I have spent much of the past two decades organizing computer professionals. You might call us disorganized labor because, unlike doctors and lawyers, the gathering together of technical workers is in its infancy.

This experience has brought me close to the way things work in Washington. I tell people that if the general public knew what I knew about our government, the revolution would have already started.

What the public misses is that the real rulers of Washington are a network of lobbyists and PACs. When the public hears about an earmark, they probably think about a bridge in Alaska. When I hear about an earmark, I think of the lobbyists that wrote the legislation and bribed the members of Congress to get it slipped in a bill.

Yes, lobbyists do write legislation. Once you have a little experience reading bills you learn to tell what has been written by legislative services and what has been written by the lobbyists-the latter generally is convoluted and usually carefully crafted to make it difficult to tell what it actually does.

Worse yet, with the bloat of government, much of our law comes in the form of regulations promulgated by unelected bureaucrats. This lawmaking gets little public attention but lobbyists rule there as well

My perspective on McCain-Feingold is maybe different that of most people. When I read the bill, I thought it represented all that is corrupt in Washington. The bill protected the established institutions such as PACs and unions, made political activities by small groups criminal, but did absolutely nothing about money influence.

While the press should have been condemning McCain-Feingold as an example of the institutional corruption, most of the mainstream media was labeling it as “not perfect, but a good start.”

Right now much of the media and many commentators are up in arms over the Supreme Court’s opinion in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission the struck down parts of McCain-Feingold as unconstitutional restraints on free speech.

Before getting agitated over the Supreme Court’s action, raise your hand if you believe corporate influence (or any other special interest) is less or that government corruption has been reduced since McCain-Feingold. Except for the drunk at the end of the bar, no hands. There is general agreement that McCain-Feingold did nothing-just as it was intended to do.

The Chicken-Little cry coming out of the media is that the Supreme Court has opened the doors to corporate influence-but they already run the show. The investment Goldman-Sachs makes through its PAC gets paid back many times over through government bailouts of its investments. The billions in bonus at the firm is a direct product of its millions in campaign cahs.

Let me illustrate how things work under McCain-Feingold. Suppose a corporation wants to increase the value of a property by having a highway connect to it and that highway goes through your neighborhood. To get the road, the Corporation bribes your Congressman with money from its PAC. In response, your neighbors form a group and take up donations. Your group then runs an advertisement close to an election describing how your Congressman’s support of the road is going to destroy your neighborhood.

You have committed a felony under McCain-Feingold. The Corporation’s bribe in the form of a PAC donation is legal. The Supreme Court’s opinion notes that, under McCain-Feingold, the big money interests retain influence but it is the little folks who get cut off.

The undue influence of money interest over Congress is of greater urgency to me that of most Americans. So I applaud the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down a statute that is designed to cut the little folks out of the political process.

We need to change the focus of reform from limiting the speech of those who cannot afford to set up PAC to limiting action in response to money. It is time for the public and the media to demand real, specific changes in campaign finance.

I will just give one obvious example here: A prohibition on members accepting contributions from those their committees oversee. If you serve on the Banking Committee, you should not be able to take contributions from bank. All that would take is a rules change-but it will never happen unless the public demands it. The banking committees are plum positions precisely because of the flow of bribes they generate from financial institutions.

Unless the public demands respond change, Congress is going to respond to regular flares up over influence peddling with do nothing legislation like McCain-Feingold.

You’d think that famous Cohen and Grigsby video would have caused things to go underground. I have attached a signup for a seminar on how to disqualify U.S. workers from ILW.com:Three-Part Telephone & E-mail Seminar: Solving PERM Practice Problems [PDF]

Sample text:

THIRD Phone Session on June 5th: Evaluation & Disqualification of U.S. Workers
• Basic Elements & Time Frames of a Good Faith Recruitment Campaign
• Disqualification of U.S. Workers-failure to meet experience requirement, education requirement, special requirements
• Proving the employer meant it when agreeing to accept any suitable combination of education, training, and work experience
• Demonstrating that skills could not be acquired during a reasonable period of on-the-job training

Much of the public is aware that the folks in D.C. use a different form of mathematics than the rest of the world uses. Fred Barnes of “The Beltway Boys” gives some good examples of this “New Math” today in The Weekly Standard [Five Easy Pieces, By Fred Barnes, May 29, 2008 ]

Among the issues that Fred says should be easily dealt with in a single vote.

Double or triple the number of foreigners given H-1B visas to work in America. We need more highly educated and skilled workers from abroad, but only 65,000 H-1B visas are handed out annually.

The number of H-1B visas is already about double what Fred claims it is. The last reported figures under the current law for new H-1B visas were 116,927 in FY 2005 and 130,497 in FY 2004. So Fred, are we supposed to double or triple the 65,000 figure or the 116,927 figure?

