The remarkable black Vanderbilt Professor Carol Swain has published a brief but acidic assessment of the Obama Stimulus/Porculus measure’s treatment of the immigration issue –a subject she understands.

Misleadingly entitled Immigration apparently not high on Obama’s priority list The Tennessean February 28 2009
this essay focuses on the great scandal of the supposed employment-stimulus package:

A detailed breakdown of U.S. Census unemployment data released by the Center for Immigration Studies reveals startling levels of unemployment for U.S.-born blacks and Hispanics without a high school education. Blacks had a 24.7 percent unemployment rate and Hispanics were at 16.2 percent.
Meanwhile, the unemployment rate for legal and illegal immigrants without a high school education was 10.6 percent….

Instead of expanding and protecting American jobs, the president allowed Senate Democrats to strip two E-Verify provisions from the stimulus bill. E-Verify is a highly effective voluntary program run by the Department of Homeland Security, which allows employers to check Social Security numbers against a national database. In 2007, it had a 99.6 percent accuracy rate and could yield results in less than three minutes

Swain goes on

The program is scheduled to expire unless Senate Democrats reauthorize the program by March 6. Not only should the program be reauthorized, it should be made mandatory for all employers.

Of course, the Obama measures, like the Budget, had not much to do with the Economy but a great deal about paying off Democrat constituencies at the expense of Whites - as the Reich/Rangel interlocution proved.

And, unfortunately, the evidence is accumulating that immigration is high on his list - more of it. Otherwise what is the logic of killing E-verify?

As Obama moves on to his next Pork Cook-Outs, Carol Swain’s closing words need to be remembered:

Our rising health-care costs and educational burdens are all impacted by the presence of large numbers of undocumented and unauthorized residents who make it more difficult for hard-working Americans to enjoy some of the benefits of living in a nation that used to be one of the greatest in the world.

Carol Swain is astonishingly ready to defy conventional opinion. Applaud Carol Swain

Dr. Norm Matloff writes

I am deeply grateful to a reader for calling my attention to a CNN report that aired on February 21. Though it is not about H-1B, it goes to the very heart of the H-1B issue. I’ll discuss the CNN clip below, but first, please bear with me while I lay the groundwork.

Ever since 1992, when I started writing about H-1B, I’ve been stressing that not only is H-1B centrally about cheap tech labor, cheap tech labor is in turn centrally about age. Younger workers are cheaper than older ones, both in wages and health insurance costs. Of course, in addition, the younger H-1Bs are even cheaper than the younger Americans. Result: An employer may hire a 24-year-old H-1B instead of a 24-year-old American, and usually will hire that 24-year-old H-1B instead of a 35-year-old American.

In my article for California Labor & Employment Law Review [PDF] I showed the stark difference in the computer field:

group         25th percentile        median        90th percentile

new grads     $45,000                $50,664       $61,5000

all workers   $65,070                $82,120       $120,410

This is a savings in the 30-50% range, which is larger than the 15-20% difference I found between H-1Bs and Americans of the same age. Getting a young H-1B is of course the best of all from a thrifty (though shortsighted) employer’s point of view, but the savings in hiring the H-1B come even more from the age factor than from the exploitation aspect.

Valued readers, please note carefully: By subscribing to this e-newsletter you presumably have serious interest in the H-1B issue. If so, constantly remind yourself of this fact–the H-1B program is fundamentally about age. Employers use the program as a means of avoiding hiring the older (age 35+) Americans. THE H-1B PROGRAM IS FUNDAMENTALLY ABOUT AGE. It is impossible to consider reform, or even academic analysis, of H-1B without having this fundamental issue at the forefront of the discussion.

Which brings me to the CNN video, titled “Students Worry about Economy,” filmed at Georgia Tech. (You can view the video at here. I prefer to download streaming videos, rather than watch them in choppy form, so I use DownloadHelper in Firefox. If you do this, I suggest you go to the AOL site instead of CNN, here.)

CNN undoubtedly chose Georgia Tech as their interview venue because the campus is only a couple of miles north of CNN headquarters, but it’s also a great example for my points below, in that there are many foreign students there. I’ll return the latter point later.

In the video, a Chinese-American student, Christine Liu, talks of her engineer dad, an immigrant from China (emphasis added):

Currently the job market with my dad, because he’s an engineer, is hard,  really hard, to stay up because we have all these Georgia Tech students  who are up with the new information and stuff like that. THEY’RE COMING  IN AND TAKING THE OLDER PEOPLE’S JOBS, so my dad doesn’t have the # opportunity to get a job. He’s a really smart guy, so he’s considering # going back to China and starting a job there. That should never be an # option!…It makes me angry.

