MICHAEL CUTLER: IMMIGRATION “REFORM” IS ENGINEERED DESTRUCTION OF THE MIDDLE CLASS
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/michael-cutler/immigration-reform-engineered-destruction-of-the-middle-class/print/
Periodically so-called “buzz words” and “buzz phrases” become fashionable. Of late, the concept of “wage equality” has been bandied about by members of the administration, politicians and some media personalities.
In point of fact, on July 15, 2014, the publication “Mail Online” published a report with a self- explanatory title: “America’s 1 percenters are even richer than we thought: Richest actually control 37 percent of U.S. Wealth”
It has been said that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Similarly, the term wage “equality” is an emotionally evocative term that is viewed as something good and worthwhile to achieve. Generally this is the proper perspective, but of course it is important to pose some significant questions. For example, “How will equality be attained?” It is also critical to understand what baseline will be established for achieving equality. (Will wages be increased or will some wages be decreased to bring about this change? If, in fact, some wages will be lowered, whose wages will be lowered?)
Finally, as we will see, sometimes inequality in wages may not be a bad thing, after all.
Before we consider the words many politicians use, we would be wise to consider two important quotes from George Orwell, the author of “1984” and other significant literary works.
“Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
Having been forewarned let us now consider the definition of “equality.”
The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary defines equality this way:
equal·i·ty
noun \i-ˈkwä-lə-tē\
: the quality or state of being equal : the quality or state of having the same rights, social status, etc.
The term equality is often equated with fairness and an entire government agency, the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) was established to combat discrimination against protected groups of workers who are treated disparately (unequally) because of factors such as race, religion, gender, disabilities or age.
Even young children inherently understand the concept of fairness — think of how many times a frustrated child is likely to complain bitterly that something or someone is “not fair!”
Recently various talk shows have discussed how the top one percent of Americans control a huge amount of wealth. Last week, the Los Angeles Times posted a video, “John Oliver tackles income inequality on ‘Last Week Tonight’“ in which Oliver spent considerable time on this issue.
America has made great strides to create a level playing field to provide all people with equal protection under our laws — indeed, the goal of the civil rights movement and the laws it inspired was to provide equal protection under our laws for all people, especially black Americans, going back to the issue of slavery, with equal treatment in the criminal justice system, where employment opportunities and where housing issues are concerned.
In short, equality has taken on the cloak of being, as the saying goes, “As American as apple pie.” Simply uttering the word “equality” evokes the emotional image of an American flag billowing in a gentle breeze with a clear blue sky serving as a backdrop.
Obviously if “equality” is good, “inequality” is bad. In most situations this is certainly true.
However, when Obama and other politicians, as well as talk show hosts, bring up wage inequality, they don’t ever discuss whose salaries will be used as the baseline against which paychecks should be compared as efforts are made to eliminate or reduce wage inequality. People tend to see and hear what they want to see and hear. It is akin to a Rorschach or inkblot test where the test subject is supposed to describe what they see in a blotch of ink.
The question that is never asked (or answered) is, “What groups are to be made more equal?” Today the average CEO of major corporations often earn salaries that are hundreds of times greater than the wages paid to the workers earning the least money in those corporations where, just a few decades ago, this disparity in wages was far smaller. It is naïve and, indeed, wishful thinking to believe that the push for “wage equality” is about narrowing the gap between the CEOs of most companies and the other employees of those companies, thereby expanding the middle class and increasing the standard of living for American middle class workers and their families.
In point of fact, the goal of the majority of advocates for the reduction of “wage inequality” is exactly the opposite: to lower the wages of American middle class workers and greatly reduce the gap between the middle class Americans and Americans living below the poverty line.
You will find proof of this in the prepared testimony provided by Alan Greenspan, when he testified before the Senate Immigration Subcommittee five years ago. We will get to his testimony shortly. His statements unequivocally dispel any doubt about the true goal of reducing wage inequality, the engineered destruction of America’s middle class.
The American Dream is inextricably linked to a vibrant and upwardly mobile middle class. The incentives for the creation of the middle class are created by an element of wage inequality. If this is confusing, consider that it is expected that generally, more highly skilled or educated workers should expect to earn more money than their lesser educated or skilled counterparts in the workforce.
This makes perfect sense and has, for generations, provided a strong incentive for American students, spurring them on to remain in school to obtain college degrees and even graduate degrees. This is why most people think of the money, time and effort expended in pursuit of advanced degrees or enhanced skills as an important investment in their futures. You could say that this is a case of “learn more to earn more.”
