The Epilogue to Dreams from My Father contains a scene where, just before he leaves Kenya, Obama visits a wise old woman Kenyan historian who had known his father. So, here is the Big Lesson of Obama’s Kenyan sojourn, which takes up pp. 299-437:

I asked her why she thought black Americans were prone to disappointment when they visited Africa. She shook her head and smiled. “Because they come here looking for the authentic,” she said. “That is bound to disappoint a person. Look at this meal we are eating. Many people will tell you that the Luo are a fish-eating people. But that was not true for all Luo. Only those who lived by the lake. And even for those Luo, it was not always true. Before they settled around the lake, they were pastoralists, like the Masai. Now, if you and your sister behave yourself and eat a proper share of this food, I will offer you tea. Kenyans are very boastful about the quality of their tea, you notice. But of course we got this habit from the English. Our ancestors did not drink such a thing. Then there’s the spices we used to cook this fish. They originally came from India, or Indonesia. So even in this simple meal, you will find it very difficult to be authentic-although the meal is certainly African.” …

I licked my fingers and washed my hands. “But isn’t there anything left that is truly African?”

“Ah, that’s the thing, isn’t it?” Rukia said. “There does seem to be something different about this place. I don’t know what it is. Perhaps the African, having traveled so far so fast, has a unique perspective on time. Or maybe it is that we have known more suffering than most. Maybe it’s just the land. I don’t know. …My daughter, … her first language is not Luo. Not even Swahili. It is English. When I listen to her talk with her friends, it sounds like gibberish to me. They take bits and pieces of everything-English, Swahili, German, Luo. Sometimes, I get fed up with this. Learn to speak one language properly, I tell them.” Rukia laughed to herself. “But I am beginning to resign myself-there’s nothing really to do. They live in a mixed-up world. It’s just as well, I suppose. In the end, I’m less interested in a daughter who’s authentically African than one who is authentically herself.” [pp. 433-434]

Obviously, the main reason “black Americans were prone to disappointment when they visited Africa” is not because Africa isn’t “authentic.” That’s just laughable.

Granted, it’s too much to expect Obama to admit that the main reason African-American tourists are prone to disappointment with Africa is because it’s disappointing. They go hoping to see what the black man can accomplish without the white man around holding him down, and, well …

Yet, why did Obama feel compelled to bring this question up and feature Rukia’s nonsensical answer so prominently as the Climactic Insight of His Life?

Because her answer, ridiculous as it is, at least validates the central concern of Obama’s existence: to prove he’s black enough. If even Africans in Africa aren’t authentic, as this learned African scholar says, then his being half-white and brought up in a wholly non-black environment doesn’t disqualify him from being black enough.

This is a welcome development. Islam’s women-hating customs are not accepted as legally binding in the state of Maryland, at least.

Saying “I divorce thee” three times, as men in Muslim countries have been able to do for centuries when leaving their wives, is not enough if you’re a resident of Maryland, the state’s highest court ruled yesterday.

Yesterday, the Court of Appeals rejected a Pakistani man’s argument that his invocation of the Islamic talaq, under which a marriage is dissolved simply by the husband’s say-so, allowed him to part with his wife of more than 20 years and deny her a share of his $2 million estate.

The justices affirmed a lower court’s decision overturning a divorce decree obtained in Pakistan by Irfan Aleem, a World Bank economist who moved from London to Maryland with his wife, Farah Aleem, in 1985.[Court denies Islamic divorce Man's attempt to circumvent state law is rejected ,By Nick Madigan, Baltimore Sun, May 7, 2008 ]

Additional reportage from the Washington Post: Islamic Divorce Ruled Not Valid in Maryland.

The state Court of Appeals issued a unanimous 21-page opinion Tuesday declaring that talaq is contrary to Maryland’s constitutional provisions providing equal rights to men and women.

This is more of the wonderful immigration-fueled diversity we are supposed to celebrate!

