Since I refuse to read about Campaign 2008 except on C. Van Carter’s Craptocracy blog, and he can go weeks without posting anything, I was kind of under the impression that they’d called this whole voting thing off due to lack of interest. But now, there are a bunch of new craptastic postings, so it appears that there will be an election this year after all. (Although Dennis Dale’s future history series on Untethered recounting the Fall of 2008 raises questions about that assumption.)

Here’s Craptocracy on Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank:

Dana Milbank is a neurotic paranoid. We know this because he wrote a bizarre essay about the genial Tom Tancredo in which he repeatedly describes the principled and soft-spoken former presidential candidate as “angry” without providing a single real example of Tancredo’s supposed rage. …

Milbank obviously believes any opposition to illegal aliens indicates a person is angry. I don’t think Milbank cares about actual illegal aliens because people in his position never do (if he’s ever had a conversation with one except to complain the bathroom wasn’t cleaned properly I’ll eat a sombrero). No, Milbank’s real concern isn’t illegal aliens at all, it’s preventing Nazis from taking little Dana Milbank and putting him in a concentration camp. In the diseased mind of Dana Milbank the only way to prevent a Fourth Reich from erupting on American soil is to flood the United States with non-whites. Because Milbank is gripped by this strange fantasy it causes him to lash out at a gentleman like Tom Tancredo. I hope the mentally unbalanced Milbank gets help; until he does the Washington Post should refrain from publishing his ravings.

The New York Sun has a guest opinion column that contains so many factual errors and distortions I doubled checked to see if the original source was of the Wall Street Journal. When you see that it was written by a former “Chief Economist” at the Department of Labor, [Diana Furchtgott-Roth , send her mail]it will reassure you of government competence. [Desperately Seeking Visas, By Diana Furchtgott-Roth, January 2, 2008

The op-ed states:

"Every year, UScIS issues 65,000 H-1b temporary visas for skilled workers certified by the Labor Department out of approximately 630,000 approved applications from employers, with applications showing no sign of abating. Immigrants who hold H-1b visas must return to their home countries when the job ends."

First of all USCIS does not issue visas, the State Department does. USCIS approves visa applications and the Labor Department approves Labor Condition Applications (LCA)

Normally, I would not pick a nit like this. When you write pieces like this, you often have to oversimplify to fit into space limitation. The problem here is that much of the article based upon this erroneous statement.

USCIS has been approving around 117,000 to 130,000 new H-1B visas a year [PDF, see below]. So not only does the author have the process mixed up, the numbers are wrong as well.

The 630,000 figure represents another interesting twist of numbers. The author here apparently wants the reader to believe this figure represents the demand for visas. The number of approved LCAs in 2006 was about 380,000. If you add the number of workers requested on all the approved LCAs you get 630,000. LCAs are not tied to a particular worker and an employer can specify any number of workers on an LCA. While the LCA give statistical evidence of what is going on in the H-1B program, there is not a one-to-one correlation between a LCAs and visa applications.

In the 2005, Infosys submitted 1,145 LCAs covering 110,000 workers. To me this indicates Infosys intended to import many H-1B workers. This author implies it means Infosys wanted to import 110,000–I don’t think so.

The author then goes on to state:

“Foreign workers must be awarded labor certification from the Labor Department. This process requires the prospective employer to affirm that he has determined that no American workers are available to fill the position, and that the foreign worker will be paid the prevailing wage. “

This is a widely circulated myth about the H-1B program. The reality is there is no recruitment requirement as part of the H-1B labor certification process.

In addition, the law allows the employer to determine what the prevailing wage is; the employer can use nearly any source; and the law limits the approval of an LCA to checking that the form is filled out correctly.

In short, the 630,000 approvals represents the amount of paper that was pushed, not how many workers were approved for visas.

The author continues with a lobbyist talking point that come straight out of How to Lie With Statistics.

“This [65,0000] figure represents a minuscule portion of the U.S. labor force of 154 million. Even if the quota were raised to 150,000 annually, that would be less than one tenth of 1% of the labor force. “

One would hope the Chief Economist would know that the jobs for which H-1B visas are eligible represent a only a fraction of the total jobs in the U.S. Using the entire labor force as a measurement is a deliberate distortion intended to come up with a figure that dilutes H-1B’s actual impact.

Between 1999 and 2005 (First year data available to last–coincidentally H-1B visas can be renewed up to six years.) the number of computing jobs in the U.S. grew by 332,660 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Over that same period USCIS/INS approved 330,524 H-1B visas for computer workers.

So if you look at the occupations where H-1B visas are used, their impact is enormous. Here the Chief Economist has come up with a distortion intended to mislead.