Where prospects for Americans, even those with the advanced degrees, achieving the “American Dream” in this economic era are concerned, a four-word phrase sums it up concisely:
Don’t count on it!
In December 2011 “Dan Rather Reports” aired a disconcerting hour-long report, “No Thanks for Everything” which reported on how highly educated and experienced American computer programmers are being replaced by programmers from India.
On May 15, 2007 a four-minute infuriating video was aired on “Lou Dobbs Tonight” on CNN. It features an immigration lawyer’s conference in which lawyers were being coached to “not find qualified U.S. workers!” The lecturer is identified in the video as being Lawrence M. Lebowitz, the Vice President of Marketing for the firm of Cohen & Grigsby.
The Winter 2014 edition of the quarterly journal, “The Social Contract” published my extensive article on the devastating impact that Comprehensive Immigration Reform would have on the middle class and on the economy of the United States. My article was entitled: “American Dream Being Sold at Auction – America’s Middle Class to Be Put on Endangered Species List”
Middle class workers and the working poor are clearly getting hammered by the current importation of foreign workers. In life there are winners and there are losers. If American workers — especially middle class workers — are losing, and losing big, someone must be winning. The question is simple, “Who benefits from open borders and failures to enforce the immigration laws?
The Spring 2012 edition of “The Social Contract,” contains a lengthy article which I wrote that was entitled, “Immigration: The Modern Day Gold Rush.” In my article I attempted to answer that question as to who the big winners are. Who are those who are literally and figuratively making out like bandits by the current circumstances. You might be surprised to find out how many are feeding at that trough. While it is obvious that employers who hire illegal aliens or who game the system to bring in foreign workers with visas that enable them to work in the United States for wages that are far lower than those Americans would be paid, there are others whose ability to profit financially and/or acquire political power might not be so readily apparent.
The list of these profiteers includes banks and money remitters who become the silent partner of every person who moves money from the United States to foreign countries. It includes immigration attorneys who not only represent aliens but employers who seek to hire foreign workers. Labor unions looking for more members, which translates into more union dues and more political leverage, are certainly on board with this concept, as are the National Chamber of Commerce and many but not all local Chambers of Commerce. Schools are eager to bring in foreign students and at present the GAO estimates that there are some 10,000 schools that are authorized to file the appropriate applications to enable foreign students to come to the United States.
The list goes on — but I think you get the point.
Facilitating the entry of still more foreign workers and more foreign students would create still more devastation for American workers and their families but would greatly increase the wealth of the super wealthy who are at the absolute top of the economic food chain in America.
On August 30, 2013 “Business Insider” published a Reuters news article: “Poverty Stresses The Brain So Much That It’s Like Losing 13 IQ Points.”
The title of that alarming report makes it clear that poverty often becomes self-perpetuating.
Notwithstanding these facts, many corporate executives are eager to import foreign workers and foreign students, apparently to lower wages and increase corporate profit. This is seemingly the driving force behind the assertions by such individuals as Bill Gates, Mike Bloomberg and Mark Zuckerberg, that there are not enough high-tech workers in the United States and that the United States must import entrepreneurs if America is to remain successful. What no one seems to have noticed is that they themselves are all native-born American citizens. Additionally, while Elon Musk, the founder of Pay-Pal, the Tesla car company and Space-X, was born in South Africa, he was provided with lawful status in the United States, providing clear evidence that this component of the immigration system already in place works. However, the lack of integrity and ability to weed out fraud in work-based visas all too often provides aliens with visas they would not have been granted if the fraud had been uncovered.
The infamous bank robber, Willie Sutton, when asked why he robbed banks said simply, “That’s where the money is!” Today CEO’s seek to find employees oversees in Third World countries because that where the cheap labor is.
Now we need to consider how the concept of reducing “wage inequality” was used deceptively by Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, in his prepared testimony when he addressed a hearing conducted by the Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees and Border Security conducted a hearing on April 30, 2009 on the topic: “Comprehensive Immigration Reform in 2009, Can We Do It and How?”
While many disclaimers we hear on television commercials are recited by announcers sounding ever more like auctioneers, making it all but impossible to actually hear the verbal equivalent of small print, Alan Greenspan’s way of delivering the bad news is to speak in a droning, syrupy, monotone voice. Greenspan’s sentences are often structured to further obfuscate what he is saying as are the words he carefully selects.