I have several points to make, which I’ll number for emphasis:

1. The employers’ love of the H-1B program comes, more than anything else, from a desire to avoid hiring the older (again, even 35 is “old”) engineers and programmers. The reason employers don’t want to hire Ms. Liu’s father is not for the reason they are giving him–i.e. it is not because he supposedly doesn’t have the latest skills–but rather it’s because employers regard him as too expensive. New/recent grads in general, and young H-1Bs even more so, provide the employers with cheap alternatives to Mr. Liu.

2. The “latest skills” issue is a pretext. It’s phony. I’ve gone into this in great detail, e.g. in the CLER link I cited above, and in my University of Michigan article cited in the CLER article.

3. Given that he is an engineer, Mr. Liu is almost certainly a former H-1B who first came to this country as a foreign student. That does add some irony here, but he at least has a green card and is likely a naturalized citizen, thus is–and definitely should be–entitled to reasonable access to the job market. By flooding the market with young foreign workers and young foreign students, the latter a deliberate plan by National Science Foundation to keep engineering salaries low as I’ve explained before, Congress is maintaining a program that is harming Mr. Liu and many other Americans.

4. Some universities actively recruit foreign students, and Georgia Tech is likely one of them, as its proportion of foreign students is, I believe, substantially higher than average. In other words, Georgia Tech is crowding out Ms. Liu’s father, and to add insult to injury, is making him pay more and more for his daughters’ education. Ms. Liu states,

My tuition here [at Georgia Tech] is actually, even with the HOPE [Scholarship], more expensive than my sister’s was, and she’s only four years older than me.

5. These considerations show that recent proposals in Congress to give “fast track” green cards to foreign students in STEM are thoroughly wrongheaded. We certainly don’t have a shortage of STEM people, as Ms. Liu notices and is well documented by the Urban Institute study. Worse, the foreign students, like their American counterparts, are YOUNG, so they are exactly the type of worker that is displacing Mr. Liu.

Norm

Friday’s Investor’s Business Daily includes a column by one Edward Schumacher-Matos, whom the IBD identifies as a syndicated columnist with the Washington Post Writers Group. Between that affiliation and the second part of his double-barreled surname, we can probably guess where S-M is coming from. The IBD helpfully labels S-M’s column “On the Left.” Well, yes. S-M’s column is a slightly veiled plea for an illegal alien amnesty, as he laments the expense and effort of incarcerating Latin Americans “only” for being in the United States illegally. The IBD has been fairly sane of late about the ongoing invasion of America, so I wonder why they published this tripe.

Putatively prompted by the revelation (not news to anyone who paid attention in 2002) that the real murderer of the unfortunate Chandra Levy was not the hapless Representative Gary Condit of California, but most likely a Salvadoran illegal alien named Ingmar Guandique (did his parents admire Swedish movies?) who made a habit of preying on American women in Washington’s Rock Creek Park, the title of S-M’s column is “Do Immigrants Really Cause Crime To Rise?” Then, relying heavily on data cooked up by the American (sic) Immigration Law Foundation and the Pew Hispanic Center, S-M purports to find that immigrants to the United States are less crime-prone than native Americans. S-M’s presentation grossly understates the effect of immigration on crime in America, because he and his sources carefully do not distinguish children of illegal aliens and immigrants from children of natives in their breakouts of the percentages of inmates in California who are foreign-born and U.S.-born. To pretend that a Mexican or Salvadoran anchor-baby gang-banger in San Quentin is not part of an immigration-driven negative phenomenon is ludicrous–but passes unchallenged almost everywhere except VDare.com.

Still, all the data-slicing S-M and his open-borders sources indulge in misses the point entirely. The answer to the question in his title is obvious. If a foreign national enters the United States, whether as a legal immigrant or an illegal alien, and commits crimes in America, that immigrant has increased crime in America. To paraphrase the evil Joseph Stalin: no immigrant, no crime. If that foreign national had not been here, America would have been free of his crimes. Even if it were true that native Americans commit crimes at overall higher rates than foreign nationals in America and their progeny–which I do not for a moment believe–that is no argument for admitting immigrants with any propensity to crime. Wouldn’t it be better to keep the foreign criminals out, the better to deal with our home-grown thugs? S-M and his friends may find it terribly offensive that Americans associate certain immigrant groups with high levels of crime, but it is a perception that has been reinforced by every wave of immigration to our shores. And since S-M and friends concentrate on violent crimes, they miss the full impact of immigrant criminality at all levels of American society. As a timely example, I would invite them to ponder the case of Barack Hussein and Michelle Obama’s very close friend, Syrian native Antoin “Tony” Rezko .