Barack Obama responds to an interview question from Michael Arrington

MA: What is your position on H1B visas in general? Do you believe the number of H1B visas should be increased?

BO: Highly skilled immigrants have contributed significantly to our domestic technology industry. But we have a skills shortage, not a worker shortage. There are plenty of Americans who could be filling tech jobs given the proper training. I am committed to investing in communities and people who have not had an opportunity to work and participate in the Internet economy as anything other than consumers. Most H-1B new arrivals, for example, have earned a bachelor’s degree or its equivalent abroad (42.5%). They are not all PhDs. We can and should produce more Americans with bachelor’s degrees that lead to jobs in technology. A report of the National Science Foundation (NSF) reveals that blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans as a whole comprise more that 25% of the population but earn, as a whole, 16% of the bachelor degrees, 11% of the master’s degrees, and 5% of the doctorate degrees in science and engineering. We can do better than that and go a long way toward meeting industry’s need for skilled workers with Americans. Until we have achieved that, I will support a temporary increase in the H-1B visa program as a stopgap measure until we can reform our immigration system comprehensively. I support comprehensive immigration reform that includes improvement in our visa programs, including our legal permanent resident visa programs and temporary programs including the H-1B program, to attract some of the world’s most talented people to America. We should allow immigrants who earn their degrees in the U.S. to stay, work, and become Americans over time. As part of our comprehensive reform, we should examine our ability to replace a stopgap increase in the number of H1B visas with an increase in the number of permanent visas we issue to foreign skilled workers. I will also work to ensure immigrant workers are less dependent on their employers for their right to stay in the country and would hold accountable employers who abuse the system and their workers.

I wonder if Obama has ever actually known a tech worker well? It is hard to meet such folks in places like Billionaires Row in San Francisco–or Law School.

Obama buying into the fairy tale that employers will have a preference for Americans if Americans have the training. He denies the entrenched ethnic nepotism in organizations that have foreign management. He is also in denial of just how US immigration policy works–with a public that wants less immigration–and that only begrudgingly accepts a government that restricts immigration to around 10% of the applicants.

When I was working at HP, a co-worker was told that he would only get funding for a project if he agreed to only hire H-1b workers from India. He had to threaten to resign to hire a Ph.D. from Harvard. Training is simply not the issue. US residency rights have value–and if companies don’t pay for that value when they use it, we will see enormous organizational attempts to extract corporate welfare in the form of immigration rights.

I find the idea that Obama is a “leftist” rather strange. Although Marx had some racist overtones, until the days of affirmative action in the US, there was a tendency of the left to support either meritocracy or programs with clear principles of equality(i.e. like Huey Long’s Share the Wealth).

Support of affirmative action has arguably been one of the major reasons why the traditional New Deal Coalition in the US broke down–and a major reason why every president since Carter has been far from progressive–and why the US has moved the last few decades towards greater concentration of wealth.

Traditionally, leftists supported Democracy. H-1b expansion was opposed from its onset by over 80% of the American public–and was a policy that was pretty much bought and paid for by corporate interests. I wonder what an old-left politician like Huey Long who actually put a strongly progressive platform in place in a difficult environment, would think of Obama’s catering to billionaires?

The Daily Telegraph reports:

The Italian edition of Vanity Fair said that it had found George Hussein Onyango Obama living in a hut in a ramshackle town of Huruma on the outskirts of Nairobi.

Mr Obama, 26, the youngest of the presidential candidate’s half-brothers, spoke for the first time about his life, which could not be more different than that of the Democratic contender.

“No-one knows who I am,” he told the magazine, before claiming: “I live here on less than a dollar a month.”

According to Italy’s Vanity Fair his two metre by three metre shack is decorated with football posters of the Italian football giants AC Milan and Inter, as well as a calendar showing exotic beaches of the world.

Vanity Fair also noted that he had a front page newspaper picture of his famous brother - born of the same father as him, Barack Hussein Obama, but to a different mother, named only as Jael.

From an anthropological point of view, this is a good example how polygamy gets in the way of the development of a class system in African cultures. The museums of Europe and Asia are full of beautiful artifacts, most of them originally commissioned by the upper classes to demonstrate their upper classness, but Africa, with some exceptions (e.g., the medieval Benin bronzes), doesn’t produce much in the way of a more refined higher culture.

In a monogamous society, an ambitious young man often aims to marry a woman raised in a higher class, who can in turn raise their children to behave in an upper class manner. For example, immigrant muscleman Arnold Schwarzenegger has four children by Maria Shriver, the daughter of the 1972 Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate and niece of President Kennedy. In a polygamous society, however, men tend to compete for quantity rather than quality of wives, so there is strong reversion to the overall cultural mean in the upbringing of rich men’s children. A Kenyan Schwarzenegger might have had dozens of wives, but most of them would be local farm girls who would have raised his children in the traditions in which they were raised.

The grandfather of both Barack and his impoverished half-brother George was, by Kenyan standards, a wealthy self-made man, and their father had been a rising governmental star until his alcoholism and general knuckleheadedness led to disaster. But, even if Barack Sr. had been more prudent on the job, the grandfather’s and father’s typically Kenyan polygamousness (three wives for the grandfather and women by four children for Barack Sr.) would have depleted the resources available to the third generation by spreading them thinly among the many descendants.

Obama Jr. was, of course,very lucky to also belong to a small white family, with its contrasting Eurasian emphasis on quality over quantity of wives and children. So, his upper-middle class grandmother, “a typical white person” as Obama memorably phrased it, a hardworking bank executive from a good family back in Kansas, could afford, despite her only daughter’s imprudent decision making, to raise her grandson in a Honolulu highrise with a spectacular view and send him to the state’s dominant prep school, then off to fancy colleges.

