A local government health official recently stated that, not only are migrants and drugs crossing the border into his country, but diseases also.

Big surprise? No. But this was a Mexican health official in Chiapas, talking about migrants, drugs and disease entering Mexico from Guatemala. It was reported in the Mexican media in an article entitled “Enfermedades y epidemias amenazan la región” (Diseases and Epidemics Threaten the Region).

The INM (Mexican immigration bureaucracy, which exercises jurisdiction over yours truly) reports that in 2006, half a million migrants passed through the area, and 40% of them (182,705) failed to make it to the U.S.A.

Dr. Norm Matloff writes in his newsletter, (not online) that

Data is fine, but there is nothing like a good old incriminating statement to shorten the process.

A case in point is Alan Greenspan’s remarkably candid statement, enclosed below, in which he says that we need H-1Bs and F-4 in order to hold down tech salaries.

That’s the real goal folks. All that talk of labor shortages, lack of PhDs, the need for innovation, American eighth grade math test scores, Baby Boomer programmers on the verge of retirement with no replacements in sight, etc. is pure smokescreen. What the employers really want is lower labor costs.

That’s all it’s EVER been. Let me remind you of a similar candid statement by our own governmental National Science Foundation, which back in 1989 pushed Congress to create the H-1B program (which it did the next year) in order to keep PhD salaries down. The NSF remarked that “A growing influx of foreign PhDs into U.S. labor markets will hold down the level of PhD salaries…[The Americans] will select alternative career paths…[as] the effective premium for acquiring a PhD may actually be negative.”

Dr Matloff is referring to this story in the Boston Globe

Allowing more skilled workers into the country would bring down the salaries of top earners in the United States, easing tensions over the mounting wage gap, Greenspan said.

“Our skilled wages are higher than anywhere in the world,” he said. “If we open up a significant window for skilled workers, that would suppress the skilled-wage level and end the concentration of income.”

Income inequality has risen in the past three decades.Greenspan: Let more skilled immigrants in - The Boston GlobeMarch 14, 2007

Income inequality, to the extent that it’s a problem, isn’t going to be cured by importing high-tech cheap labor, which will actually make it worse for Americans who have the talent to do the work that that pays well.

And it’s not the proper role of government to deliberately lower the wages of American workers this way.

Last Tuesday’s conference at Washington D.C.’s National Press Club to mark the publication Shots Fired, the collection of the writings of our much-missed columnist Sam Francis was a great success in terms of attendance and media presence, and a credit to the organizer, Fran Griffin. I hope to post my speech as soon Fran sends me the tape - as usual, I spoke from notes. For a lumpen left shock/ horror reaction to my opening joke (”The problem with immigrants as we know is that they…talk fast and nobody can understand them. If that happens here, please raise a fiery cross or some other cultural symbol and I will renew my effort to assimilate acoustically”), click here. There is no limit to these people’s stupidity and humorlessness.

CSPAN was there, but VDARE.COM readers probably won’t get to watch the conference because of an extraordinary performance by E. Michael Jones, editor of Culture Wars and a prize specimen even by the standards of my lifelong study of characters on the American Right. Jones denounced Elizabethan England, Puritans, capitalism, Protestants, “revolutionary Jews” (but not all Jews, he was quite nuanced) and, for good measure, the idea that race matters or that America was ever a nation. I like Catholic bigots as much as anyone else, but this had nothing to do with anything Sam Francis ever wrote - except where it actually contradicted his views. Sam felt bitterly that he never had the recognition he deserved while he was alive. Jones ensured that he won’t get it now that he’s dead.