Doctor Norm Matloff writes

Profs. Wm. Kerr and Wm. Lincoln of the Harvard Business School just released a study in which they claim that Chinese and Indian H-1Bs, especially the Chinese, are highly innovative, and that “shocking” (their term) our economy with a large inflow of H-1B would be greatly beneficial. The paper is already making the rounds–Kerr will speak at the Center for Immigration Studies on Feb. 13, and Vivek Wadhwa lauds it in his BusinessWeek column–and is sure to be highly cited by the industry lobbyists.

The authors’ finding that the Chinese are the most innovative might strike some readers as odd? Aren’t East Asians known for lack of innovation? Actually, the governments of China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan themselves believe this, and have publicly wondered how to reverse it. Nobel physicist C.N. Yang has said, “…[those] trained in the Orient tend to be too [intellectually] timid…This attitude prevents them from jumping over hurdles to make important contributions…This too timid attitude is a handicap later in life when they want to be more creative or more imaginative.” I must assure you that there are indeed many East Asians that are fantastic innovators (Yang himself of course being a prime example)–but at the same time, I share the views of the abovementioned governments and Dr. Yang.

As I will explain, the study is indeed fundamentally flawed. It is impressive looking, 50 pages in length, extensive data analysis, lots of references, and math that goes beyond the capabilities of people on the Hill (i.e. logarithms). But, sadly, it makes a number of major errors.

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Roy Beck raised an interesting question today on his NumbersUSA blog.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s reaction to a limited set of stricter rules for banks hiring foreign workers answers a bar debate that long has raged. The question has always been whether if we had another Great Depression would the Chamber still continue to lobby for more foreign workers on the basis of worker shortages. This week, the debate is settled. YES, THEY WOULD! “It’s Official — U.S. Chamber Would Lobby for Foreign Workers During a Depression“

Beck raised this question because the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Immigration Lawyers Association haven’t finished with Senate Amendment 306 in the Stimulus bill. As explained in my previous newsletter, SA306 was watered down at the urging of AILA lobbyists who got it to the point that it will save at most 1,000 jobs. You would think the greedsters wouldn’t care to shoot it down again, but they do. [Groups fight stimulus limit on workers with H-1B visas,By Chris Strohm, CongressDaily 02/10/2009]

The big question is why?

After the Senate voice vote to amend SA306 (which watered the bill down) it would stand to reason that the USCoC and AILA would let dead dogs lie, but they aren’t. In order to understand why let’s look at what SA306 will and won’t do.

What SA306 will do:

1) Give us a symbolic victory that could be used as a marker in the future to fight H-1B.

2) Banks that receive TARP money will have a slightly bigger hassle getting H-1B visas because now they will automatically be declared H-1B dependent. Companies that are H-1B dependent never fail to get the H-1Bs they want but there is slightly more paperwork that has to be filed. Before SA306 was modified the banks wouldn’t have been allowed to hire any H-1Bs for a year, which would have been a much bigger victory for us.

What SA306 won’t do:

1) Prevent banks from hiring foreigners by using H-1B, L-1, or TN visas.

2) Prevent banks from using bodyshops like Tata or Infosys that use nothing but H-1Bs or L-1s.

3) Prevent offshoring of bank functions or services.

4) Save jobs for Americans.

There are some dynamics going on that show that groups with slightly conflicting interests are willing to work together to gang up on SA306. The USCoC loses a little if SA306 stands as is because H-1B dependency is a hassle that businesses don’t want. On the other hand, AILA represents immigration lawyers that stand to gain slightly since companies would have to pay lawyers more to process the H-1B visas and for the additional legal advice that would be required to replace American workers. Apparently these organizations are so obsessed with total victory in all things immigration they are willing to put aside minor differences in order to deny us a miniscule symbolic victory.

The corporatists and the sharks have obviously decided to spend resources in order to wipe SA306 off the face of the Earth. From my observations many labor and immigration groups are confused about what is going on, and therefore divided. So far the odds of SA306 getting through Congress seem to be quite bad unless opposition gets their act together quickly.

Be sure to read the US Chamber Of Commerce letter to the Senate here.

Dr. Norm Matloff writes

As many of you will recall, last week I reported on the Sanders/Grassley amendment to the economic stimulus package now being considered in Congress. See here.

The amendment, which passed unanimously in a voice vote, would place certain restrictions on hiring of H-1Bs by financial institutions receiving TARP bailout money.

