Professor Norm Matloff [email] wrote this to his mailing list, and it appears on his website, [the original is here. and an archive of previous postings is here]

Professor Matloff writes:

On October 23, IS Associates, an industry affiliates program in the UCLA Anderson School of Management, held a panel discussion on the future of U.S. IT professionals, given the rise of H-1B and offshoring.

This is one of the few panel discussions I’ve ever participated in that gave everyone a chance to speak in full. Instead of the usual one hour, we actually had three hours (including a break and a Q&A period) in which to thoroughly debate the issues. That sounds like hardship for both speakers and audience alike, but the debate was quite lively and the audience seemed quite engaged.

Enclosed below is a blog report on the event by Don Tennant, editor of Computerworld, who served as the moderator. He posed some excellent questions, and included a couple of small excerpts of the ensuing discussion in his blog.

Though Don is correct in stating that much of the debate consisted of exchanges between Prof. Ravi Aron and me, it’s important to point out that there were two other panelists, Jesus Arriaga, Interim CIO of Bosley Medical, Inc. and Mitch Stern, Director Human Capital, Deloitte Consulting. Mr. Stern, an HR expert, did have quite a bit to say, and Mr. Arriaga made some interesting comments as well.

As you will see in his remarks below, Prof. Aron takes the libertarian point of view. He admits that the H-1B program is used for cheap labor rather than for remedying a labor shortage, and over lunch before the event he also admitted that the H-1Bs are mainly brought in so that employers can avoid hiring older, i.e. 40+, Americans; indeed, he brought this up before I did. (He also mentioned that to prep for the debate, he talked to his former colleague at Wharton, Peter Cappelli, whose writings on the non-shortage of labor I’ve often quoted.) He put forth the usual argument, spoken with religious fervor and mathematical certainty, that purely laissez faire economic policies make the world better.

For my part, I stated that I respect the libertarians because at least they are honest about issues like this. However, I also stated that I believe most people (including those in the audience) aren’t libertarians. My willingness to participate in forums such as this is motivated mainly by a desire to get the facts out in the open; then each listener can apply his own political/economic philosophy to forming his stance on the issues.

The nature of the audience, consisting of CIOs, IT managers, IT entrepreneurs and the like, made for quite a different type of discussion than one usually finds in these forums. They KNOW these issues. This is the first such forum I’ve seen in which NO ONE (if I remember correctly) challenged my point that H-1B is about cheap labor and replacement of older workers. Even Stern and Arriaga, both of whom strongly asserted a tech labor shortage, did not dispute these points, and as mentioned, Aron did not dispute them either.

One thing that got a big laugh and several references in the subsequent discussion was that I said, “Paraphrasing Shakepeare, I say `First thing we do is kill all the HR people.’” After the event, several people told me some of their own favorite HR horror stories. HR people tend to be zealous gatekeepers, a major obstacle to good hiring. Mitch Stern, a very personable guy, took the kidding good naturedly.

Ravi Aron was personable too. Though the discussion between him and me got a bit heated at times (I do get irritated when offered false choices such as “Who would you rather believe on H-1B, Paul Krugman or Charles Grassley?”), I look forward to another pleasant chat with him when we bump into each other again.

Yet it’s clear that Ravi and I differ sharply in, literally, our views of the world. It’s not just ideology, but also a sense of nationality–or lack of one, as the case may be. I get the impression that Ravi is a member of a growing class of immigrants to the U.S. who consider themselves transnationals, not tied to any particular country. Just as many big firms view themselves multinational, and Harvard economist Richard Freeman says even his university thinks of itself as multinational, there are now many individuals who have a multinational mentality too. The trend has been noticeable enough for UC Berkeley anthropologist Aihwa Ong to write a book on it, titled Flexible Citizenship.

Before coming to the U.S. for study and later work, Ravi was a consultant in Malaysia, and for a while ran a software firm in his native India. It wouldn’t surprise me if Ravi’s next job were in the UK or China, say. This has to color his views of offshoring and H-1B.

His stance on those issues is also presumably impacted by his outside consulting work on offshoring, which I’m told has been quite lucrative for him. (Speaking of which, one of the people writing comments on Don Tennant’s blog asserted that I have a “vested interest” against H-1B; but it ought to be clear that the status of the H-1B program has no substantial impact on me one way or the other.)

By the way, I posited three points that I thought everyone could agree on as to the desirability/necessity of keeping a major fraction of this profession American. Two are in Don’s excerpt below–military work and the need for innovation. The third one was the point that whether we think the importation of foreign programmers and engineers is good or not, they’re not going to keep coming here in the future. Tech careers in the U.S. are becoming less attractive, due to stagnant wages and a roller coaster job market, while jobs in India and China are on the upswing. Even Mitch Stern, the HR expert, seemed very concerned when I mentioned this. Yet Ravi dismissed it, saying that we (he may have said “you”) can grow this labor force internally if things come to that. Mitch replied, no, this is not a feasible solution, as an economy takes many years to make such adjustments.

In a somewhat comic twist (whether deliberate or unwitting), all of us speakers were presented with special clocks, with a map of the world and 24 time zones, perfect for the globalist future. I did notice, though, that in order to see the U.S. one needs to hold the clock upside down.