Fred goes on to tell us,

This causes two problems: Jobs requiring special skill or training go unfilled, and those who might fill them migrate to other countries, which become more competitive at America’s expense.

Computer workers account for nearly the majority of H-1B visas. Between 1999 and 2005 employment for U.S. workers grew by 332,660. Over that same time period the U.S. approved 330,524 new H-1B visas for computer workers. In the last reported year (2005), the U.S. approved 47,282 H-1B visas for computer workers yet employment for computer workers only grew by 19,950 that year. Apparently Fred is telling us that unless we import 2 or 3 H-1B computer workers for every computer job created in the country we are going to have unfilled jobs.

This problem could be solved by a single vote in the House and Senate boosting the number of visas to 130,000 or 195,000. One click.

It’s only when you use Fred Barnes’ “New Math” that problems like H-1B become very simple.

This year’s H-1B quota got used up in one day and employers are engaged in the usual whining that they cannot find people and that the lack of H-1B visas will prevent them from growing their business.

Today’s whiner is Development Design Group [Email them] in Baltimore. The Washington Post has an article that features the company’s difficulty finding workers. [For Visas, The Demand Outstrips The Supply, By Pamela Constable, April 21, 2008]

The CEO of the company, Roy Higgs, is quoted as saying “Some people think this is just about bringing in cheap labor, but it’s not. We offer the same salaries and perks whether you’re from Baltimore or Bangladesh . . . but we simply cannot find enough qualified U.S.-born staff to fuel our growth.”

Hummmm.

Let’s take a little trip to the H-1B disclosure data at www.flcdatacenter.com and look them up

There are 18 H-1B architects working for Development Design Group, and their salaries range from a low of $34,00 to a high of $60, 000, and the average wage Development Design Group has promised to pay H-1B architects is $44,588.24.

Now go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics website, where one finds that the mean wage for an architect in Baltimore is $69,210.

We have just explained:

1. Why Development Design Group has such “difficulty” finding people in the U.S.

2. Why the H-1B quota gets used up on one day

This week the Detroit News gave the public a clear example of how the “drive-by” media fails to serve the public. Last Wednesday their editorial page recycled unedited talking points from industry lobbyists in a plea for more H-1B visas [Expand visas for seasonal, skilled workers, April 2, 2008].

Taking as gospel a study from the one-man National Foundation for American Policy (which the Detroit News describes as a “non-partisan think tank” but which is actually immigration enthusiast  Stuart Anderson), the Detroit News states, “Skilled immigrant workers complement, not replace, U.S. hires.”

Ironically, the same day the Detroit News contained a report that directly contradicted the claims on their editorial page. The news pages reported that 400 IT workers from Chrysler were being “outsourced.”  One of the two companies receiving this business is Tata, the 6th largest user of H-1B visas.

Tata claims that its wages are 20-25% less than that of U.S. workers.

The Detroit News [Email Nolan Finley, editorial page editor] joins the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post as an editorial pages that do not let the facts get in the way of a good argument.

The New York Sun has a guest opinion column that contains so many factual errors and distortions I doubled checked to see if the original source was of the Wall Street Journal. When you see that it was written by a former “Chief Economist” at the Department of Labor, [Diana Furchtgott-Roth , send her mail]it will reassure you of government competence. [Desperately Seeking Visas, By Diana Furchtgott-Roth, January 2, 2008

The op-ed states:

"Every year, UScIS issues 65,000 H-1b temporary visas for skilled workers certified by the Labor Department out of approximately 630,000 approved applications from employers, with applications showing no sign of abating. Immigrants who hold H-1b visas must return to their home countries when the job ends."

First of all USCIS does not issue visas, the State Department does. USCIS approves visa applications and the Labor Department approves Labor Condition Applications (LCA)

Normally, I would not pick a nit like this. When you write pieces like this, you often have to oversimplify to fit into space limitation. The problem here is that much of the article based upon this erroneous statement.

USCIS has been approving around 117,000 to 130,000 new H-1B visas a year [PDF, see below]. So not only does the author have the process mixed up, the numbers are wrong as well.

The 630,000 figure represents another interesting twist of numbers. The author here apparently wants the reader to believe this figure represents the demand for visas. The number of approved LCAs in 2006 was about 380,000. If you add the number of workers requested on all the approved LCAs you get 630,000. LCAs are not tied to a particular worker and an employer can specify any number of workers on an LCA. While the LCA give statistical evidence of what is going on in the H-1B program, there is not a one-to-one correlation between a LCAs and visa applications.

In the 2005, Infosys submitted 1,145 LCAs covering 110,000 workers. To me this indicates Infosys intended to import many H-1B workers. This author implies it means Infosys wanted to import 110,000–I don’t think so.

