This is from Norm Matloff’s mailing list–Professor Matloff writes

Cisco Exec Blurts Out Truth On H-1b

Every once in a while someone from the industry or an industry ally blurts out the truth about H-1B and related issues. Enclosed below is a real doozy:

“While some students may believe IT won’t provide a long-term career path because so many positions are outsourced to other countries, [Cisco Executive Jim] McGrath indicated this simply isn’t true.’There are limits on the number of foreign nationals that can be hired due to H1-B visa caps. IT is one of the fastest-growing industries in the U.S.’” [Demand for Information Technology College Grads Soars, MentorNet News, November 2007]

In other words, McGrath is admitting that the H-1B program DOES displace American workers. If the cap were higher, he is saying, then those young people’s fears that they would lose their jobs to foreign workers would be valid. He is saying that employers would shun (even more) American workers in favor of H-1Bs if only Congress would allow them to do so. And concerning the current level of the cap, even the most charitable interpretation of his remarks would be that the present cap is not hurting Americans but a higher cap would harm them.

By the way, though McGrath spoke of H-1Bs in his reply, the question had actually been about offshoring. So, his comment was not only a great blurt but also a possible Freudian slip.

Here are few other “famous blurts” I can recall off the top of my head:

• A few years ago, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, Queen of H-1B in Congress, sought to address concerns that H-1Bs are used as cheap labor by proposing that any H-1B paid more than $60,000 be exempt from the cap. Her spokesperson lauded the proposal, saying “$60K is peanuts in Silicon Valley.” Indeed!
• The Minister of Commerce of India called H-1B “the outsourcing visa,” totally contradicting the industry’s claim to use the visa only to remedy staffing shortages.
• Stephen Seideman, dean of the New Jersey Institute of Technology’s engineering graduate program, stated that foreign students “will do everything they can to stay here,” thus demonstrating their exploitability, which is why the industry lobbyists are pushing Congress so hard now to provide special visas for foreign students.
• Former Fed chair Alan Greenspan stated that we need H-1B in order to hold down American tech worker salaries.

And then of course there is the mother of all blurts, the entire YouTube video collection made by the Cohen and Grigsby law firm, showing employers how to legally hire foreign workers at below-market pay and how to exploit loopholes which allow an employer to sponsor a foreign national for a green card while legally rejecting qualified Americans.

Denis McCormack, who writes about Australian immigration issues in the Social Contract, has a suggestion for the upcoming Australian election at TheIndependentAustralian.com.au/

LET YOUR OPINON ON IMMIGRATION BE KNOWN WHEN CASTING YOUR VOTE

Veteran immigration commentator Denis McCormack has a suggestionon how you can do so painlessly, come the Federal election.

How easy is this for millions of us to do on election day?

1. With both ballot papers in hand, walk into the privacy of voting booth.

2. Number the squares as you wish for your valid vote.

3. In the clear blank space of about 1 cm deep across the top of both ballot papers write

REDUCE IMMIGRATION

which can’t obscure your numbered squares and therefore won’t invalidate your vote.

4. Fold them both, walk out of voting booth, drop them into the respective Reps and Senate ballot boxes on the way out … so easy!

According to my enquires with the good, helpful folk at the Australian Electoral Commission, it would most certainly be noted by all and sundry at the counting everywhere, and therefore spread naturally into the reportage of mass media on election night if a big % of valid ballot papers for both Reps and Senate had REDUCE IMMIGRATION written across the top of them and no matter who had won Government, all would be on notice.

The point here is that while opposition to increased immigration has bipartisan support among Australians in general, support for increased immigration has bipartisan support among Australia’s political class. Opposition to illegal immigration is what won John Howard an earlier  election, and while illegal immigration can be a problem for Australia if the government isn’t prepared to be firm, (See Nice Guys Get Illegal Immmigrants by John Derbyshire) Australia is defended by a lot of deep water, much deeper than the Rio Grande, which means that illegals can only come by ship.

And after Howard’s massive success over blocking boat people, even the left-wing opposition won’t allow boat people. [Rudd to turn back boatpeople, By Paul Kelly and Dennis Shanahan, The Australian,November 23, 2007 ] But boat people aren’t the problem–numbers are the problem. As Enoch Powell put it 

“[N]umbers are of the essence: the significance and consequences of an alien element introduced into a country or population are profoundly different according to whether that element is 1 per cent or 10 per cent. “

In Australia the numbers have been fairly large, and the elements fairly alien.

I don’t always agree with what the Manhattan Institute does, of course, but here’s Tom Wolfe writing about how the Manhattan Institute got Charles Murray started:

[Charles]Murray had done the dog’s work of combing through reams of statistical studies of welfare programs, many of them undertaken after Lyndon Johnson launched his War on Poverty in 1965. The typical War on Poverty study, Murray noticed, opened with a hazy but, on balance, optimistic summary—followed by miles of statistics that contradicted it. [Tom Wolfe--.Turning Intellect Into Influence]

Boy, does that sound familiar!

Mickey Kaus writes

Pinch Works Fast: The New York Times’ value has been cut in half in less than three years. It’s now worth a little more than $17 a share. In 2002, it traded above $50 a share. I wouldn’t worry about Rupert Murdoch buying the Times at this point. I’d worry about Rupert Murdoch’s nanny buying the Times. …

Perhaps being publisher of the Times is a job Americans won’t do? This reminds me of what I wrote when Murdoch was contemplating buying the Wall Street Journal:

With the stories of Rupert Murdoch trying to buy the Wall Street Journal flying around, we at VDARE.com can’t help wondering if this means that immigration, either in the form of Murdoch himself or one of his feisty Australian editors, is finally going to affect the livelihoods of the Editorial Board itself? That would be really, really, sad.Really!

But they say it helps to laugh, so if it does happen, we’ll laugh really, really, hard, just to keep from crying. Condolences, and offers of jobs picking fruit, can be sent to the WSJ here.

It would be just as sad if something like that happened to the New York Times. You can read the Times’s latest pro-immigration article here, and read what Ann Coulter has to say about it here. If the Times editorial board were replaced by immigrants, could they be more anti-American? In fact, it might even be an improvement.