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Barack Obama spent the mid-1980s trying to politically mobilize the black poor in Chicago, giving him, presumably, lots of first-hand insight into their problems. Yet, the 163 pages he devoted to his community organizer years in his 1995 autobiography, published at the height of the debate over welfare, are strikingly lacking in insight.
For example, he only mentions the world “welfare” twice, both times in neutral to positive contexts. Similar terms such as “food stamps” and “Aid to Families with Dependent Children” aren’t mentioned at all. The notion that “welfare … did create some perverse incentives when it came to the work ethic and family stability” (to quote from Obama’s 2006 campaign book, The Audacity of Hope, of which he says “This book grew directly out of those conversations on the [2004] campaign trail” — i.e., he’s playing back what he heard from voters) simply never comes up in Dreams from My Father.

So, if welfare wasn’t a problem, according to Obama, what was?

I apologize for quoting another slab of Obama’s 1995 prose, which was carefully engineered to be unquotable, but it’s interesting to see the influence on him of what appears to be his mother’s worldview (as exemplified by the title of her 1,067 page anthropology dissertation “Peasant Blacksmithing in Indonesia: Surviving and Thriving Against All Odds“):

As we walked back to the car, we passed a small clothing store full of cheap dresses and brightly colored sweaters, two aging white mannequins now painted black in the window. The store was poorly lit, but toward the back I could make out the figure of a young Korean woman sewing by hand as a child slept beside her.

The scene took me back to my childhood, back to the markets of Indonesia: the hawkers, the leather workers, the old women chewing betelnut and swatting flies off their fruit with whisk brooms. I’d always taken such markets for granted, part of the natural order of things. Now, though, as I thought about Altgeld and Rose-land, Rafiq and Mr. Foster, I saw those Djakarta markets for what they were: fragile, precious things. The people who sold their goods there might have been poor, poorer even than folks out in Altgeld. They hauled fifty pounds of firewood on their backs every day, they ate little, they died young. And yet for all that poverty, there remained in their lives a discernible order, a tapestry of trading routes and middlemen, bribes to pay and customs to observe, the habits of a generation played out every day beneath the bargaining and the noise and the swirling dust. It was the absence of such coherence that made a place like Altgeld so desperate, I thought to myself; it was that loss of order that had made both Rafiq and Mr. Foster, in their own ways, so bitter. For how could we go about stitching a culture back together once it was torn? How long might it take in this land of dollars?

Longer than it took a culture to unravel, I suspected. I tried to imagine the Indonesian workers who were now making their way to the sorts of factories that had once sat along the banks of the Calumet River, joining the ranks of wage labor to assemble the radios and sneakers that sold on Michigan Avenue. I imagined those same Indonesian workers ten, twenty years from now, when their factories would have closed down, a consequence of new technology or lower wages in some other part of the globe. And then the bitter discovery that their markets have vanished; that they no longer remember how to weave their own baskets or carve their own furniture or grow their own food; that even if they remember such craft, the forests that gave them wood are now owned by timber interests, the baskets they once wove have been replaced by more durable plastics. The very existence of the factories, the timber interests, the plastics manufacturer, will have rendered their culture obsolete; the values of hard work and individual initiative turn out to have depended on a system of belief that’s been scrambled by migration and urbanization and imported TV reruns. Some of them would prosper in this new order. Some would move to America. And the others, the millions left behind in Djakarta, or Lagos, or the West Bank, they would settle into their own Altgeld Gardens, into a deeper despair.

If only Andrew Carnegie hadn’t put all those black peasant blacksmiths out of business …

According to a recent article by Pablo Bachelet, a National Latino Museum is in the works,

Among the backers of such a museum is California Congressman Xavier Becerra. Becerra said that when he first visited Washington, D.C.’s Smithsonian Museum complex in the 1980s he thought is was “phenomenal” but it displayed “an incomplete picture of what it means to be an American.”

In case you’re wondering about the congressman’s immigration position, Americans for Better Immigration gives Becerra an F- career grade and an F recent (2005-2008) grade.

Well, last week Congress approved a big public land measure and tucked into all the fine print was the authorization for a 23-member panel to “study the viability of a National Museum of the American Latino Community in Washington. Proponents hope the museum will rise above the din of the illegal immigration debate to highlight the contributions to U.S. society by the 45 million-strong Hispanic community.”