During his testimony at that hearing, Greenspan spoke of the advantages to the employment of foreign workers — both illegal aliens, as well as high-skilled aliens admitted into the United States — with visas that enable them to take the high-tech jobs. In fact, he called for greatly increasing the number of highly skilled (and educated) foreign workers.
In this excerpt from his testimony, it is clear that he understands what most Americans want, but he could not care less:
There are two distinctly different policy issues that confront the Congress. The first is illegal immigration. The notion of rewarding with permanent resident status those who have broken our immigration laws does not sit well with the American people. In a recent poll, two-thirds would like to see the number of illegals decreased.
But there is little doubt that unauthorized, that is, illegal, immigration has made a significant contribution to the growth of our economy. Between 2000 and 2007, for example, it accounted for more than a sixth of the increase in our total civilian labor force.
Greenspan glossed over the significant costs on state and local governments and minimized the issue of wage suppression. When people are among the working poor, every cent they earn counts. He noted the imposition of significant costs on some state and local governments, but what is significant is that corporations will make more money even as they off-shore their manufacturing facilities and their profits to minimize labor costs, violate safety and environmental laws and standards and certtainly dodge paying taxes in the United States.
This should surprise no one. What level of empathy would you expect of someone who could complain about too much money being paid to middle class workers (the privileged elite as he referred to them)?
This is precisely the position he took when he went on to support the claims that had been made by Bill Gates at a previous hearing that the United States needs to admit far more high-skilled workers into the United States. Here is how Greenspan’s testimony addressed this issue:
First, skilled workers and their families form new households. They will, of necessity, move into vacant housing units, the current glut of which is depressing prices of American homes. And, of course, house price declines are a major factor in mortgage foreclosures and the plunge in value of the vast quantity of U.S. mortgage-backed securities that has contributed substantially to the disabling of our banking system.
The second bonus would address the increasing concentration of income in this country. Greatly expanding our quotas for the highly skilled would lower wage premiums of skilled over lesser skilled. Skill shortages in America exist because we are shielding our skilled labor force from world competition. Quotas have been substituted for the wage pricing mechanism. In the process, we have created a privileged elite whose incomes are being supported at noncompetitively high levels by immigration quotas on skilled professionals. Eliminating such restrictions would reduce at least some of our income inequality.
It is beyond belief that Greenspan could refer to American middle class workers as the “privileged elite” or that such an outrageous statement could be made at a Senate hearing and go unreported. Yet this is precisely what happened.
Most people equate Comprehensive Immigration Reform with a massive amnesty for unknown millions of illegal aliens who have violated America’s borders and immigration laws that are supposed to protect American lives and the jobs of American workers, thereby creating a national security nightmare.
What is generally not known is that among the provisions of Comprehensive Immigration Reform, the legislative betrayal of American citizens, is that it would provide for a huge increase in the number of H-1B visas for high tech workers and a provision that would, for the very first time, permit the spouses and adult children of H-1B visa holders to be granted Employment Authorization Documents (EAD’s) that would give these nonimmigrant family members as much right to any job as an American worker.
Greenspan said that American workers should no longer be shielded from foreign competition. This is a key area of “reform” that this legislation would deliver. Under the current immigration laws, Title 8 U.S. Code § 1182: (Inadmissible Aliens) enumerates various categories of aliens who are to be prevented from entering the U.S. The list of excludible classes of aliens includes aliens who suffer dangerous communicable diseases, severe mental illness, fugitives from justice, aliens who are convicted felons, spies, terrorists, war criminals, human rights violators, and others whose presence would undermine national security and/or public safety.
This section of law also addresses the issue of protecting the jobs, wages, and working conditions of the American worker. Here is the relevant portion of this section of law:
(5) Labor certification and qualifications for certain immigrants
(A) Labor certification
(i) In general Any alien who seeks to enter the U.S. for the purpose of performing skilled or unskilled labor is inadmissible, unless the Secretary of Labor has determined and certified to the Secretary of State and the Attorney General that —
(I) there are not sufficient workers who are able, willing, qualified (or equally qualified in the case of an alien described in clause (ii)) and available at the time of application for a visa and admission to the U.S. and at the place where the alien is to perform such skilled or unskilled labor, and
(II) the employment of such alien will not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of workers in the U.S. similarly employed.
