Paul Streitz of CT Citizens for Immigration Control writes, (in an email newsletter that’s not on the web yet):

Marco Tomakin and El Bandalan

Job Snatchers from the Phillipines

The article in the Schenectady, NY Daily Gazette, is going to be a contender for this year’s Golden Croissant award. This is given by the Hartford Courant for the newspaper article that best represents American journalism as cheerleaders for massive immigration.

Reporters like these aren’t American citizens; they just happen to live in the United States.

The reporters are Jill Bryce and Sara Foss “Immigrants make it all work“

Bryce and Foss cheerily report that hiring foreigners, as “It’s just one of Albany Medical Center’s strategies for dealing with a chronic, nationwide shortage in nurses,” this news is supplied by “Greg McGarry, a spokesman for the hospital.”

“We were aware that in the Philippines there are a number of well-trained nurses looking for work,” he said. “They’re fluent in English. They assimilate quite readily. Most of them have adjusted well with our homegrown staff.”

Unfortunately, Bruche and Foss don’t report any reactions from the homegrown staff, if there are any American nurses left.

They report that the nurses say, “We send money home and it has a tremendous impact on the economy,” Tomakin said. “It keeps it afloat.” A nurse in the U.S., he said, earns more than a specialist in the Philippines. “In a private hospital in the Philippines, a nurse can make about $220 a month. At Albany Medical Center, nurses earn $220 a day,” he explained.

Bryce and Foss fail to mention that these foreign remittances drain billions from the U.S. economy each year. That not only are the jobs taken from Americans, but the dollars go back to benefit foreign workers and foreign countries.

(more…)

From Norm Matloff’s H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter.

Norm Matloff writes:

H.R. 5882 appears to be on its way. The bill would expand the number of employment-based green cards by a “recapture” process. This would first make available unused visas going all the way back to 1992, and would continue to do the same thing in the future, under a system in which visas unused in one year would be available for use in the next year. The same policy would hold for family-based immigration.

The bill’s premise–that “the best and the brightest” foreign workers are being lost as they tire of waiting for a green card–is bogus, as I’ve explained, for instance here.

A summary is that of the three main employment-based (EB) categories, the two that are designated for “the best and the brightest” do not have long waits; the only category with long waits is the one for ordinary people doing ordinary work. [After Flurry Of GOP Amendments, Judiciary Subpanel Moves Visa Measure, By David Hess, National Journal.com, Fri. Aug 1, 2008]

H.R. 5882 differs from other recent proposals, including one by Lofgren, to expand the EB green card program, which would essentially grant an automatic green card to any foreign graduate of a tech program at a U.S. university. These proposals would create their own demand, and by being targeted on new graduates, would apply mainly to the young, and thus greatly exacerbate the already-existing problem of employers hiring young foreign workers instead of older (age 35+) Americans.

Though differing in mechanism, H.R. 5882 would have similar effects. If some workers do tire of waiting and leave, that’s good. Most of these foreign workers are young too, so each one that leaves lightens the age problem described above. The same is true for those in line whose employers go out of business, thus losing their EB green card application. Yes, it is disappointing to those workers, but they are not needed and had been given no guarantee of being able to stay. (The industry lobbyists’ argument that they will then go and “work for our foreign competitors, taking knowledge gained from U.S. companies” is absurd, since these same companies operate R&D centers abroad.)

In other words, the fact that H.R. 5882 does not contain an H-1B increase does not mean that the bill is harmless. In addition, as mentioned, its premise is invalid. Yet, as the enclosed article reports, it has now passed its first committee hurdle.

Language Log has post titled Spanish Is Not A Secret Language about the Foxwood Casino workers who made sexual remarks in Spanish in the hearing of their American female customers.(The casino is being sued by the insulted women, but if tried to prevent its workers from speaking Spanish, it would have been sued by the EEOC.) Linguistics professor Bill Poser writes

What I find so curious about this is the belief of the two offending casino employees that they could speak Spanish without fear of being understood. With 322,000,000 Spanish speakers in the world and 34,000,000 in the United States, the odds of someone at a roulette table in Connecticut understanding the language are not exactly remote, and it doesn’t take a linguist to be aware of this.

I can answer that–the Mexican workers in the casino knew that there were millions of people in America who spoke Spanish, but they thought they could identify them by sight. They were racial profiling.

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute has a new book out, The Soul and Barbed Wire: An Introduction to Solzhenitsyn by Edward E. Ericson Jr. and Alexis Klimoff, that serves as both biography and critical appraisal of the late literary giant’s work. It’s readable and reasonably short at 270 pages. It’s only $13.50 in paperback at Amazon .

And here are excerpts from Solzhenitsyn’s 2001 two volume work on Russians and Jews, Two Hundred Years Together, 1795-1995. Only a 20 page excerpt in an earlier ISI book has ever been published in the U.S.