Dr. Norm Matloff writes:

Enclosed below are an article from an HR magazine, and an editorial by the Washington Post, blasting as “protectionist” the recent legislation that placed restrictions on hiring of H-1Bs by TARP recipients.The “P-word” is always invoked in these contexts by the parties with vested interests, and thus might be dismissed as such, but really it’s much ado about nothing.

• Protectionism Sweeps Over H-1Bs as Recruiters Sort Out Stimulus Regulations New restrictions cut into the talent supply at a time when economic recovery depends on innovation and specialized skills, By Fay Hansen, Workforce Management Online, February 2009
• A Wall Built With Visas | How a move to protect American workers could instead cost U.S. jobs,Washington Post, March 2, 2009

The fact is that any immigration policy of any major nation is protectionist.Moreover, that protectionist nature is fully accepted by the citizens of said nations.

For example, U.S. immigration policy disallows the immigration into the U.S. of people with criminal records or with tuberculosis.To my knowledge, no organization promoting immigration–not even the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), not even MALDEF, not even the Southern Center on Law and Poverty, not even the ACLU, not even the Cato Institute–has ever advocated changing this policy.There may be an individual case here and there in which these organizations get involved, but none of them has ever advocated dropping laws barring these categories of people from immigrating.

My point is that these laws are protectionist–their purpose is to PROTECT the people who are already here (both natives and earlier immigrants).So we are all protectionists, yes, even the Cato Institute.

There of course is a question as to where to draw the protectionist line.We protect people’s safety and health, so we might wish to protect people’s economic well being too–or we might not.After all, barring criminals from immigrating protects virtually all of us, whereas at least in theory employment-based immigration might have substantial numbers of both winners and losers.

So yes, a discussion on employment-based immigration might be held–and in fact, it already has, with the conclusion that some protection for Americans’ economic health is appropriate.That’s why H-1B law, for instance, requires that employers pay the foreign workers prevailing wage.That law is riddled with loopholes, but the point here is that none of the above immigration-promoting organizations has argued that the prevailing wage requirement should be dropped.So we are all protectionists, even those who are now decrying the recent legislation on H-1B as protectionist.

Indeed, those objections constitute rank hypocrisy.The industry lobbyists on H-1B (including, as always, the AILA), have repeatedly stated that the current worker protections in H-1B law are proper. Just today Microsoft, in answering a letter from Sen. Grassley regarding Microsoft’s layoff policy for H-1B workers, included the by-now obligatory statement that fraud in the H-1B program must be stamped out.Again, the problem is gaping loopholes, not fraud or other violations of the law, but the point is that Microsoft is tacitly agreeing that U.S. workers ought to be protected.Indeed, every major entity lobbying Congress for a higher H-1B cap has made such statements on numerous occasions.Given that, how can they use the word “protectionist” now? (I’ll comment on the Microsoft letter tomorrow.)

Some in India have even claimed that the recent legislation violates international trade agreements.They may be surprised to know that the legislation, which merely applies the existing H-1B-dependent employer restrictions to TARP recipients, is actually part of the GATT.And that section in the GATT applies to ALL employers of H-1Bs.So Congress, by enacting the recent legislation, was not in violation of the GATT at all; on the contrary, the U.S. has been in violation of the GATT all these years, by not applying its rules to ALL employers.

I’ve mentioned before that personally, I believe we should not bar foreign goods or services of higher quality than we have in the U.S.My wife and I have bought nothing but Japanese cars, throughout our entire working lives, because we believe the quality is better.Similarly, I have always supported bringing in “the best and the brightest” from around the world.But only a small percentage of H-1Bs are in that league, and I don’t support bringing in foreign goods or services simply because they are cheap.And that is precisely the reason why the vast majority of H-1Bs are hired–for cheap labor.

The enclosed article claims that the new law will in practice prevent the banks from hiring foreign “geniuses.”Again, only a tiny fraction of H-1Bs are outstanding talents, but what about those few that are? Will the legislation effectively block the banks from hiring them?The answer is no.

First of all, that hypothetical new Stanford PhD in the article could be hired for 29 months–immediately, no questions asked–under the OPT program.Second, the bank could hire that Cardinal Einstein under the O-1 visa, which is specifically for those of outstanding talent.Third, PhDs and other top professionals have their own fast-track green card program.

Both the HR article and the editorial in the Post (a newspaper whose board includes Mrs. Bill Gates) are chock full of all the industry lobbyists’ favorite lines, every single one of them false or misleading. As I’ve addressed all these lines many times in my writings, I’ll limit myself to just one here–the claim that H-1Bs are not used for cheap labor.Here is an excerpt from the HR article:

“Congress buys the idea that these employees are brought in to workfor lower wages,” Paparelli says. “That’s a false perception.