Today the San Jose Mercury-News gives us yet another example of why the drive-by media is not trusted by the public.

Speaking of the cheap labor on visas, the Mercury-News tells us, “The U.S. caps the number of H-1B visas at 65,000 a year, an allotment typically exhausted in a single day. The limit should be doubled.”[AGENDA 2008 | TECHNOLOGY CRUCIAL PROPOSALS ARE STILL WAITING FOR POLITICIANS TO REACH CONSENSUS Mercury News Editorial, January 3, 2008]

But if we go to the official counts [PDF ], we find the number of visas approved has been 116.927 in FY 2005 and 130,497 in FY 2005–nearly double the Mercury-News figure.

The Mercury-News has conveniently omitted the 20,000 visas for those with U.S. graduate degrees and the unlimited visas to academia and research labs.

All of the current H-1B expansion bills employ the same technique of exempting more and more people from the quota. This allows the dishonest folks at the Mercury-News to tell us the country needs an increase of 65,000 to 130,000 when the actual legislation gives an increase of 117-130,000 to unlimited.[Email the San Jose Mercury-News]

George Macdonald Fraser, the author of the Flashman novels, has died–this is his obituary from the London Telegraph:

George MacDonald Fraser was born at Carlisle on April 2 1925. His father was a doctor, his mother a nurse. George was educated at Carlisle Grammar School and Glasgow Academy, where his performance as Laertes was distinguished by his unscripted defeat of Hamlet in the pair’s duel.

In 1943 he joined the Border Regiment and served as an infantryman in North Africa and with the “Forgotten” Fourteenth Army in Burma. He was eventually commissioned in the Gordon Highlanders. Some of his finest writing is contained in his graphic recollections of his Burma service, Quartered Safe Out Here(1992), in which the affectionate portrait of his Cumbrian comrades demonstrated his keen eye for character and acute ear for dialogue.

John Keegan, in The Sunday Telegraph, justly called it “one of the great personal memoirs of World War II”.

…
Fraser wrote a number of other books, notably a series of comic novels that drew on his time in the Gordon Highlanders and centred on Private John McAuslan, “the dirtiest soldier in the world”. He wrote a scholarly and well-received history of the Anglo-Scottish Border Reivers, The Steel Bonnets (1971), and several historical novels. These included a boisterous romp, The Pyrates (1983), and The Candlemass Road (1993), an Elizabethan adventure set in Fraser’s beloved Border country.
…
A short, heavily-built man, Fraser held unashamedly reactionary views on law and order. He was particularly firm in his conviction that the use of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima was justified, believing that among the lives it had saved had been his own.

Nor did he have much time for fashionable attitudes about the emotional delicacy of soldiers and their need for counselling. His experience, in what he acknowledged was another age, was that war was a job that needed to be done, one accomplished by his generation without relish but with a common sense and resolve since vanished from the public spirit.

He aired his views in Quartered Safe Out Here (1992) and was touched when many young people wrote to agree with his sentiments.

In 2002, I reviewed his The Light’s On At Signpost, his book on what a man his age thought of modern British life. The review was called Flashman And The Politically Correct.

In it, I wrote that he was unimpressed by both modern British attitudes to crime, (which is now more or less legal in the UK) freedom of speech, (now more or less illegal in the UK) and of course, the European Union, which makes the UK itself more or less illegal. Some excerpts from The Light’s On At Signpost can be seen here.

His chapter on Political Correctness was called “How To Encourage Race Hatred” of which I wrote

In Angry Old Man Part 8, “How to Encourage Race Hatred,” Fraser describes the great leap backward in British race relations brought on partly by the pressures of the sheer numbers involved in mass immigration, and partly by the grievance industry.

In Fraser’s view, the massive change in the ethnic composition of Britain, while startling, could have been adapted to by Britons in the same way they’ve adapted to other 20^th century changes such as pizza and cell phones.

But the Race Relations Act (“one of the most foolish and pernicious ever enacted by Parliament”), and the race relations industry that goes with it, are causing the very evils that they’re supposed to prevent, breeding “resentment, suspicion, and hatred” among the British populace. He also notes the double standard on hate crimes, which mandates that minorities are never charged with hate crimes.

Fraser feels, like Steve Sailer, that “Race is simply an extension of the family.” He asks why the tolerance that Britons are expected to feel for immigrants can’t be reciprocated by the immigrants themselves.

Some foolish reviewer compared his attitudes to those of the elderly WWII Home Guards portrayed in the classic British sitcom Dad’s Army, to which replied that the only answer you could give to that was the series catchphrase “Stupid boy!”

But reviewer was very wrong–at the time that series was set, Fraser was a young non-com in Burma, leading hardbitten North-of-England infantrymen against murderous Japanese troops.