Eliminating these provisions of our immigration laws would accomplish precisely what Greenspan called for when he said that American workers should no longer be shielded from foreign competition so that the “wage premiums” being paid to American workers could be eliminated. This is not about decreasing the wage disparity between America’s super wealthy and other Americans but about greatly reducing the wage disparity between America’s middle class and Americans living below the poverty level.
Senator Ted Cruz, however, is truly leading the charge against American high-tech workers. He provided an amendment to Comprehensive Immigration Reform (S.744) referred to as “Cruz 5.” The goal of his amendment was made crystal clear in the video of statements by Cruz at a Senate hearing on this issue. His amendment provides for a 500% increase in the cap for H-1B visas, increasing the current annual cap of 65,000 such visas to an outrageous 325,000 Science, Technology Engineering and Math (STEM) professionals.
When the Labor Department reports on the unemployment rate — currently estimated to be 6.1% — the fact that nearly 100 million Americans of working age are not working is utterly ignored, both in the statistics and in the way that roughly one-third of American citizens are left out of the equation. This is a bit like a surgeon conferring with the family of a patient who has died on the operating table telling the family that the news is not all bad, at least the deceased in not suffering from a fever.
Politicians — Democrats and Republicans alike — seek every opportunity to call for educating more foreign students because, they claim, that we need to bring the world’s best and brightest students and workers to the United States so that America can be successful, often stating that we should be “stapling green cards onto the diplomas and degrees earned by those foreign students so that they will not go back to their home countries half-way around the world upon graduating.”
What they fail to note is that we have a term for the world’s “Best and Brightest” — they are called Americans!
The assertions about the need to import the world’s best and brightest to fill a supposed lack of qualified workers are utterly false.
On January 2, 2014 the Global Post published a report written by James Tapper.
The title and subtitle of his report summed up his findings succinctly:“The Indian tech worker H-1B visa scam: More than 1 in 3 US tech jobs go to foreigners. Americans, and many foreigners, get cheated in the process. Obama and Zuckerberg want to let in more.”
Here is an excerpt from Tapper’s article:
Unemployment rates are high for information systems graduates, with 14.7 percent out of work.
The competition from foreign workers also depresses wages for Americans. The average hourly wage for computer and mathematics graduates was $37.27 in 2000, and $39.24 in 2011 — an average rise of less than 0.5 percent per year.
And research from the Economic Policy Institute contends that only half of American students who graduate with a degree in science, technology, engineering or maths ends up with a job in that field.
“It has nothing to do with any lack of American workers,” Professor Hira said. “It is simply that the foreign workers will work for less.”
When aliens marry American spouses solely to acquire lawful immigrant status, such an arrangement is referred to as a “Marriage of Convenience.” Such a “marriage” constitutes a federal crime, one involving fraud, wherein the alien gains lawful immigrant status by deception and defrauding the government and the citizen “spouse” is paid for involvement in the scam.
Today there is a new sort of “marriage of convenience” impacting immigration — this one involves corporate executives who are normally at each other’s corporate throats, but who have joined forces for a common goal- flooding America with as many foreign workers as possible to drive down wages and other labor-related costs. These CEOs consistently lie about the supposed need for foreign high-tech workers because of a purported shortage of qualified Americans. They have also pumped huge sums of money into this effort to influence politicians about this alleged “shortage.”
Politico reported on this “marriage of convenience” in its September 2013 article, “Tech rivals joining forces on NSA, immigration.”
Here is how this report began:
They trash each other in the marketplace and sue each other in courts.
But lately, tech companies and their leaders have been holding hands to fight for things they care about in Washington, from immigration reform to National Security Agency damage control.
The report went on to note:
The primary example is immigration reform. Tech company lobbyists and industry trade groups have linked arms to work for passage of legislation, holding Monday strategy calls, deploying teams to focus on lawmakers by party and by chamber and acting as a coordinator among the disparate groups pushing Congress to act.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has tapped Silicon Valley’s leading executives and investors to join his reform advocacy group, FWD.us. His group and others in the tech sector are pushing for comprehensive immigration reform, an evolution from the industry’s past strategy of focusing narrowly on its desire for more high-skilled visas.
Although my focus is the immigration issue, it is important to note that the Politico article reported that the CEOs of these competing companies are also uniting to push globalist positions to enable them to move data across international borders.
For these CEOs, profits trump America’s national security and the lives and livelihoods of Americans.