The author then goes on to state:

“Foreign workers must be awarded labor certification from the Labor Department. This process requires the prospective employer to affirm that he has determined that no American workers are available to fill the position, and that the foreign worker will be paid the prevailing wage. “

This is a widely circulated myth about the H-1B program. The reality is there is no recruitment requirement as part of the H-1B labor certification process.

In addition, the law allows the employer to determine what the prevailing wage is; the employer can use nearly any source; and the law limits the approval of an LCA to checking that the form is filled out correctly.

In short, the 630,000 approvals represents the amount of paper that was pushed, not how many workers were approved for visas.

The author continues with a lobbyist talking point that come straight out of How to Lie With Statistics.

“This [65,0000] figure represents a minuscule portion of the U.S. labor force of 154 million. Even if the quota were raised to 150,000 annually, that would be less than one tenth of 1% of the labor force. “

One would hope the Chief Economist would know that the jobs for which H-1B visas are eligible represent a only a fraction of the total jobs in the U.S. Using the entire labor force as a measurement is a deliberate distortion intended to come up with a figure that dilutes H-1B’s actual impact.

Between 1999 and 2005 (First year data available to last–coincidentally H-1B visas can be renewed up to six years.) the number of computing jobs in the U.S. grew by 332,660 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Over that same period USCIS/INS approved 330,524 H-1B visas for computer workers.

So if you look at the occupations where H-1B visas are used, their impact is enormous. Here the Chief Economist has come up with a distortion intended to mislead.

Today the San Jose Mercury-News gives us yet another example of why the drive-by media is not trusted by the public.

Speaking of the cheap labor on visas, the Mercury-News tells us, “The U.S. caps the number of H-1B visas at 65,000 a year, an allotment typically exhausted in a single day. The limit should be doubled.”[AGENDA 2008 | TECHNOLOGY CRUCIAL PROPOSALS ARE STILL WAITING FOR POLITICIANS TO REACH CONSENSUS Mercury News Editorial, January 3, 2008]

But if we go to the official counts [PDF ], we find the number of visas approved has been 116.927 in FY 2005 and 130,497 in FY 2005–nearly double the Mercury-News figure.

The Mercury-News has conveniently omitted the 20,000 visas for those with U.S. graduate degrees and the unlimited visas to academia and research labs.

All of the current H-1B expansion bills employ the same technique of exempting more and more people from the quota. This allows the dishonest folks at the Mercury-News to tell us the country needs an increase of 65,000 to 130,000 when the actual legislation gives an increase of 117-130,000 to unlimited.[Email the San Jose Mercury-News]

The latest in industry talking point to get an increase in the number of H-1B cheap guest worker visas is to point out the European Union “Blue Card.” The story goes that this Blue Card demonstrates that Europe recognizes the need to be immigrant friendly to compete in the world talent market and that the U.S. is not immigrant friendly. See this op-ed in the Washington Post by Intel’s chairman: A Talent Contest We’re Losing [By Craig Barrett, December 23, 2007]

Ignoring the fact that the U.S. takes in the lion’s share of the world’s immigrants (some reports even put it at the majority), there is one tiny little problem: The Blue Card does not exist.

The Blue Card is merely a proposal. Since it would require the unanimous approval from the EU member counties to go into effect, the Blue Card is unlikely to ever come about.

The mere fact that H-1B zealots in the U.S. are using the threat of the Blue Card to demand more cheap labor shows the lack of facts on their side and the depths of their intellectual dishonesty.

One example of that dishonesty is at the end of the article:

“The writer is chairman of Intel Corp., which employs about 2,000 employees with H-1B visas among its 86,000 workers worldwide.”

A true measure here would be the number of H-1B employees among its U.S. workers. This practice of diluting by using the number of worldwide workers is at standard deception among cheap labor zealots.

According to this article [High-tech visa debate comes to Congress via 'blue cards', By Heather Greenfield, Technology Daily December 3, 2007] , the industry lobbying group CompeteAmerica is attempting to scare Congress into granting more H-1B visas by distributing “Blue Cards”. The story goes that if we do not admit the world’s best and brightest, these people will just go to Europe where they can get a Blue Card in 2 months compared to the 5 to 10 years it takes it get a Green Card.

One item not mentioned in the story that some people might find important: The Blue Card does not exist.

The Blue Card program is simply a proposal that would need approval from all EU member countries to go into effect, something not likely to happen.

Read the article carefully with that in mind and see how ridiculous it is to compare the time it takes to get to a Green Card to the time it takes to get a nonexistent Blue card.

The fact that the lobbyists have had to resort to threatening Congress with “vaporware” to get more guest worker cheap labor demonstrates how desperate they have become.

They can raid homes to prevent video game piracy but businesses for hiring illegal aliens?[US Raids 30 Sites For Chips That Allow Pirated Video-Game Play CNNMoney, August 1, 2007]