By the way, The Onion had a piece a couple of weeks ago on a different brother by another mother, Cooter Obama.

And, here’s a cartoon by Rex May.

As I have said before, getting on the nerves of Larry Auster, the formidable proprietor of View from the Right, is dangerous. This time, it is the National Review cheerleader squad:

In his syndicated column last week, National Review editor Richard Lowry, whose main job as a “conservative” political writer is to keep coming up with ways to make the latest conservative surrender to liberalism seem acceptable to conservatives, laid out a strategy by which McCain’s possible choice of Joseph Lieberman as his vice presidential running mate could be made to seem acceptable to conservatives. Lowry’s big idea: the one-term pledge.

(Ah, what a memory: “Read my lips: No New Taxes”)

Having considered the whole NR crew:

National Review Online editor Kathryn Jean Lopez makes it plain from the start of her article on the same subject that she is totally opposed to the choice of Lieberman, who, she points out, not only supports abortion but voted against a ban on partial birth abortion. But what, in practical reality, does her stalwart opposition to Lieberman mean? She pointedly neglects to say that she would refuse to support such a ticket. Meaning that, notwithstanding her opposition to Lieberman, she would support him…

Then there’s mighty Jay Nordlinger of National Review…Wow! Nordlinger would “gulp” at voting for a Lieberman ticket. Meaning that he would gulp, and then vote for it. I’ll bet that stern warning really has McCain shaking in his boots at the thought of picking Lieberman….

Then there is the National Review editorial on the same subject that was published this morning. The editors start off by saying that if McCain picks Lieberman (or the amazingly overrated Tom Ridge), it would “shatter” the recent momentum he’s built up among conservatives. And the upshot of that dire warning? “For vice president, [McCain] should make a choice that’s conservative in both meanings of the word.” Oh, yes, indeed he should. But if he doesn’t, we know that NRO’s editors will still be in his corner anyway…

Auster concludes:

Personally, I hope that McCain chooses Lieberman. I want to see the establishment conservatives squirm and moan and groan, then sign on to the Partial Birth Abortion ticket, thus giving up the last tatter of their conservative credibility

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From a VDARE.com point of view, what is notable about this NR discussion is the total lack of reference to nation-shattering immigration. On this subject, Lieberman is a disaster. Why does NR, which rallied to the anti-amnesty cause, not mention this?

Answer: They don’t care; the posturing last year was purely tactical.

The VDARE.com theory on Lieberman: GOP operatives actually believe America is controlled by the Jews. They think nominating him will bring in substantial donations (which they desperately need) and, much more importantly, sympathetic media coverage.

By the way, Larry Auster has his faults. See his unreasonable attack on our Steve Sailer for linking to a Slate article (by an apparently Jewish author) on the Georgia/Israel nexus.

But as a comrade on the offensive, he has no peer.

Gina Kolata writes in the NYT:

Men, Women and Speed. 2 Words: Got Testosterone

BEIJING — No matter what happens in the men’s marathon here Sunday, one thing is all but certain. The winner will run the 26.2-mile course faster than the winner of the women’s marathon last Sunday.

The woman who won, Constantina Tomescu of Romania, was fast, of course, finishing the race in 2 hours 26 minutes 44 seconds — more than a minute ahead of the second-place finisher. But for a variety of intrinsic biological reasons, the best women can never run as fast as the best men, exercise researchers say.

Women are slower than men in running, in swimming, in cycling. Whether it is a 100-meter race on the track or a marathon, a 200-meter butterfly swim or a 10-kilometer marathon swim, the pattern holds.

And even though some scientists once predicted that women would eventually close the gender gap in elite performances — it was proposed that all they needed was more experience, better training and stronger coaching — that idea is now largely discredited, at least for Olympic events. Researchers say there is no one physiological reason for the gap, although there is a common biological thread.

“To a large extent, it’s a matter of testosterone,” said Dr. Benjamin Levine, director of the Institute for Exercise and Environmental Medicine at Presbyterian Hospital and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. “That’s why systematic doping of women is even more effective than systematic doping of men. That’s why the East German women were so much more successful than the East German men.”

This line of analysis was put forward by sports physiologist Stephen Seiler and myself in the 12/31/97 issue of National Review in our article Track & Battlefield:

Everybody knows that the “gender gap” in physical performance between male and female athletes is rapidly narrowing. Moreover, in an opinion poll just before the 1996 Olympics, 66% claimed “the day is coming when top female athletes will beat top males at the highest competitive levels.” The most publicized scientific study supporting this belief appeared in Nature in 1992: “Will Women Soon Outrun Men?” Physiologists Susan Ward and Brian Whipp pointed out that since the Twenties women’s world records in running had been falling faster than men’s. Assuming these trends continued, men’s and women’s marathon records would equalize by 1998, and during the early 21st Century for the shorter races.

This is not sports trivia. Whether the gender gap in athletic performance stems from biological differences between men and women, or is simply a social construct imposed by the Male Power Structure, is highly relevant both to fundamental debates about the malleability of human nature, as well as to current political controversies such as the role of women in the military.

(more…)

The International Olympic Committee today announced that the Modern Pentathlon–an Olympic event that tests five skills a young officer would have needed to succeed as a courier during the Napoleonic Wars: fencing, shooting, swimming, horseback riding, and running–will be replaced at the 2012 London Summer Games by the Postmodern Pentathlon, which will test the skills crucial to delivering a message in the 21st Century:

• Spinning
• Cellphoning while riding in an elevator
• Staying on message
• Being ubiquitous in the media
• Taking offense

Medal favorites include Mischa Saakashvili, Morris Dees, Karl Rove, and David Brock.