Dr. Norm Matloff writes:

Though the title of the first enclosed article below includes the word “H-1Bs,” I have not included the word in my Subject line above. The reason for my exclusion of the word is that Senator Schumer has not said anything about increasing the H-1B cap, so far as I can tell. There have been news articles on this in the last few weeks, and to my knowledge Schumer has made no public statements in this regard.

The quote included in the Computerworld article linked here,

“We must encourage the world’s best and brightest individuals to come to the United States and create new technologies and business that will employ countless American workers, but must discourage businesses from using our immigration laws as a means to obtain temporary and less-expensive foreign labor to replace capable American workers,” [Computerworld Analysis: The next H-1B fight begins by Labor Day | Planned legislation could include a way to raise the cap on H-1B visas, By Patrick Thibodeau, July 13, 2009]

would appear to be similar to statements made during the last year by a number of Democrats, including Obama, supporting liberalization of the employment-based green card program. As I’ve written here many times, I am just as strongly opposed to expansion of the green card program as I am to expansion of H-1B, as both have the effects of reducing job opportunities for U.S. citizens and permanent residents. Moreover, though I definitely support bringing “the world’s best and brightest individuals” here, very few of the foreign workers are of that caliber.

So I’m not making the distinction between H-1B visas and green cards in order to say that I support, or at least do not mind, what Schumer is apparently planning to do. Nevertheless it is important to know what those plans are, and I believe the expansionary facets of them will focus on green cards, not H-1Bs.

Of course, the second half of Schumer’s comments above is designed to give them impression that he wishes to take strong action to stop abuse of the H-1B program. My guess is that that is not the case at all. Instead, I believe his legislation will simply include provisions to stop fraud rather than abuse, via stepped-up enforcement measures. As I’ve stated so often, the main problem is loopholes in the law, not fraud, so anti-fraud measures would be of little value.

For example, it is a safe bet that Schumer will not propose that all employers be subject to the restrictions currently imposed on H-1B-dependent employers, such as a requirement that the employer attempt to fill the position with an American before hiring an H-1B. After those were temporarily extended to TARP recipients, i.e. the financial industry, earlier this year, Schumer vowed to overturn that legislation.

It is interesting that Schumer on the one hand claims to be opposed to using foreign workers as cheap labor, while on the other using Greenspan as his star witness, who has stated repeatedly (see the second enclosed article below) that the goal of importing the foreign workers is to keep salaries down. Definitely an “emperor has no clothes” moment.

Greenspan has made such statements many times in the last year or so, and one has to wonder just what he’s thinking. The median salary for a mid-career software developer is around $80,000, which while not subsistence-level is not particularly high. New law graduates, using a similar skill set (good analytical and problem-solving abilities, etc.) make $160K. I would assume that Greenspan is just ignorant, rather than flat out lying, but even ignorance would be highly disturbing. As the second article here points out, and as Greenspan himself has said, he had no inkling that the financial industry might implode. This is amazing, since anyone could have understood the danger of selling no-down-payment mortgages to people who can’t afford them, selling “insurance” to investors on sliced-and-diced packages of those mortgages, etc.

Some comments on some of the passages in the articles:

One proposal that may get traction in Congress would create an independent commission to manage employment-based visas. The commission would determine whether there are labor shortages and have the authority to make annual adjustments on the cap based on economic need. That idea was pitched by the AFL-CIO in April.

This has been suggested before (including by me), but is likely a political nonstarter. After, the industry–and Schumer himself, as noted above–opposes requiring employers to recruit Americans before hiring H-1Bs, so the industry would certainly not support a commission which would have essentially that same goal. Indeed, an industry lobbyist already criticized the idea in that Associated Press report.  Of course, if somehow such a commission were formed, its members would be people from industry and their allies anyway.

Angela Kelly, vice president for immigration policy and advocacy at the Center for American Progress, a Washington-based group that’s headed John Podesta, President Clinton’s former chief of staff, said an element of any immigration reform bill would have to be its labor protections.

“How do we ensure that by bringing these workers in we’re not disadvantaging American workers and how do we invest in our folks for the long haul, so that we’ve got kids in computer science, math, and engineering programs, which are right now, frankly, dominated by kids who aren’t from the U.S. That’s the reality and we need to deal with it,” she said, in a conference call with reporters.

That is false. For example, only 6% of recipients of bachelor’s degrees in computer science are nonresident aliens; see the data from CRA, The large numbers of foreign students occur at the PhD level. But of course Kelly’s point about H-1B and offshoring discouraging Americans from studying CS is correct.

Here’s a National Journal article by Stuart Taylor on how Sotomayor and two other judges almost got away with making the Ricci case disappear without their ten fellow judges on the Second Circuit hearing about it. Sotomayor’s old mentor, Jose Cabranes, read about it in his local New Haven newspaper and blew his stack at their tactic, which is the only reason it didn’t disappear down the Memory Hole.

Presumably, Cabranes, a New Havenite, didn’t feel like taking a chance on burning to death due to incompetent New Haven firemen.

Tuesday live update: Orrin Hatch is asking some tough questions about the Cabranes scandal, so which Sotomayor is not replying well, but now Sen. Hatch is rambling off into a speech instead of following up with tougher questions, and now has given up.

Well, here is a happy story. [Canadian sentenced to prison for smuggling South Koreans into U.S., By Ian Ith, Seattle Times, July 10, 2009] Illegal aliens from South Korea no longer have to come here and be sex slaves. Because of a US-Korean agreement, the illegal alien business from Korea has dried up. Koreans can come here easily now as legal immigrants. This is the happiest story since Cinderella. Bet this didn’t make your local news.[VDARE.com note: The headline says "Canadian" man, which may conjure up pictures of a hockey player, a Scotsman, or a Ukrainian immigrant, but actually his name is Jin Kyu "Alex" Sohn.]

At the heart of the Ricci case, which Judge Sonia Sotomayor attempted to bury so that it couldn’t be appealed when she heard it by upholding the lower court’s anti-Ricci decision without an opinion (outraging her mentor Judge Jose Cabranes), is the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s Four-Fifths Rule.

This regulation says that on any employment test, the lowest scoring ethnic group better pass at a rate at least 80% as high as the highest scoring ethnic group.

The fashionable Advanced Placement tests provide us with a database to test the reasonableness of the rule that gives the Disparate Impact theory its teeth. As I mention in post below, blacks only pass AP tests at a per capita rate not Four-Fifths but One-Twentieth of the Asian rate.

But what about just those more elite students who bother to take AP tests? How reasonable is the Four-Fifths rule for them?

The gaps are smaller, but not a single AP exam would pass the EEOC’s Four-Fifth’s Rule, as the table below shows. (And many colleges require not just scores of 3, but 4s or 5s, which make the racial gaps substantially larger.) (more…)

Steve Sailer will be on the Ron Smith Show today at 5:35 p.m. ET. Listen here.

Following up last night’s VDARE.com article on Advanced Placement testing, I’ve been mulling some more over the problem off how to find the easiest Advanced Placement tests for high school students to pass in order to get free college credit. All AP Tests are fairly hard, but which ones take the minimum combination of IQ, math skills, and midnight oil to squeeze by with a passing score of at least 3 out of 5?

(more…)