They have even convinced others to get into their “marital bed.”
Consider the February 4, 2014 Breitbart report written by Matthew Boyle, “Former Democrat Operative Helped Prepare Mark Zuckerberg’s Amnesty Pitch to GOP.”
Here is how this report begins:
FWD.us, the pro-amnesty brainchild of Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, made a big splash at the House GOP retreat last week in Cambridge, Maryland, with a packet distributed to every lawmaker touting the benefits of a big, comprehensive reform bill.
However, the Republicans who received the document might be interested to learn that one of its co-authors (Jennifer Martin) is a hardened Democratic party operative.
The Daily Caller’s article, “Zuckerberg’s lobby group announces hackathon with illegal immigrants,” focused on a unique program created by Zuckerberg and his Silicon Valley cohorts to provide opportunities expressly for illegal aliens.
The article began with this statement:
Tech-savvy illegal immigrants are being given a chance to prove their mettle alongside renown American technology entrepreneurs in an upcoming contest in Silicon Valley, where they will code and create projects to promote comprehensive immigration reform.
Facebook founder and CEO Zuckerberg’s political action committee, FWD.us, is hoping to showcase the programming talents of members of the technology community who would most directly benefit from comprehensive immigration reform: illegal immigrants.
The contest, called a hackathon, will be held at LinkedIn’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. from Nov. 20 to 21.
Zuckerberg, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Groupon founder and former CEO Andrew Mason, and Dropbox founder and CEO Drew Houston are expected to work alongside the hackathon’s participants as mentors throughout the event.
“Each team will create a project or application that could help supporters share stories, contact members of Congress or show family and friends why they want meaningful immigration reform,” FWD.us states on its website.
Ironically, Zuckerberg referred to this stunt as a “Hackathon.” A computer hacker is one who accesses computers by breaking in. Here he provided encouragement for illegal aliens to break into the United States and acquire educational and career opportunities he would joyfully provide to them, but not to desperate fellow Americans or lawful immigrants.
Why could not this incredible opportunity have been provided to American children — perhaps especially those living in poverty? It is reported that some 25% of all American children now live below the poverty line. Many of these children are members of America’s minority communities.
Why not provide such opportunities to returning battle-weary and/or wounded members of the U.S. military?
Zuckerberg and his cohorts know that the administration won’t ask them those questions nor seek to take punitive actions against them for providing such opportunities to illegal aliens. The DHS, an agency I have come to refer to as the Department of Homeland Surrender, is no more likely to act against Zuckerberg than it is to act against sanctuary cities that shield illegal aliens from detection by the federal government.
Some of these “illegal immigrants” may not be who they claim that they are. Some may have entered the United States with nefarious intentions and may not have actually entered the United States as children as they claim. This is the same vulnerability with the “DREAMERS” who have until age 31 to file an application in which they claim to have entered the United States before the age of 15. There is no record of their entry and their true identities cannot be verified. Providing high-tech training to such foreign nationals engenders unacceptable national security risks.
On March 26, 2013 CNBC posted an insightful report that was, itself, predicated on a Sunlight Foundation report. The title of the CNBC article paints a clear picture, “Our Massively One-Sided Immigration Debate.”
Here is an important excerpt from the CNBC report:
As it turns out, while Americans remain divided on immigration, the lobbyists are not.
The Sunlight Foundation, a do-gooder government transparency and accountability outfit formed in 2006, on Monday released “Untangling the Webs of immigration Lobbying,” a report examining the organizations that have led the charge for changing the rules on immigration to the United States.
Sunlight dug through 8,000 lobbying reports filed since the last big push for immigration reform in 2007. Six-thousand seven-hundred and twelve of those involved immigration lobbying. More than $1.5 billion was spent on this immense lobbying push.
Members of the leadership in the House of Representatives, perhaps bowing the pressures of that gargantuan lobbying effort, have expressed a willingness to provide illegal aliens with lawful status.
On December 4, 2013 The Fiscal Times published an important report: “Obama’s Immigration Sop to Silicon Valley”
Here is how this report begins:
“Is President Obama’s push for more STEM grads and increased H-1B visas payback to the tech companies that got him re-elected? It seems possible. While the likes of Google and Microsoft have been sounding alarms over a shortage of technical workers, other research indicates that in fact we may have too many college graduates with degrees in science and math. Critics charge that Silicon Valley has promoted the shortage myth to gain support for policies — like those promoted by the president — that ultimately aim to keep a lid on tech pay.”
