One reason I’m a lousy blogger is because I get bored easily, and thus often fail to write about what everybody else is writing about at the moment. This week, everybody was blogging about Obama’s stimulus bill, but I said all I have to say about it in previous months, which has migrated to the edges of conventional wisdom by now.

Conversely, I started talking about the Community Reinvestment Act’s role in the mortgage meltdown in August 2007, but by the time John McCain picked that idea up in the fall of 2008, I had gotten bored with it because I couldn’t figure out a solid answer to the response, “Who held a gun to the heads of these big bankers and made them make loans to deadbeats?” Now, I’ve finally figured out what really happened, but who wants to hear about it now?

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Dr. Norm Matloff writes:

The Senate voted Friday to place restrictions on the hiring of H-1Bs by banks that accept government bailout money. The legislation, which was proposed by Senators Grassley and Sanders as an amendment to the economic stimulus bill, would in its original form have imposed a flat ban on hiring of H-1Bs by the TARP-aided banks. It was weakened somewhat (details below), and of course may not survive conference committee etc., but it certainly sends a strong message.

The move was sparked by an AP story that ran in many major newspapers, investigating usage of H-1Bs by banks that had accepted bailout funds. The AP places restrictions on redistribution of its articles, so I will not enclose it here, but you can read it at, for instance, here.

One of the good things about that article was that it noted that paying H-1Bs below-market rates can be done perfectly legally. Here is an excerpt from the article:

Foreigners are attractive hires because companies have found ways to pay them less than American workers. Companies are required to pay foreign workers a prevailing wage based on the job’s description. But they can use the lower end of government wage scales even for highly skilled workers; hire younger foreigners with lower salary demands; and hire foreigners with higher levels of education or advanced degrees for jobs for which similarly educated American workers would be considered overqualified. “The system provides you perfectly legal mechanisms to underpay the workers,” said John Miano of Summit, N.J., a lawyer who has analyzed the wage data and started the Programmers Guild, an advocacy group that opposes the H-1B system.

I’ve explained elsewhere the details of these and other loopholes.

Needless to say, the industry lobbyists were quick to react. Note that the vanguard of the industry lobbyists includes the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), who have obvious vested interests. Indeed, according to the immigration lawyers newsletter Immigration Daily, for many law firms H-1B and employment-based (EB) green cards form the lion’s share of their business. I’m enclosing below the press release from the AILA.

As always, the AILA press release cites work by the National Foundation for Public Policy, a one-man organization run by Stuart Anderson, who is hardly an unbiased researcher. He’s been making a living writing articles supporting the H-1B program since the mid-1990s, and was the author of the lengthy 1997 report by the industry lobbying group Information Technology of America that formed the basis for the doubling of the H-1B cap enacted by Congress in late 1998. Anderson later worked as a Senate staffer, and was the author of that 1998 legislation, and then of a second act increasing the cap in 2000. Though he does not say who his present employer (funder) is, the fact that the lobbyists who quote him the most are immigration attorneys would seem to point to the American Immigration Lawyers Association or their American Immigration Law Foundation is his main funder.

Anderson’s job creation claim comes from a blatant statistical error. See here for details.

The industry lobbyists love to portray any restriction on H-1B as blocking industry’s ability to hire “the best and the brightest” from around the world. But as I have shown in my writings, the fact is that only a tiny percentage of H-1Bs are of that caliber. And if a bank does find someone of outstanding talent, they can hire the person under the O-1 visa program.

Now, what effect would the measure have if it survives the political process? I have not seen the exact text yet, but according to press reports the provision would extend to all TARP-aided banks the rules now in force for H-1B-dependent employers. The two main features of those rules are (a) that the employer must recruit Americans for a position before filling it with an H-1B and (b) employers may not hire H-1Bs during the period of 90 days before and 90 days after a layoff.

Restriction (a) is not quite as strong as it sounds. A similar provision in EB green card law is full of loopholes, as the infamous YouTube videos demonstrated so dramatically; see here.

However, there is a little-known technical difference between the American recruitment requirements in H-1B-dependent and EB law, with the H-1B-dependent version being somewhat more effective. It is certainly worthwhile, and the anti-layoff rule is quite worthwhile.

The provisions here were part of the Durbin/Grassley bill in the last Congress. In addition, that bill addressed the real heart of the problems with H-1B and EB green cards, by setting a definition of prevailing wage that would reflect reality. Due to these provisions–U.S. recruitment, anti-layoff and prevailing wage–I strongly endorsed the bill. (It also had some other parts that I felt were not important.)

A Computerworld article on today’s vote is enclosed below, in addition to the AILA press release. For the AP story on the vote, see here.

Norm

Senate approves ’strict’ rules on hiring H-1B workers, Bill sought to bar firms receiving bailout money from hiring foreign workers but set restrictions instead, By Patrick Thibodeau, Computerworld, February 6, 2009

Congress Takes a Wrong Turn on Way to Stimulus

The American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) believes Congress took a disturbing step backwards today - to an era of employment protectionism.