Norm

Matloff vs. Aron on the loss of U.S. IT jobs to non-U.S. workers

By Don Tennant on Mon, 11/05/2007 - 11:39am (more…)

Pat Buchanan’s recent column concludes:

If true, a vote for Rudy is a vote for endless war.

And, as James Madison said, wars are the death of republics.

This was in my personal opinion one of Buchanan’s better recent columns, and I think it deserves some explicit tie into the immigration issue. Rudy Giuliani is advocating a significant expansion of US military commitments–while also positioning himself as a “tax cutter“.

Now, in an era of deficits, how does one fund a military buildup? Well, there are two basic ways:

• A draft-which is essentially a specific tax on young people (who are largely disinclined to vote for Rudy Giuliani)
• Recruitment of mercenaries willing to provide military service in exchange for US green cards.

Both of these approaches have the advantage of being tax increases that aren’t widely perceived and understood as taxes. Honest budgeting would place $300,000 in the military budget for every green card that is issued in exchange for military service. Unfortunately, that isn’t going to happen any time soon. I also sincerely doubt that the children of Giuliani’s supporters are going to be diverted by a draft from their budding careers as investment bankers and hedge fund managers.

What this means is that the US army will become increasingly an army of the poor who have fewer other job prospects after the type of economic programs and social service cuts Giuliani will put in place-and foreigners that are recruited by the lure of green cards and citizenship.

This type of military is much more likely to get used for non-constitutional purposes than the type of military the US has traditionally had. If you have a military that is a cross-section of the American public, there are things that are just plain difficult for even a sitting president to get them to do. US soldiers ultimately take an oath not to any particular president, but to uphold the Constitution. Young people who grow up in the US still largely get some education about what the Constitution is about and what it means. Green card mercenaries don’t get such education–and aren’t identified with communities for whom the US Constitution is especially important.

When we look at the whole picture of Giuliani’s policies and record, I think we have a formula for fascism. What is different from traditional fascism is the lack of intense nationalism. However, despite Rudy’s record of failed marriages (or possibly because of them), he appears to be catering to conservative religious interests that are rather hysterical in their opposition to Islam.

As mayor of New York, Rudy was limited in action largely to pushing people he perceived as “problems” into other cities. That becomes rather different if he becomes president–and frankly both he and Mitt Romney scare me that that sense. I’m not in love with Hillary Clinton either. I fully expect more divisive actions like Waco if she becomes president. The realistic good options are slim. The best realistic scenario I think is likely here is that we’ll see peace candidates like Paul and Kucinich do well enough in the primaries to provide a real voice of sanity to the American public.

The specter of Giuliani creating a massively larger army largely composed of foreigners with no real loyalty or obligations to anyone in the US except himself deserves to be treated quite seriously. I dare call it fascism.

What a coincidence! On October 11th, I had an article published on VDARE about how Mexican beauty pageants prefer white Mexicans.

Just four days later, the international beauty pageant known as “Miss International” announced its winner. She is Mexican Priscilla Perales. Congratulations Priscilla.

As you can see here, she’s a white Mexican.

And, if you look at the Mexican representatives in the Miss International pageant since 1993 they mostly appear to be white also.

The obvious conclusion here is that Mexican beauty pageants prefer white Mexican women as winners.

This is from the That’s Outrageous feature in Reader’s Digest, and it’s pretty outrageous.

Nasko Nazov, an illegal immigrant from Macedonia, didn’t hit the brakes in time and his tractor-trailer plowed into two idling vehicles, one of them the Armstrongs’ car. No one in the family survived the horrible crash.

Adding to the senselessness of the tragedy, officials soon learned that Nazov had been driving his truck with a bogus commercial driver’s license (CDL). The suburban Chicago resident had obtained false documents claiming he was a resident of Wisconsin (where he took his driver’s test) and had gotten help from a translator on the answers to a written exam. In 2006, Nazov was sentenced to four years in prison. [Illegal Truck Drivers Given a License to Kill : Commercial License Fraud, by Michael Crowley, July 2007]

There’s more, involving more drivers who don’t speak English:

A check of his credentials led to Utah, where Grcic, a Bosnian who could barely speak English, had received his CDL. It turned out his skills had been certified by one of three companies contracted by the state to administer driving tests to truckers.

While the feds never proved definitively that Grcic had bought his credentials, they did uncover that the firms were willing to certify a trucker’s driving skill for a payment of anywhere from $500 to $1,500. A few hundred more dollars bought the answers to a written test.

Even more disturbing are cases in which the scams are run by the very people who are supposed to be protecting us. In Illinois, state officials sold hundreds of phony licenses to unskilled drivers, including immigrants who couldn’t read or speak English and people who flattened orange pylons in driving tests.

The fraud came to light after a driver who knew little English failed to understand radio warnings from passing truckers that part of his tailpipe assembly was loose. The pieces flew off and were run over by a van, piercing the vehicle’s gas tank. The van exploded into flames, killing six children of a Chicago minister. Investigators determined the trucker had bought a sham license from the state. So had another driver who killed ten people in a 2004 Texas highway crash. The probe went all the way to Illinois governor George Ryan, who was imprisoned last year on corruption charges. Illegal Truck Drivers Given a License to Kill : Paying for Credentials

Practice your defensive driving, folks, the Government isn’t going to protect you.