“The vast majority of employers using these visas are law-abidingemployers who incur high fees and costs and additional risks andsubject themselves to criminal liability because they need theseworkers and cannot find suitable employee here.”

Yes, the employers are indeed law abiding–but the law itself is full of huge loopholes that allow the employers to pay the H-1Bs lower wages in full compliance with the law, as even a GAO report found.Just as any firm, from the tiniest startup to the giants like Intel, will make aggressive use of loopholes in the tax code, they do the same for H-1B. And the employers pay Mr. Paparelli big bucks to exploit those loopholes.And of course there is no criminal liability for using a loophole, which is by definition legal.And the American Immigration Lawyers association, through their lobbying of both Congress and the executive branch, put those loopholes in the statutes and regulations. Mr. Paparelli, a very well-dressed man with a CEO-smooth personality, is dissembling to the n-th degree here.

As Sen. Grassley said, “No one should be fooled.”

Norm

When I wrote in December about the beating death of Ecuadoran immigrant Jose Sucuzhanay, I had to look hard to find a news report that mentioned that the race of the attackers was black: New York Governor Condemns Murder of Ecuadoran.

Two of the accused killers were arrested last week, Hakim Scott on Wednesday and Keith Phoenix on Friday. However, I couldn’t find decent mug shots of both until today, and I had to snap that off an online video. Again, one assumes a certain reticence on the part of the media because this widely condemned hate crime did not conform to the MSM’s favored narrative of perps being angry white guys. The crime surely does not advance the Rainbow Coalition ideology promoted by Jesse Jackson and extreme diversity enthusiasts.

In addition, some of the rhetoric at the indictment presser was beyond lofty: Suspects In Fatal Brooklyn Beating Indicted On Murder Charges [New York One, March 3, 2009].

Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes unsealed an indictment today against the two men charged in the fatal beating of an Ecuadorian immigrant.

Keith Phoenix, 28, and Hakim Scott, 25, are accused of beating Ecuadorian immigrant Jose Sucuzhanay and his brother Romel last December.

According to the indictment, the Sucuzhañay brothers were walking home from a party in Bushwick in the early hours of December 7, 2008, when the two suspects attacked them with a glass bottle and a baseball bat.

The DA says the suspects beat the brothers, who were walking arm-in-arm, because they believed they were homosexuals. The indictment alleges the two suspects shouted anti-gay and anti-Hispanic slurs during the attack. [...]

“The case is a clear message that society simply cannot permit cretins to target for their violent hatred anyone because of sexual orientation, ethnicity, race, religion or gender,” said Hynes.

“We will not allow hate in our city,” said City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, one of many elected officials and advocates in attendance. “We will not let hate go unchecked.”

Hate will no longer be permitted in New York City? Good luck with that.

Michael Lewis visits Iceland for ten days for Vanity Fair to develop A General Theory of the Icelandic Financial Crash.

The subtext of his article is that Lewis, who wrote a bestselling memoir in 1989 about his few years on Wall Street,is suddenly so much in demand again as a financial journalist that he’s getting rapid-fire assignments on topics about which he knows nothing.

The resulting article is a wonderful example of how reporters parachute into some place unknown and create general theories based on trivial travel incidents. When his plane lands, an Icelandic bumps him while getting his bag out of the overhead bin (ICELANDIC MEN ARE MACHO). The airport passport control has one life for foreigners and natives (ICELANDERS ARE EGALITARIAN), etc. At times it sounds like something that one of the foreign correspondents in Waugh’s Scoop would write.

After visiting a museum devoted to Iceland’s bloody medieval sagas, Lewis eventually arrives at the theory that Iceland went hog wild financially out of excessive machismo. Well, excessive machismo and excessive refinement, since Icelandic men were too cultivated to be fishermen or aluminum smelters, so they became investment bankers.

From there he develops a general theory of bubbles:

Back in 2001, as the Internet boom turned into a bust, M.I.T.’s Quarterly Journal of Economics published an intriguing paper called “Boys Will Be Boys: Gender, Overconfidence, and Common Stock Investment.” The authors, Brad Barber and Terrance Odean, gained access to the trading activity in over 35,000 households, and used it to compare the habits of men and women. What they found, in a nutshell, is that men not only trade more often than women but do so from a false faith in their own financial judgment. Single men traded less sensibly than married men, and married men traded less sensibly than single women: the less the female presence, the less rational the approach to trading in the markets. One of the distinctive traits about Iceland’s disaster, and Wall Street’s, is how little women had to do with it. Women worked in the banks, but not in the risktaking jobs. As far as I can tell, during Iceland’s boom, there was just one woman in a senior position inside an Icelandic bank.