Even though he did live to grow old, which so many didn’t, it’s appropriate to recite part of this old poem for the war dead:

At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.”

I was looking over the market odds on Intrade for Winning the Iowa Caucuses. Both the Iowa nomination and the and the actual nomination. From that I could look the probability of each candidate winning the nomination if they win Iowa. Now, this is all a pretty thin market–and there were some anomalous results.

Basically the market is saying that Iowa is a make or break event for both Obama and Edwards–and will probably decide the Democratic nominee.

On the GOP side, Iowa is less important. If Romney doesn’t win Iowa, his chances of getting the nomination decline to that of Ron Paul. What we’ve seen here is that Iowa has forced every Republican contender to “talk tough” on the issue of immigration-or effectively leave that race to their rivals(and Giuliani and McCain have done). Now the problem is that the Iowa electorate only understands one segment of the immigration issue: illegal immigration.

This means that we have candidates that are either for expanding all forms of immigration (like McCain) vs. the rest of the bunch that with the possible exception of Ron Paul, want to expand immigration of H-1b and neo-bracero guest workers in return for controlling illegal immigration.

This makes a good case for organizations like VDARE.com, NumbersUSA and FAIR having a booth at the 2008 Ames straw poll–just to educate Iowa voters about what is going on-and what the real records of these candidates really are.

Iowa will probably eliminate either Romney or Huckabee from the top tier of presidential candidates. However, Romney has enough or his own money that he will work hard to make sure he isn’t terribly embarrassed–and Huckabee’s campaign is so lean, had so little expectations from the start-and his 23% Vice Presidential odds are so good, that he’ll continue to be a factor.

However there is about a 40% chance that the winner of the Iowa Caucuses will be the eventual nominee. We’ll essentially see who gets the lead the charge for more Guest worker Visas into New Hampshire. Now, the interesting thing there is that in NH there is enough tech industry, I can imagine some folks could plausibly ask some hard questions-and the only one with any credibility because of his record in the area of resisting H-1b expansion has been Ron Paul.

Huckabee has little shot at winning NH. McCain has carried that state before and Romney was the governor of a nearby state. The most optimistic likely outcome here is that Huckabee wounds Romney in Iowa, Romney can eliminate McCain in NH–and then the race starts to open up a bit with no faux immigration restriction advocate having a commanding presence so that the issue can continue to be discussed in a variety of states-and the candidates be forced to realize just how little their staffers really know.

This is a new one on me, although I suppose it’s familiar enough to border residents–these kids aren’t illegal residents of the US who are taking advantage of the US free school system, they’re living in Mexico, and crossing the border to go to school every morning.

Calif. School Targets Mexican Students
Dec 31 02:39 PM US/Eastern
By ELLIOT SPAGAT
Associated Press
CALEXICO, Calif. (AP) - Children are more likely to shield their faces than to smile when Daniel Santillan points his camera.

Santillan’s photos aren’t for any picture album or yearbook—they help prove that Mexican youngsters are illegally attending public schools in this California border community.

With too many students and too few classrooms, Calexico school officials took the unusual step of hiring someone to photograph children and document the offenders. Santillan snaps pictures at the city’s downtown border crossing and shares the images with school principals, who use them as evidence to kick out those living in Mexico.

Since he started the job two years ago, the number of students in the Calexico school system has fallen 5 percent, from 9,600 to 9,100, while the city’s population grew about 3 percent.

“The community asked us to do this, and we responded,” school board President Enrique Alvarado said. “Once it starts to affect you personally, when your daughter gets bumped to another school, then our residents start complaining.”

Every day along the 1,952-mile border, children from Mexico cross into the United States and attend public schools. No one keeps statistics on how many.

Citizenship isn’t the issue for school officials; district residency is.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled illegal immigrants have a right to an education, so schools don’t ask about immigration status. But citizens and illegal immigrants alike can’t falsely claim residency in a school district.

Enforcement of residency requirements varies widely along the border. Some schools do little to verify where children live beyond checking leases or utility bills, while others dispatch officials to homes when suspicions are raised.

Jesus Gandara, superintendent of the Sweetwater district, with 44,000 students along San Diego’s border with Mexico, said tracking children at the border goes too far. “If you do that, you’re playing immigration agent,” he said.[More]

Anyhow, you can read some of VDARE.com’s work on the Supreme Court decision, (Plyler vs. Doe) that requires school districts to allow illegal students here and here. Of course, Plyler requires the schools to allow illegals from anywhere in the world–Somalia, Iraq, Beirut, Hong Kong, whereever–but only residents of Mexico are in a position to do this commuting deal.