You might be surprised to find out that the H-1B system can be expanded by a bureaucratic decree–and no politician will be held accountable. It can be done with a simple edict by the Dept. of Homeland Security.

In this scenario the number of foreign students who graduate from US universities that can stay in the U.S. until they find jobs will dramatically increase. Congress will sit on their thumbs in order to evade responsibility. This can happen because the Department of Homeland Security is proposing to change a regulation that would allow the Optional Practical Training program to increase from 12 months to 29 months. This is a de-facto expansion of the H-1B visa program because it allows students to work in the U.S. for more than twice as many months until they get an H-1B visa. In air traffic terminology, the foreign students are put on a holding pattern until they get an H-1B visas.[Homeland Agency May Expand High-Skill Foreign Student Stay, by Mark Schoeff Jr., April 4, 2008]

So just why do the “best and brightest” minds in the world need more time to find jobs? Shouldn’t they be able to find jobs way before graduation if they were as smart as the promoters of this regulatory change claim? The answer of course is that they are the cheapest minds in the global marketplace, not the best or brightest.

The OPT expansion is a stab in the back to all American students who are toiling to get their engineering or science degrees, but of course most young students are too clueless to understand what is going on, so don’t expect their brainwashed minds to ever comprehend how their future careers are being undermined. They will probably wonder why they can’t seem to get internships, but they will be unlikely to figure out that they are being swept aside for foreign students on OPT work authorizations.

In case you are wondering what these foreign students will do with their extra time, read this article in the Daily Princetonian called Learning to grind with American girls.[By Zoe Buck, March 27th, 2008]

Guess who gave a Congressional testimony that called for this increase in the OPT time period? None other than Bill Gates!

This week the Detroit News gave the public a clear example of how the “drive-by” media fails to serve the public. Last Wednesday their editorial page recycled unedited talking points from industry lobbyists in a plea for more H-1B visas [Expand visas for seasonal, skilled workers, April 2, 2008].

Taking as gospel a study from the one-man National Foundation for American Policy (which the Detroit News describes as a “non-partisan think tank” but which is actually immigration enthusiast  Stuart Anderson), the Detroit News states, “Skilled immigrant workers complement, not replace, U.S. hires.”

Ironically, the same day the Detroit News contained a report that directly contradicted the claims on their editorial page. The news pages reported that 400 IT workers from Chrysler were being “outsourced.”  One of the two companies receiving this business is Tata, the 6th largest user of H-1B visas.

Tata claims that its wages are 20-25% less than that of U.S. workers.

The Detroit News [Email Nolan Finley, editorial page editor] joins the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post as an editorial pages that do not let the facts get in the way of a good argument.

Sen. Charles Grassley has recently written letter to the Senate Majority Leader and Speaker Pelosi promoting some legislation he’s supporting–S.1035, which is supposed to lower the level of H-1b fraud.

The thing is, a program like H-1b will inevitably displace US workers unless it is very carefully structured. Competent oligarchs in countries like Singapore manage guest worker programs with a degree of careful structure. A similar program for a democratic nation will require even more care.

The fundamental problem is that each H-1b visa has a market value of around $50,000. When something that valuable is given to companies free of charge, they rapidly become addicted to this corporate welfare–and learning to live without that corporate welfare will be very difficult for the companies involved.

All S. 1035 does is raise the bar for abuse–and focus the corporate welfare aspect of guest worker visas abuse.

My friend was looking at a photo of UCLA’s freshman All-American center Kevin Love, who will be playing in the basketball Final Four this weekend. I explained that Love may have the potential to be the first American white basketball star since John Stockton retired. He replied, “Are you sure he’s all white?”

So, I looked into his background a little and discovered that Kevin Love is the nephew of Mike Love, lead singer of the Beach Boys, so Kevin Love’s cousin-once-removed is all-American tragic genius Brian Wilson.

Kurt Streeter writes in the LA Times:

For generations, the Loves and their extended family have been at the center of much that makes Los Angeles what it is, for better or worse.

This is a clan that was part of the vast, Depression-era migration that helped give the culture here a Midwestern flavor, witnessing first hand the waves of racial change that roiled South L.A. in the ’50s and ’60s.

It’s the family–Stan’s brother, Mike, and three of their first cousins–that formed the nucleus of the Beach Boys: the band that helped convince the world every Los Angeles neighborhood was bordered by a sandy beach stuffed with surfboards and bikinis. It’s a family, with Stan Love stuck in the middle, that struggled against something deep in the fabric of this place–excess, indulgence and the madness that can come with fame in L.A.

Chris Roach of Man-Sized Target finds a “Window To The Past” in the archives of Time Magazine. Specifically, in a story called Attack on Negro Crime, [February 11, 1957 ] which includes this 1957 statistical footnote:

In 1,477 U.S. cities, Negroes, making up an average 11% of the population, accounted in 1955 for an average 35% of the arrests for what the FBI calls “major crimes” (homicide, rape, aggravated assault, robbery, burglary, theft), and 57% of the arrests for crimes involving violence or threat of bodily harm.

A contemporary liberal, such as Eleanor Roosevelt, would have said that this all stemmed from lack of economic opportunity and discrimination, which was a real problem for blacks at the time. They would have said that if opportunities were available, and discrimination against blacks wasn’t a factor, then crime would go down. This turns out not to have been the case.

An excerpt from my latest movie review in The American Conservative:

The once-lively Mexican film industry stagnated after it was nationalized in the late 1950s, but revived in 1990s with the loosening of the government’s velvet stranglehold on the arts. Last year, three art house films by Mexican directors, “Babel,” “Pan’s Labyrinth,” and “Children of Men,” garnered a total of 16 Oscar nominations.

Meanwhile, the number of Mexicans in the United States continues to soar, eliciting the interest of movie moguls hoping somehow to woo the enormous, but opaque, illegal immigrant market away from the Univision television network. (Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” was a huge hit among undocumented filmgoers, but Hollywood would rather not remember that missed opportunity.)

Expecting synergy, the Weinstein Company and Fox Searchlight paid $5 million at the 2007 Sundance film festival for “Under the Same Moon,” a sentimental family film about an illegal immigrant mother in East LA and the little boy she left behind in Sonora. It was made by Patricia Riggen, daughter of a Guadalajara surgeon. (Part of its $2 million budget was provided by the Mexican government.)

Theorizing that “Under the Same Moon” could be, in the words of the old Saturday Night Live parody ad, both a floor wax and a dessert topping, the studios released it simultaneously in both downscale theaters in Latino neighborhoods and in upscale cinemas for Anglos who like socially conscious foreign films with subtitles.

Through inept planning, I managed to check out both prongs of its novel marketing strategy. By the time I arrived at The Plant in heavily Latino Van Nuys (the curious title of this power mall built on the site of an old Chevy factory commemorates the days when cars and planes, not just movies, were manufactured in the San Fernando Valley), the 9:40 pm Saturday night show had sold out.

So, I drove south to the cinephiles’ latest venue, the Arclight on tony Ventura Blvd. for the 10:30 show, which turned out to be almost empty. Apparently, if the residents of the Hollywood Hills were really all that interested in hearing about the lives of illegal aliens, they wouldn’t pay $12.75 to see “Under the Same Moon” at the Arclight, they’d just strike up a conversation with their servants. Judging from the film’s maid’s-eye view of Los Angeles’s Anglo elite as stuck-up and cold-blooded, however, they aren’t.

Not surprisingly, “Under the Same Moon” works better as a floor wax than as a dessert topping.