The industry lobbyists, most notably the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), apparently lobbied strongly against the amendment last week, succeeding in greatly weakening it. Originally the measure placed a flat ban on H-1B hiring by the TARP recipients, but in final form it merely imposed the same restrictions on them that currently apply to the H-1B dependent employers. As I will explain below, that represented a major weakening of the amendment, but according to the article enclosed below, the AILA et al are still not satisfied, and are pushing for the amendment to be deleted from the bill. [Groups fight stimulus limit on workers with H-1B visas,By Chris Strohm, CongressDaily 02/10/2009]

The major restrictions to which H-1B dependent employers are subject are (a) Americans must be given hiring priority over H-1Bs and (b) employers are not allowed to hire H-1Bs within 90 days before or after a layoff. General H-1B employers do not have these restrictions, but the Sanders/Grassley amendment would extend them to TARP recipients.

This would be a step toward implementing a portion the provisions of the excellent Durbin/Grassley H-1B reform bill introduced in the last Congress, which would have extended the H-1B dependency restrictions to all H-1B employers. I strongly endorsed that bill, because I approve of that portion of the Durbin/Grassley bill, though I regarded the prevailing wage reform part of the bill to be its most important feature.

After I made the above posting to this e-newsletter, a number of readers e-mailed me with comments pointing out that the TARP recipients could still hire from the bodyshops, thus circumventing the intent of Sanders/Grassley. I had not mentioned that in my posting, as I had assumed it would be obvious, as are other ways of getting around the restrictions, such as hiring L-1s; but of course it is an issue. Though I believe there is too much emphasis on the bodyshops in the H-1B debate, they are definitely important, but I will leave that issue to a major posting on it that I currently have in preparation.

You might ask, though, if the TARP recipients are going to get access to foreign workers through the bodyshops anyway, which they already do in sizable numbers, why would the AILA be so worried? The answers to this question are quite significant.

First, the bodyshops hire H-1Bs in bulk, and likely do so with a pretty small set of lawyers. Indeed, one can use a single H-1B application to request permission to hire many H-1Bs. So, when the bodyshops hire H-1Bs, only a tiny percentage of AILA members get any business. Second, unlike many other employers, bodyshops sponsor very few of their H-1Bs for green cards. Since a lawyer charges five or six times as much for green card applications as for H-1B cases, that again is quite a loss in income for AILA members.

But even those considerations pale in comparison to the core issue, which I believe is the historic, symbolic significance of the Sanders/Grassley amendment. For the first time since the establishment of the H-1B program in 1990, a house of Congress (the Senate here) has gone on record as characterizing H-1B to be a Bad Thing. The amendment puts H-1B on par with exhorbitant salaries for CEOs who run their companies into the ground, and with the purchasing of cheap foreign steel.

The statements made by those who want to limit TARP recipient CEO salaries, including Pres. Obama, are along the lines of, “Normally we would consider those high salaries for poor work to be stupid but well within the rights of boards of directors to pay them, but we draw the line when taxpayers’ money is involved.” The Sanders/Grassley amendment’s analog of this statement would be, “We’ve been reluctantly allowing you to hire H-1Bs instead of Americans, but no way will we let you do this if you’re receiving a taxpayer bailout.” In other words, the Sanders/Grassley amendment is an admission that H-1B is fundamentally wrongheaded.

The amendment also is an admission by the Senate that H-1B is about cheap labor, by analogy with the proposals that recipients of the stimulus package funds not be allowed to buy cheap foreign steel. Though Congress has implicitly admitted that the bodyshops hire H-1Bs for the purpose of acquiring cheap labor, it has never admitted that this is true for mainstream firms too. By imposing limits on big, household name financial institutions regarding H-1Bs, the Senate is tacitly admitting that they too use the H-1B program for cheap labor.

(I’ve of course written about this at length. Some of the mainstream firms may hire a higher class of workers, but they still pay them less than comparable Americans.)

Seems to me that this symbolism is huge. I believe the lobbyists may go all out to get the amendment deleted, or at least get it greatly watered down. They may, for example, push for an exception for foreign workers who have graduate degrees from U.S. universities. As I’ve written before, such an exemption would NOT be justified–most such workers are of only moderate talent, and employers can hire the few exceptions through the O-1 visa program–but sadly, pushing this Education Button has usually proved effective with gullible people on the Hill. One way or the other, this amendment does not seem likely to remain intact, and will likely be deleted altogether.

It will be interesting to watch.

