

I have written a number of  previous articles for this publication in the past.  As might be expected, all of my articles focus on the various aspects of the immigration crisis that have done harm to America and Americans.  It is important for you to understand, however, that my conern is not that the United States admits foreign nationals into the United States- diversity is important and enriches our country and our lives.  My concern is that the immigration system lacks integrity.  The open borders advocates attempt to minimize the true significance of our nation’s borders and immigration laws by blithely claiming that aliens who run our borders entered the United States “undocumented.”  This use of Orwellian language began with President Jimmy Carter who also demanded that illegal aliens no longer be referred to as being “illegal aliens” but rather “undocumented workers.” 
In December 2011 “Dan Rather Reports” aired a disconcerting hour-long report on how highly educated and experienced American computer programmers are being replaced by programmers from India. The report was titled:

 Rather Reports: No thanks for everything”

On May 15, 2007 a four minute infuriating video was aired on “Lou Dobbs Tonight” on CNN. It features an immigration lawyers’ conference in which lawyers were being coached to not find qualified U.S. workers!” The lecturer is identified in the video as being Lawrence M. Lebowitz, the Vice President of Marketing for the firm of Cohen & Grigsby.

While Americans are losing their jobs and falling from middle class to poverty as a consequence, it is clear that this is precisely what Alan Greenspan and others, in and out of government want.  

On October 20, 2012 CAPS (Californians for Population Stabilization) posted my commentary:

“Leveling the Playing Field for American Workers”

My commentary contained the following- including a quote from Greenspan:

Comprehensive Immigration Reform would provide for a huge increase in foreign high tech workers and would no longer protect American workers from unfair foreign competition. This is precisely what Alan Greenspan called for when he testified before a 2009 hearing on the topic:

That hearing was conducted by the U.S. Senate’s Subcommittee on Immigration, chaired by the chief advocate for Comprehensive Immigration Reform, Senator Chuck Schumer.

During his prepared testimony Greenspan stated, in part:

“…The second bonus (in accelerating the influx of skilled immigrant workers) would address the increasing concentration of income in this country. Greatly expanding our quotas for the highly skilled would lower wage premiums of skilled over lesser skilled. Skill shortages in America exist because we are shielding our skilled labor force from world competition. Quotas have been substituted for the wage pricing mechanism. In the process, we have created a privileged elite whose incomes are being supported at non-competitively high levels by immigration quotas on skilled professionals. Eliminating such restrictions would reduce at least some of our income inequality.”

On July 2, 2013 the Washington Time published my commentary:

The importance of our borders and our immigration laws cannot be overemphasized.  In the war on terror and transnational gangs, they are our first line of defense and our last line of defense against international terrorists and transnational criminals.  They are equally important to American workers who are facing unfair competition from foreign workers, aided and abetted by the administration and advocates for “Sanctuary Cities” and Comprehensive Immigration Reform.  

The starting point for any conversation or legislation concerning immigration must be the findings and recommendations of the 9/11 Commission which determined that a lack of border security, including the visa process. and fraud in the immigration benefits program enabled terrorists to enter and embed themselves in the United States, as they went about their deadly preparations.

In his historic speech before the 3rd Army on May 31, 1944, General George S. Patton said, on the strategy of holding a position:

“We’re not holding anything, we’ll let the Hun do that. We are advancing constantly, and we’re not interested in holding onto anything except the enemy.”

Pushing back against Comprehensive Immigration Reform is the same as holding position. The time has come for us to advance by demanding that our borders be made truly secure and our immigration laws be effectively administered and enforced.

Comprehensive Immigration Reform violates all of the findings and recommendations of the 9/11 Commission but no one is willing to even consider how the lack of real border security and the lack of real integrity to the various components of the immigration system imperil national security and public safety.

Immigration is not a single issue but a singular issue that impacts nearly every challenge and threat confronting the United States today!  Simply stated, the immigration laws were enacted to save lives and protect the jobs of American workers.

It is not “Anti-Immigrant” to be “Pro-American!”

Our armed forces are charged with securing America’s borders externally while the DHS is supposed to secure those same borders from within.  The failures of the DHS to live up to its half of the equation are undermining the efforts, valor and incredible sacrifices of Americas men and women who serve in our military!

If our government’s failures to protect American jobs by securing our nation’s borders and effectively enforcing our immigration laws concerns you or especially if it angers you, I ask you to call your Senators and Congressional “Representative. This is not only your right- it is your obligation! 

All I ask is that you make it clear to our politicians that we are not as dumb as they hope we are!

We live in a perilous world and in a perilous era. The survival of our nation and the lives of our citizens hang in the balance.

This is neither a Conservative issue, nor is it a Liberal issue- simply stated, this is most certainly an AMERICAN issue!

You are either part of the solution or you are a part of the problem!

Democracy is not a spectator sport!

Lead, follow or get out of the way!

-michael cutler- 

Please check out my website:

https://www.michaelcutler.net/

On Friday evenings from 7:00 PM until 8:00 PM Eastern Time, I host my show, “The Michael Cutler Hour” on the USA Talk Radio Network on Blog Talk Radio.

Call in and join the conversation!  The phone number is 310-982-4145

I hope you will be listening!  (Please tell your friends and neighbors!)

Here is a link to the program:

http://www.usaradionetwork.com/cutler.htm

You can find my archived shows here:

  USA Talk Radio

Call in via Skype for free here
(while show is Live)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *