Dr. Norm Matloff emailed this–while Heritage’s Robert Rector did some good work on the amnesty front, Heritage’s free market organization tends to make them think that’s what’s good for business is good for America.

This is frequently true, but not in immigration policy, where immigration decisions by the government are good for some Americans (employers) and bad for others (employees) with a whole separate category of badness paid for by the taxpayer.

Dr. Norm Matloff writes:

The Heritage Foundation is a well-known DC think tank, with a conservative viewpoint. They might be viewed as the mirror image of the Urban Institute, the well-known liberal think tank in DC that published the recent study debunking several myths about science and math education in the U.S. (See my posting on the UI study here.)

Yesterday Heritage released an article responding to my recent study published by CIS (here, in its final version, which is slightly expanded from the original). As you may recall, my study refuted the industry lobbyists’ constant claim that the H-1Bs they hire are “the best and the brightest” from around the world, and the related claim that the H-1Bs are key to the industry’s ability to innovate.[May 6, 2008 H-1B Workers: Highly Skilled, Highly Needed by James Sherk, Heritage WebMemo #1916]

My analysis took a market-based approach: If the H-1Bs are of extraordinary talent, as the industry asserts, then they would be paid well above average for their levels of experience and education within their profession. Well, they’re not. The data show that the vast majority of H-1Bs are workers of average talent, making average pay for their occupation and experience.

So, what’s a self-respecting conservative institution such as Heritage to do in such a predicament? They want to support Big Business and thus present a favorable analysis of H-1B, but on the other hand, my critical analysis of H-1B is market-based, an approach considered holy by those on the right of the political spectrum.

Turns out that support for the captains of industry trumps ideology: The Heritage analysis of my study, enclosed below, basically ignores the market and says in essence, “OK, so the H-1Bs are just average engineers, but they’re brighter than your average butcher. Most butchers don’t have a master’s degree, y’know.”

Not only is this a patently silly argument, it is completely at odds with the claims the industry has made concerning the “best and brightest” issue. For instance, in his 2003 Senate testimony supporting the H-1B program, Intel executive Patrick Duffy said

“We are an international leader because we have been able to locate, hire and retain the world’s best engineering talent.”

In other words, he’s saying that the H-1B engineers Intel hires are much more talented than the average engineer–NOT that his H-1B engineers are more talented than the average butcher.

In his testimony to the House Committee on Science and Technology on March 12 this year, Bill Gates wasn’t comparing H-1B engineers to butchers either. He referred to the H-1Bs as “world class engineers.” So of course he was making a claim about H-1B engineers relative to engineers as a whole, not comparing H-1B engineers to butchers.

And the data show, as my study found, that the vast majority of H-1Bs, including those at Intel and Microsoft, are NOT making world-class salaries. They are making about average for their experience/education groups within their occupations. If one believes in the marketplace, as Heritage does, one must conclude that these are not world-class engineers.

Yes, Intel and Microsoft do hire SOME foreign workers who are world-class (which I’ve always supported). For instance, Microsoft hires some under the O-1 visa, which by statute is for “workers of extraordinary ability,” and the data show that Microsoft pays its O-1s 40% above average, but this is much higher than what it is paying its other foreign workers.

And note that my recent analysis is merely a confirmation through new methodology of previous work that also showed that most of the H-1Bs are not world-class. The study by David North, for example, found that foreign students in U.S. university tech programs, the source of many H-1Bs, are mainly concentrated in the less-selective, lower-ranked schools, again contrary to the industry’s “best and brightest” claim.

Once he finishes pointing out that H-1B engineers make more money than American butchers, the Heritage author, Jame Sherk, then puts forth another argument that ignores the market economics. He says that U.S. productivity would fall without H-1Bs, as these jobs would go unfilled for lack of qualified workers. But if a tech labor shortage did exist as he says, market economics would mean that wages would be zooming up–which they’re not. On the contrary, salaries have been flat or falling. For instance, the starting salary for new computer science grads with bachelor’s degrees was $52,473 in 2001 and $53,051 in 2007. Inflation for this time period has been about 16% but yet the starting salary for computer science grads only increased by 1%. The same stagnant trend holds for fresh master’s grads.

I never thought I’d see the day when the Heritage Foundation, of all organizations, would ignore the realities of the marketplace.

Norm

This is from Time Magazine’s website–black voters in Indiana felt ignored by both Barack and Hillary.

Tuesday, Apr. 29, 2008

Indiana Black Voters Feeling Ignored

By Steven Gray/Indianapolis

For weeks, Delores Smith, membership coordinator at the Madame C. J. Walker Theater in Indianapolis, has e-mailed and called Sen. Barack Obama’s representatives, hoping he’ll hold a campaign event at the 937-seat theater. It is, after all, named in honor of one of the nation’s first black millionaires. And its place in the heart of one of Indianapolis’ oldest black neighborhoods makes it a key stop for candidates seeking this city’s nearly quarter-million African-American voters — the largest concentration in Indiana. But so far, Smith says, “I haven’t heard anything.”

Even before the major distraction this week caused by the remarks of black liberation theologist and former Obama pastor Jeremiah Wright, black voters in Indiana have been feeling ignored. While both Democratic presidential candidates have been jockeying for the rural, working-class white voters who make up much of Indiana’s electorate, they have been largely absent from predominantly black neighborhoods that have historically been among the party’s strongholds. For much of the campaign in Indiana, as well as around the country, many black voters feel there has been little effort to engage them on issues that have particular impact in the black community, such as the home foreclosure and HIV crises.

Amos Brown III, one of Indianapolis’ most popular black talk radio hosts, says many African Americans here, like elsewhere in the country, were buoyed by Obama’s success in overwhelmingly white states like Iowa and Idaho. Obama generated even more local excitement with his March 15 visit to a suburban Indianapolis high school. But since then, Brown says many of his listeners are asking, “Where is he? And, is he going to come to the ‘hood or not?’ Hoosiers, black or white,” Brown adds, “like to be courted. It’s important to go to the smaller towns, but it’s just as important to go out into the neighborhoods of the big city. I haven’t seen that with Barack or Hillary.”[More]

In the general election, blacks vote 90 percent for the Democrats. In the Hillary vs Barack primary, they vote more than 90 percent for Barack. That means both candidates can ignore them–Hillary because she can’t get their votes, Barack because he’s already got them. If blacks want more positive attention from the Democratic candidates, some of them will have to consider voting Republican.

Canada has socialized medicine, which means overuse of non-essential services, and rationing of essential ones. As a result, at least a hundred women with high-risk pregnancies have had to come south of the Canadian border to get emergency free-enterprise medicine.

Of course, the babies naturally get dual Canadian-American citizenship as result of the circumstances of their birth, (and the current misinterpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause) but they go right home with their mothers, assuming, God willing, that both mother and child survive the high-risk birth. [Canada's U.S. baby boom| With neonatal resources stretched thin, more and more high-risk infants are sent south to find a bed, By Lisa Priest, Globe and Mail, May 5, 2008 ]

Possibly in twenty years from now, the child will come back to the United States to work, and not need a Green Card, but that’s about it.

James Taranto [Send him mail] is trying to be funny about this in the Wall Street Journal’s Best of the Web:

Aw, look at the cute little Canadian babies! It’s all very sweet and innocuous, right?

Don’t believe it. Read between the lines, and you realize this is a sinister Canadian plot to take over America. Canada’s military is no match for ours, so the crafty Canucks are using infancy instead of infantry to carry out their imperial designs.

Think about it. Canadian officials send women across the border, smuggling in “anchor babies” cleverly disguised as clumps of tissue. The women give birth inside the U.S., which means their Canadian offspring are entitled to U.S. citizenship. As these “children” grow and mature, they receive instructions from their masters in Ottawa about how to undermine American culture.

Before you know it, your kids are stuffing themselves with litres of back bacon, downing kilogram after kilogram of Crown Royal and Labatt Blue, and belting out “God Save the Queen” as they watch hockey on TV.

It’s all so horrible to contemplate, but it can be stopped. All we need to do is make America as inhospitable as Canada for expectant Canadian mothers. Hillary Clinton has the right idea: The U.S. needs socialized medicine.

This, for those not familiar with Taranto’s open borders advocacy and heavy-handed attempts at humor, is a satire of “nativist” concerns about Mexican immigration. Now, I could say that the main problem with Mexican immigration is that they’re not Canadians, but that’s not the most obvious thing here–the most obvious thing is numbers.

• The Canadian women are in the US for an average of 26.6 day–Mexican illegals are here for life. And they take over whole towns.
• The Canadian government is paying the women’s medical bills–the Mexican government is paying nada.
• The Canadians’ children are going home with their parents–the Mexicans’ children tend to stay, even if their parents are deported.

And the final big difference:

• Approximately 100 Canadian babies going home with US Birth Certificates tucked into their blankies–up to half a million illegal immigrant anchor babies whose parents came from Mexico and similar places.

Those kids are staying, and they’ll cost the US Taxpayer a lot of money.

Professor Norm Matloff sent this out to his email list:

From: Norm Matloff [Email him]

Subject: Salzman and Lowell published by Nature

The British journal Nature is one of the two or three most prestigious scientific publications in the world. Thus Hal Salzman and B. Lindsay Lowell have achieved quite a coup in having the findings of their study on American capabilities in math and science published in the journal, even if it is in the form of commentary.

Salzman and Lowell, you will recall, published a study for the Urban Institute a few months ago in which they debunked the myths that American kids are abysmal at math and science, that we are not producing enough people with degrees in those fields, that our average math/science scores are misleading because sadly we have not solved the problem of educating the underclass but the mainstream is fine, and so on. It is the most thorough, careful study related to the H-1B issue I’ve seen in years. See my postings on the study here and here.

The Nature column by Salzman and Lowell not only summarizes some of their previous findings, but also makes some points that are, I believe new.

One of these new points is striking: In absolute numbers, the U.S. has more top-scoring kids in math and science than any other country studied–by far. The authors point out that it is mainly these kids who become the innovators later as adults, and we’ve got an excellent supply of them. This is completely counter to what one constantly sees in the popular press.

Which leads to a point Salzman made in announcing his article to the Sloan Industry Centers e-mail discussion group: “We’d welcome reactions and particularly thoughts on why the S&E shortage claim is so strongly believed despite lack of evidence.” The answer, of course, is that the groups that stand to benefit from a public perception of an S&E shortage–the tech industry (who want an expanded H-1B work visa program for its cheap labor), the immigration lawyers (who want an expanded H-1B for obvious reasons), the education lobby (”Give us more money so we can remedy the shortage”) and so on hire the slickest PR people money can buy. They’ve been at it for years, to the point at which many people in Congress, the press and the public at large simply take it for granted that “Johnnie can’t do math.”

The Nature article is Making the Grade .[PDF]

Heather Mac Donald has column in the WSJ about the Reverend Wright’s speech to the NAACP. What she’s talking about is the excuses he’s making for black underclass behavior, and his

Approving of self-destructive behavior in school is just one part of the vast academic project to justify black underclass dysfunction. The academy has also singled out crime as authentically black, another poisonous idea that Mr. Wright appears to have embraced. In his NAACP speech, he mocked the tendency of “those of us who never got caught” to treat “those of us who are incarcerated” with disrespect. In other words, we all commit crime, but only some of us get nabbed for it.

This leveling argument recalls the bizarre doctrines of University of Pennsylvania law professor Regina Austin. In a widely reprinted California Law Review article from 1992, Ms. Austin asserted that the black community should embrace the criminals in its midst as a form of resistance to white oppression. People of color should view “hustling” as a “good middle ground between straightness and more extreme forms of lawbreaking.” Examples of hustling include “clerks in stores [who] cut their friends a break on merchandise, and pilfering employees [who] spread their contraband around the neighborhood.” It never occurs to Ms. Austin that these black thieves may have black employers who suffer the effects of crime — as do the larger neighborhoods of which they form the essential fabric. Officially incorporating crime into the black identity, as Ms. Austin and Mr. Wright do, is a pathetic admission of defeat and marginalization. [The Wright Side of the Brain, April 30, 2008]

This is normal behavior for an activist, but it seems a little extreme for a law professor, who’s a member of the Pennsylvania Bar. Regina Austin, [Send her mail] She’s listed in David Horowitz’s book The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, right next to Bill Ayers. (The proximity is due to alphabetical reasons.) The Law Review article Heather Mac Donald is referring to is “The Black Community,” Its Lawbreakers, and a Politics of Identification. [ 65 Southern California Law Review 1769 (1992) ]

The point here is that Reverend Wright is not unique–the professors and theologians he quotes are the norm in black academic circles. And of course Heather Mac Donald is right about the promotion of crime being bad for the black community, but that’s not its intention. The left-wing black academics want it to be bad for the white community, and it is.

James Cone is a Black Liberation theologian, if theologian is really the word here. He’s one of Jeremiah Wright’s inspirations, and most people don’t know what he’s about, so you should check out this article by Kathy Shaidle:

The leading theorist of Black Liberation Theology is James Cone. Overtly racist, Cone’s writings posit a black Jesus who leads African-Americans as the “chosen people.” In Cone’s cosmology, whites are “the devil,” and “all white men are responsible for white oppression.” Cone makes this point without ambiguity: “This country was founded for whites and everything that has happened in it has emerged from the white perspective,” Cone has written. “What we need is the destruction of whiteness, which is the source of human misery in the world.”

If whiteness stands for all that is evil, blackness symbolizes all that is good. “Black theology,” says Cone, “refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the black community … Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy. What we need is the divine love as expressed in Black Power, which is the power of black people to destroy their oppressors here and now by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject his love.” Small wonder that some critics have condemned black liberation theology as “racist idolatry” and “Afro-Nazism.”[Obama's Church: Gospel of Hate By Kathy Shaidle FrontPageMagazine.com | Monday, April 07, 2008]

See also Jared Taylor, Rod Dreher, and the useful links here.

This is the poster for the conference Brenda was talking about in her column today. (Click it for the full sized version,–it has all the names of the people who think that we shouldn’t be Islamophobic.)

But what it represents is a woman in a mask, like a ninja mask (you can achieve the same effect with a black t-shirt over your head–click here for details) or a Ku Klux Klan hood, or the ski-masks worn by serial killers and the IRA.

Why shouldn’t we be frightened by someone dressed like that? Here’s an example of the fear of fear, by PC enforcer Eric Muller:

February 7, 2008

Islamophobia Goes To The Movies

T

his is how fear works: a Raleigh, NC, woman in a burqa goes to the movies, and soon there are rumors of a terrorist attack.

Posted by Eric at February 7, 2008 8:19 AM.

While this turned out to be false alarm, it’s a reasonable suspicion–and if you don’t want to be suspected, you probably shouldn’t be appearing in public in a ninja mask, as worn by a Talliban commander disguising himself as a woman,and by at least one bank robber in Philadelphia.

I said recently that

Apparently the anti-Klan laws intended, not unreasonably, to prevent people from appearing in public in masks, do not apply to Muslim ladies.

Apparently the panic that people are allowed to feel at the least sign of “white racism” doesn’t apply either.

Giovanni Alemanno, who is a member of Italy’s National Alliance, and who is either a “rightist“ or a “center rightist,” depending on who you believe, has been elected Mayor of Rome.

His plans include defunding Rome’s bloated film festival, and tearing down a really ugly museum, because he feels that Rome isn’t the place for modern architecture. He’s probably right, too. Here is a picture of the Vatican. Here is a picture of the museum.

But the real reason a “right-wing” politician has been elected mayor of a largely left-wing country, that once almost voted itself Communist, is that he’s offered to crack down on crime and immigration. American politicians take note.

The President of the Republic of Ireland, Bertie Ahern, has come to the US to speak to Congress and ask the US to keep all the illegal Irish, rather than sending them back.. (Taoiseach , pronounced roughly “tea-shock” is Gaelic for Prime Minister–Ireland has a weird kind of self-inflicted bilingualism.)

Taoiseach makes case for undocumented Irish in US Congress speech
The Belfast Telegraph

[Published: Wednesday 30, April 2008 - 17:26]
The Taoiseach used his address to the Joint Houses of Congress in Washington this afternoon to make a case for undocumented Irish immigrants to the US.

Bertie Ahern today became the sixth Irish leader to address the Joint Houses. The theme of his address was “Ireland and America - Our Two Republics”.

Bertie Ahern began by emphasising the bond between Ireland and America, and went on to outline the benefits of the new Irish to our country, and the challenges.

“So we’re profoundly aware of those challenges as we ask you to consider the case of undocumented Irish immigrant community in the United States today.

“I hope you’ll be able to find a solution to their plight.”

The Taoiseach then spoke of the contribution Irish immigrants have made to America.

Mr Ahern also spoke about the benefits of the European Union, about the global challenges of poverty, financial decline and climate change, and about the peace process in Northern Ireland.

To huge applause, he said he was proud to be the “first Irish leader to inform the United States Congress– Ireland is at peace.”

Look, I like the Irish–Dennis Day, Bing Crosby, Megan McArdle, whoever. In the history of immigration to the US, I suppose it could be said that Irish immigration has been a blessing–just not an unmixed blessing.

But since Irish immigrants greatest contribution to America have been in the police and the military, perhaps we could convince all these illegals to join the Border Patrol. That way Ahern  could have made a proposal that for each illegal Irish immigrant, he would help deport two illegal  Mexicans. But really, while Irish immigrants might be good as a substitute for Mexican immigration, they aren’t going to be very popular as an (illegal) addition to the immigration problem. Ask Brenda Walker.

Joe Guzzardi will be interviewed tonight at 6:10 PM PST on the Political Vindication network. Listen here; callers welcome at (646) 652-4598.