Norm

A featured review, “Charles Darwin, Abolitionist,” by Christopher Benfey, a professor of English, in the Feb. 1, 2009 New York Times Sunday Book Review asserts:

Two arresting new books, timed to co­incide with Darwin’s 200th birthday, make the case that his epochal achievement in Victorian England can best be under­stood in relation to events — involving neither tortoises nor finches — on the other side of the Atlantic. Both books confront the touchy subject of Darwin and race head on; both conclude that Darwin, despite the pernicious spread of “social Darwinism” (the notion, popularized by Herbert Spencer, that human society progresses through the “survival of the fittest”), was no racist.

Adrian Desmond and James Moore published a highly regarded biography of Darwin in 1991. The argument of their new book, “Darwin’s Sacred Cause,” is bluntly stated in its subtitle: “How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution.” They set out to overturn the widespread view that Darwin was a “tough-minded scientist” who unflinchingly followed the trail of empirical research until it led to the stunning and unavoidable theory of evolution. This narrative, they claim, is precisely backward. “Darwin’s starting point,” they write, “was the abolitionist belief in blood kinship, a ‘common descent’ ” of all human beings. …

This is getting American intellectual history confused. The polygenetic theory of human origins tended to appeal to Northern intellectuals, while Southerners didn’t have much time for it since the Old Testament clearly lays out a monogenetic history of humanity going back to Adam and Eve, with the races being descended from Noah’s various sons.

Darwin did spend a number of pages in The Descent of Man considering whether the races were different species before concluding that the different races were, indeed, just different races. If, however, James Watson had mentioned in public some of the evidence that Darwin considers on this question, he wouldn’t have been fired. He would have been burned at the stake.

It’s all muddled in Benfey’s head because contemporary dogma insists that anyone who believes there are any difference on average between races is in favor of slavery (which then makes stamping out their ideas a moral necessity — If Charles Murray, say, is not exposed to nonstop hatred and lies, the Slave Trade will automatically be re-initiated.) (more…)

After Hank Paulson’s turn as Treasury Secretary, the conventional wisdom became: We don’t need as Treasury Secretaries anymore of these CEOs with 700 million simoleons, a fancy suit, and a firm handshake. We’ve had enough self-confident blowhards with endless Wall Street connections and conflicts of interest. Instead, we need a … civil servant! That’s right, a career bureaucrat, a regulator. Why didn’t anybody think of this before?

So, now, we’ve got one. He gave his first big speech today to explain his rescue plan, to reassure and stabilize the markets, to impart confidence, to demonstrate there is a strong hand on the tiller. Unfortunately, upon getting a gander at little Timmy Geithner in action — Noah Millman said he looked like an elf giving a book report — the markets immediately fainted with the vapors.

The next iteration of the conventional wisdom will probably be that we can’t have some wimpy nerd as Treasury Secretary, we need a prime specimen alpha male, a pin-striped powerhouse, a real silverback with a great head of silver hair and a million dollar smile, like … like former Treasury Secretary John Connally!

Back in 1971, Richard Nixon developed a political crush on the conservative Democrat Connally, a former governor of Texas (who was wounded by Lee Harvey Oswald on 11/22/1963), appointing him Treasury Secretary, and picturing Connally as his heir in 1976. Connally talked Nixon into all sorts of zany adventures, like wage and price controls. When Connally ran for the GOP nomination in 1980, he raised the most money — corporate CEOs liked his look — but was obliterated by Reagan. Connally won only one delegate, Ada Mills of Arkansas, who became known as “The $11 Million Delegate.”

Jewish Far-Leftist Boasts Goal of ‘Progress By Pesach’ is to Thwart the Will of the Majority Population!

The Kvetcher blogs

The New Jersey Jewish News reports,

Taking part in the conference call, Vic Rosenthal, executive director of Jewish Community Action in St. Paul, Minn., urged Jewish grassroots efforts to offset the influence of groups that oppose an easier path to legalization for undocumented foreigners and seek criminal penalties and deportation for such immigrants.

“There have been a huge number of letters and phone calls that have come in from right-wing and anti-immigrant groups,” he said. “What we want to be able to show in the next 80 to 100 days is that we can get thousands of Jewish people and their allies to demonstrate their support for a comprehensive solution to solve the problem and not ignore the fact that it is a problem.”

The Kvetcher comments

I would love to declare that people like Rosenthal do not represent the mainstream Jewish organizations. But how can I reasonably claim that? Look at their “partners” list. These aren’t only radical and consistently shrill organizations…there are also mainstream Jewish organization that have signed on as well.

Who the hell do these Jews think they are?

Patrick Cleburne observation: The Kvetcher’s Blog is inwardly directed to the Jewish community. In that respect, it could be very valuable. I appeal to VDARE.com’s unjewish friends not to intervene. The Kvetcher has his hands more than full.

I worry for him.