Bill Gates, who supposedly scored 1590 on the SAT (which is equivalent now that the maximum has been raised to 2400 and scoring made easier, to about, oh, roughly, a million today), is, notoriously, the World’s Biggest IQ Snob in his personal business (at which he’s been rather successful). And yet, the Gates Foundation, the chief meddler in American public schools, is as allergic to thinking about the impact of IQ variations on education as every other spouter of the Conventional Wisdom. Not surprisingly, the Gates Foundation has been rather unsuccessful at improving public schools, according to Bill Gates.

Gates’s IQ elitism in his personal life is evident even in his writing for the Gates Foundation. Here are excerpts from the first page of his 2009 Annual Letter on the work of the Gates Foundation, where he discusses his transition from Microsoft to fulltime work at the Gates Foundation:

My job at Microsoft had three magical things. … Finally, the work let me engage with people who were smart and knew things I didn’t….

I love the work at the foundation. Although there are many differences, it also has the three magical elements. … Second, I feel like my experience in building teams of smart people with different skill sets focused on tough long-term problems can be a real contribution. … However, I am equally confident that our maniacal focus on drawing in the best talent and measuring results will make a difference. Finally, I find the intelligence and dedication of the people involved in these issues to be just as impressive as what I have seen before. Whether they are scientists at a university or people who have worked in the field in Africa most of their lives, they have critical knowledge and want to help make the breakthroughs. The opportunity to gather smart, creative people into teams and give them resources and guidance as they tackle the challenges is very fulfilling. [Emphasis mine]

In contrast, as the boss of the Gates Foundation, Gates argues that everybody must complete a post-secondary degree or certification. Of course, Bill Gates, himself, is a Harvard dropout.

That Gates is a dropout is not a secret, but it’s just the kind of fact that’s not considered relevant in thinking about school policy.

Look, lecturing kids who are struggling to graduate from high school that getting a high school degree is useless except as preparation for getting a postsecondary degree is a catastrophic strategy. It’s the old Yale or Jail syndrome, which encourages a lot of youths to believe that an honest life of reasonably compensated work is hopeless for them, so they might as well drop out of high school now and start dealing drugs.

A reader writes:

This may run a little long since I have intimate experience with Bill Gates’ program for small schools within schools.

In 200X or so, my daughter was attending XYZ High School in the VAPAC program (Visual and Performing Arts Center), a magnet school for the city that rivaled the best FAME programs in the country in terms of great teachers and motivated students.

VAPAC was a school within a school at XYZ High. It had about 500 kids among a greater student body of 2000. The program’s classes were open to all the students for plays, choir, band, etc.

XYZ High was broken up at 25% white, 25% black (ghetto) 25% Asian (Hmong, Vietnamese) and 25% Hispanic. The VAPAC program had a majority of whites who helped raise the test scores for the entire school.

Then The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation raised their head. XYZ High was offered millions to transform into small learning communities where it would be broken up into groups of 500 kids or so who would matriculate together as helping and bonded communities since large schools were impersonal and made kids feel lost and adrift.

When this proposal was made to the parents of Vapac students, we protested. They were going to dissolve the small community that already was working and effective.

What came about was a lesson in racial politics. VAPAC had to be destroyed because it was too white (60% or so). The black (female) Principal and others complained that not enough black students were in the plays, musicals, choir, jazz dance, etc.

It was explained that everyone in the school was eligible to participate and win roles based on ability, but that wasn’t good enough. So they set out to ruin the program.

The school district then transferred the school to the retired Phoenix Suns basketball player Kevin Johnson (now mayor), who promised to make his charter school a beacon of great test scores to send ghetto blacks to college. It hasn’t happened of course. Vapac was destroyed (one of the best high school programs in the country and world), and XYZ High is now a school everyone but a few blacks avoid.

My daughter was able to graduate in the last year of VAPAC, fortunately for her.

Of course, my wife and I tried to tell others at the various “community” meetings that Gates’ ideas were crackpot social engineering that wouldn’t work either since improvement always depends more on discipline and parents’ involvement than schemes and grant money.

We were looked on as racists, though.

The Kvetcher has sent out a Fiery Cross (so to speak):

Hear, ye, hear ye!

The U.S. Must Stop Enforcing Our Immigration Policies by Passover!

The Jews have spoken. The U.S. must stop enforcing their immigration laws. Rather,

“Immigration Reform, Not Raids”

In other words, if you make illegal immigrants citizens, then they aren’t illegal anymore! The Jews want this policy change finished by Passover. The American government has until Passover to implement this policy. Okay?

The Kvetcher explains:

Why Passover? Because that’s when we Jews emigrated from Egypt. Egypt was not working out. Hence, this narrative proves that everyone should be able to immigrate anywhere (in the West).

Of course The Kvetcher is being ironic. He has posted a number of fine pieces hostile to mass immigration, as I have noted here and here and here. This campaign, called Progress by Pesach appalls him:

please warn everyone in our community that the Jewish social-Left is speaking on the Jewish community’s behalf, and demanding implementation of some very irresponsible policies.

and he very sensibly adds

And do not be fooled by how typically cheesy, typically self-congratulatory, and illogical this campaign sounds to the sober ear. These guys are quite serious. And plenty of money is at stake, such as federal and state contracts for HIAS, who is at the root of this campaign.

HIAS (The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), is of course a public menace – as is the entire Refugee Industry.

Looks like more business for Kevin MacDonald.