There’s already a Smithsonian Latino Center in D.C., which organizes itinerant exhibitions. But this proposal envisages a National Museum “to showcase Hispanic culture in the United States rather than the culture of the countries from which migrants originated.” Not only is the museum to highlight famous American Hispanics, but to show how that “Hispanics have been intertwined with America at its earliest inception.”

It’s not unusual to see job ads that specify that the applicant must be an H-1B visa holder (this has been covered many times in this newsletter). Not much ever happens to companies for being so blatant, although a few of them have been warned by the DOJ to stop using discriminatory language.

Now a company finally got more than a warning–this time they got a light slap on the wrist! A large bodyshop called iGate Mastech was fined $45,000 dollars for discrimination against U.S. citizens.

A link to recent DOJ press release about the settlement is included below. The most peculiar thing about it is that they gave no indication that the Programmer’s Guild initiated the investigation, even though it was the PG who filed complaints about those fake job ads. Several articles that appeared in tech magazines gave the PG the credit they deserve for spurring the DOJ to take action against this company.

Under the circumstances it would seem reasonable to assume that iGate would be required to hire Americans to fill the 30 computer programmer jobs that were filled by discriminating–but don’t assume that. The DOJ press release doesn’t give any indication that iGate has to replace the 30 H-1Bs with Americans, so the $45,000 fine just amounts to the cost of doing business. On average employers save $20,000 a year per H-1B, so if iGate is allowed to retain these H-1Bs for the six year term of an H-1B visa they will save $3,600,000. That means they come out $3,555,000 ahead after the DOJ slaps them on the wrist.

So, what could get iGate in worse trouble than discriminating against Americans?

ANSWER: Underpaying H-1Bs!

One thing companies don’t want to do is to get caught intentionally paying H-1Bs less than the prevailing salary. Even though the prevailing salary regulations have many loopholes that allow employers to legally game the system, sometimes companies still try to push their luck.

iGate got into more trouble: the Dept. of Labor nailed them for underpaying 156 Filipino physical therapists. iGate will be fined $512,000 in civil penalties and they will have to pay $3 million in back wages owed to the workers. Keep in mind that the $3 million they will pay back to the Filipinos is nothing more than the wages iGate would pay if they were following the rules.

Call it a coincidence, but it looks like iGate stands to break even from all of this: they save $3.5 million by discriminating against Americans and they have to pay the Filipinos $3.5 million. Actually iGate will come out ahead because they will still be able to employ the Filipinos at a prevailing salary that will be below what American physical therapists would make. If iGate employes the therapists for 6 years, they stand to save $18,720,000 minus $3.5 million.

After all is said and done, except for legal fees iGate will come out about $18 million ahead, which doesn’t seem like much of a deterrent to others that want to replace Americans with the cheap young blood of foreign workers.

MY CONCLUSION: Discrimination against Americans is embarrassing but not a big deal because the priority of our government is to protect foreign workers, not citizens.. Underpaying foreign workers by cheating the loophole-laden prevailing salary regulations is bad for business because violators will have to pay back wages and might have to pay a perfunctory civil fine.

• FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE–USDOJ iGate Mastech Inc. to Pay $45,000 in Civil Penalties to Settle Discrimination Claim
• ESA News Release New York City staffing company charged with violating H-1B program following U.S. Labor Department finding almost $3 million in back wages due 156 workers Advanced Professional Marketing Inc. also assessed civil penalty of $512,000
• Company Posting ‘H-1B Only’ Job Ads Fined $45K
• DOJ settles H-1B job ad case for $45,000
• Consulting firm settles H-1B discrimination case iGate case is tip of visa-abuse iceberg, lobbyist claims

Dr. Norm Matloff emailed this–while Heritage’s Robert Rector did some good work on the amnesty front, Heritage’s free market organization tends to make them think that’s what’s good for business is good for America.