With all of the frustration so many Americans now justifiably feel about their representation (or lack thereof) by the administration and by Congress, it is essential to note that one of the implacable stalwart champions and defenders of American workers and their families is Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama.
In fact, on May 16, 2014 Breitbart posted an article with a crystal clear title, “Scholars Debunk Claims of High-Tech Workers Shortage, Question Industry’s ‘Free Pass.’ “
The article noted that:
On a Friday conference call that was organized by the office of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), who has been relentless in standing up for American workers and their interests during the amnesty debate, Hal Salzman, a Rutgers University public policy professor, said current wages in the high-tech and information technology (IT) industries do not reflect a labor shortage.Matloff said the high-tech industry has gotten a “free ride” from the media and enjoys a very “positive image” in this debate, which he said has “really been a non-debate.”
Here are several additional significant quotes from this article.
The myth that there are such widespread labor shortages in the high-tech industry has been debunked in numerous studies, but Republicans and Democrats have continued to, as the scholars noted, perpetuate it without being challenged on their specious claims. High-tech lobbies like Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us have poured in millions of dollars in high-profile campaigns to secure more high-tech visas.
And they have partly been succeeding. The Senate’s amnesty bill that passed last year would double and possibly triple the number of high-tech visas and, as Breitbart News has reported, House Judiciary Committee Chair Rep. Bob Goodlatte’s (R-VA) “SKILLS” Act that that passed out of his committee would double the number of H-1B visas.
Ron Hira, a public policy professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology who has worked on these issues for more than a decade, said on the conference call that the H-1B visas that are filling the supposed “gaps” are “doing more harm than good” to the U.S. science and engineering workforce.
He noted that the majority of the H-1B visas are being used for “cheaper workers” from abroad and mentioned that offshoring firms used 50% of the cap last year to further their business model of bringing in “lower-cost H-1B workers to replace American workers.” Salzman said that even after American software engineers train their replacements, they cannot speak out about their experiences for fear of being blackballed or having to forfeit their severance payments.
Hira said that the H-1B program has run amok because “Congress sets the wage floors way too low” and “far below the market wages for American workers” while not placing any “requirement to look for or recruit American workers first, so there is no displacement of American workers.”
“As a result, you are basically inducing companies to game the system to bring foreign workers to undercut American workers,” Hira noted. “Instead of complimenting the U.S. workers as it should, it’s substituting for the U.S. workforce and taking away future opportunities by shifting the work overseas.”
Here is an additional quote from the article:
IT guest workers are on pace to make up 30-40% of the entire IT workforce even when there are 50% more graduates than job openings in the STEM fields.
Further, Matloff emphasized that H1-B visa holders earn 5-10% less on average than American workers and there is a high churn rate that gives companies a “never-ending supply of new hires,” allowing them to replace workers over the age of 35 while weakening the “bargaining position of current workers.”The Senate bill, Matloff said, exacerbates this problem by providing 150% of the visas that the IT industry has said they needed at the beginning of the debate.
“You are replacing more innovative people with less innovative people, which also will amount to a net loss for the U.S. economy,” Matloff said, saying, for instance, that there are fewer patents per capita produced by those from abroad than those in America.”
As a result, fewer Americans are able to move up the economic ladder through the high-tech fields. And the problem has gotten worse since the H-1B spigots were opened in the 1990s.
They are ignoring the obvious: That the best way to make certain that students who acquire vital education in the United States don’t leave the United States is to educate American students. Upon graduation, rather than go half-way across the planet, they will simply go half-way across town and take jobs inside the United States. This will help Americans and also the American economy. Foreign workers, both legally and illegally working in the United States, last year sent at least 125 billion dollars in remittances back to their home countries. Economists estimate that because of the multiplier effect this alone increases America’s burgeoning national debt by roughly a half trillion dollars per year. Now consider the impact this further has on the displacement of American workers who go from being tax-paying middle class consumers to joining the growing ranks of Americans living below the poverty line who lose their homes to foreclosure and lose their disposable income, creating a further drag on our nation’s economy.
I would argue that all of America’s national debt could be eliminated by effective immigration law enforcement coupled with “going back to the future” by making certain that American Citizens be provided with a world class education and preference in the workforce. This is how the “Greatest Generation” built America’s Middle Class and with it, the American Dream.
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