Of course, this theory completely explains the much more important American Housing Bubble, as well, since women play virtually no role in buying or selling homes in the United States.

Of all the incidents of mainstream media failure in the decade or so that I have been analyzing its stories, none is greater than the Washington Post’s 2001 total breakdown while pursing Chandra Levy’s killer. Levy had been California U.S. Representative Gary Condit’s intern.

The press in general, and the Post specifically, was so intent on defaming and ultimately convicting Condit of Levy’s killing that it completely ignored that the apparent actual killer, Salvadoran illegal alien and alleged MS-13 member Ingmar Guandique, was right under its nose. [Warrant Issued for Suspect in Levy Killing, by Sari Horowitz and Scott Higham, Washington Post, March 4, 2009] l

As usual, VDARE.COM is several miles ahead of the MSM in getting to the bottom of things.

At the risk of self-aggrandizement, I refer you to my October 17, 2008 column: The Condit Case Revisited: MSM Smeared Congressman—Ignored Illegal Alien Suspect.

If you missed it the first time around, read it now. And if you caught it back in October, re-read it to note its striking parallel to the headline news unfolding today and being presented to you as “breaking news”.

From WFAA:

Some Mexicans fear threat to way of life with rapid growth of American residents

Not everyone is rolling out the welcome mat to Americans. Many Mexicans complain about the rapid growth of the American population in their neighborhoods, the threat they see to Mexican culture and language, and the possible drain on Mexico’s inexpensive health care.

In San Miguel de Allende, the group Basta Ya is protesting the erosion of the language and the rising cost of living generated by the infusion of dollars into the local economy.

“They think Mexico, especially San Miguel de Allende, is an extension of their country,” group member Arturo Morales Tirado said of the Americans who call San Miguel home. “It’s not and won’t be, no way.”

Well, they’ve certainly solved the problem of too many Americans in Rosarito Beach, the once popular tourist resort 30 miles south of Tijuana.

I have to say, though, that I’ve come to appreciate Mexican anti-Americanism. It has helped keep two countries that share a 1,952 mile border quite different.

It looks like Obama’s budget intends to give up on implementing the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. (Congratulations, Senate Majority Leader Reid (D-NV).

So, nuclear waste would continue to sit around nuclear power plants. Which means nobody is going to build anymore nuclear power plants in the U.S. ever. And since we’ll be cutting back on carbon emissions, that will leave, uh, wind and solar power. And don’t forget tidal power. Or maybe photosynthesizing bacteria.

Factor that into your long range economic growth projections, then see where the Dow should be.

An excerpt from my review in The American Conservative of the Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay winning film “Milk:”

“Milk” is a repetitious biopic about the 1970s political career of the self-proclaimed “Mayor of Castro Street,” following Harvey Milk as he grinds through five election campaigns on his way to becoming “America’s first openly gay elected official.” Director Gus Van Sant (best remembered for 1989’s “Drugstore Cowboy”) manages to make even San Francisco look unattractive in his haste to get back to the gerrymandering at Milk’s camera shop.

By the way, what kind of camera store is used as a political clubhouse? Camera shops are normally the worst meeting halls imaginable because they’re crammed with fragile and expensive merchandise. Yet, Milk’s “Castro Camera” is depicted as a shell with little inventory other than orange Kodak film boxes. (My guess: it was mostly a drop-off for amateur photographers who wanted their gay porn pictures developed discreetly — an easy little business that left Milk with plenty of time on his hands for politics.)

A great tragic story could be made about how Milk’s gay liberation movement unleashed its own nemesis. Within two decades of Milk’s arrival, gay rights had transformed Castro Street into the plague spot of the Western world, with AIDS killing its 10,000th San Franciscan in 1993.

Mentioning a little thing like how industrial scale promiscuity set off the worst American health catastrophe of the last generation wouldn’t be On Message, however, and “Milk” sticks to its political talking points with the same tenacity as its namesake did. …

Most strikingly, if “Milk’s” screenplay weren’t so relentlessly hagiographic, Sean Penn would be on the hot seat over his stereotypical caricaturizing of a homosexual. Penn’s performance is so flamingly effeminate that you have to wonder whether he got Harvey Milk of Castro Street confused with Harvey Fierstein of Broadway.

During television appearances, Milk came across as a calm, moderately masculine presence, with only slight gay mannerisms. In contrast, Penn’s flamboyant act sets your gaydar clanging like the meltdown siren at a nuclear power plant. That’s important, because Penn’s decision to play Milk as utterly unable to pass for straight robs Milk’s story of much of its interest. The real man, who had served without incident as a Naval officer, chose to come out of the closet.

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