This is frequently true, but not in immigration policy, where immigration decisions by the government are good for some Americans (employers) and bad for others (employees) with a whole separate category of badness paid for by the taxpayer.

Dr. Norm Matloff writes:

The Heritage Foundation is a well-known DC think tank, with a conservative viewpoint. They might be viewed as the mirror image of the Urban Institute, the well-known liberal think tank in DC that published the recent study debunking several myths about science and math education in the U.S. (See my posting on the UI study here.)

Yesterday Heritage released an article responding to my recent study published by CIS (here, in its final version, which is slightly expanded from the original). As you may recall, my study refuted the industry lobbyists’ constant claim that the H-1Bs they hire are “the best and the brightest” from around the world, and the related claim that the H-1Bs are key to the industry’s ability to innovate.[May 6, 2008 H-1B Workers: Highly Skilled, Highly Needed by James Sherk, Heritage WebMemo #1916]

My analysis took a market-based approach: If the H-1Bs are of extraordinary talent, as the industry asserts, then they would be paid well above average for their levels of experience and education within their profession. Well, they’re not. The data show that the vast majority of H-1Bs are workers of average talent, making average pay for their occupation and experience.

So, what’s a self-respecting conservative institution such as Heritage to do in such a predicament? They want to support Big Business and thus present a favorable analysis of H-1B, but on the other hand, my critical analysis of H-1B is market-based, an approach considered holy by those on the right of the political spectrum.

Turns out that support for the captains of industry trumps ideology: The Heritage analysis of my study, enclosed below, basically ignores the market and says in essence, “OK, so the H-1Bs are just average engineers, but they’re brighter than your average butcher. Most butchers don’t have a master’s degree, y’know.”

Not only is this a patently silly argument, it is completely at odds with the claims the industry has made concerning the “best and brightest” issue. For instance, in his 2003 Senate testimony supporting the H-1B program, Intel executive Patrick Duffy said

“We are an international leader because we have been able to locate, hire and retain the world’s best engineering talent.”

In other words, he’s saying that the H-1B engineers Intel hires are much more talented than the average engineer–NOT that his H-1B engineers are more talented than the average butcher.

In his testimony to the House Committee on Science and Technology on March 12 this year, Bill Gates wasn’t comparing H-1B engineers to butchers either. He referred to the H-1Bs as “world class engineers.” So of course he was making a claim about H-1B engineers relative to engineers as a whole, not comparing H-1B engineers to butchers.

And the data show, as my study found, that the vast majority of H-1Bs, including those at Intel and Microsoft, are NOT making world-class salaries. They are making about average for their experience/education groups within their occupations. If one believes in the marketplace, as Heritage does, one must conclude that these are not world-class engineers.

Yes, Intel and Microsoft do hire SOME foreign workers who are world-class (which I’ve always supported). For instance, Microsoft hires some under the O-1 visa, which by statute is for “workers of extraordinary ability,” and the data show that Microsoft pays its O-1s 40% above average, but this is much higher than what it is paying its other foreign workers.

And note that my recent analysis is merely a confirmation through new methodology of previous work that also showed that most of the H-1Bs are not world-class. The study by David North, for example, found that foreign students in U.S. university tech programs, the source of many H-1Bs, are mainly concentrated in the less-selective, lower-ranked schools, again contrary to the industry’s “best and brightest” claim.

Once he finishes pointing out that H-1B engineers make more money than American butchers, the Heritage author, Jame Sherk, then puts forth another argument that ignores the market economics. He says that U.S. productivity would fall without H-1Bs, as these jobs would go unfilled for lack of qualified workers. But if a tech labor shortage did exist as he says, market economics would mean that wages would be zooming up–which they’re not. On the contrary, salaries have been flat or falling. For instance, the starting salary for new computer science grads with bachelor’s degrees was $52,473 in 2001 and $53,051 in 2007. Inflation for this time period has been about 16% but yet the starting salary for computer science grads only increased by 1%. The same stagnant trend holds for fresh master’s grads.

I never thought I’d see the day when the Heritage Foundation, of all organizations, would ignore the realities of the marketplace.

Norm