Business v Bush
Business v Bush
Date: Tuesday, October 28, 2003 12:02 PM
JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER
www.ZaZona.com
The op-ed article in the Economist almost reads like a parody until you
realize that is supposed to be serious. Bush is accused of being too
restrictive on immigration because "America admits only 1.1m immigrants
a year." Whoever wrote this article doesn't know who his friends are
because no other country in the world accepts that many immigrants and
Bush wants to let even more in. In addition, Bush has tried numerous
times to give illegal aliens amnesty - but that fact doesn't faze The
Economist.
I interviewed a reporter at the Economist but he couldn't have been the
author of this hatchet job. He came across as being objective and
intelligent - just the opposite of the drivel below:
Until recently, lobbyists had given up any hope of a higher
cap. America overflows with unemployed software engineers
protesting
about imported foreigners. One otherwise out-of-work engineer,
Rob Sanchez, puts his energies into a website (zazona.com) that
claims to lay bare a policy designed by big business to replace
American workers with cheap young blood even though a recent study
by the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) found that, when you allow
for age, experience and education, employers actually pay
foreigners
more than Americans.
This obvious attack on my credibility labels the material on ZaZona.com
as mere "claims" while a "recent study" is accepted as unarguable fact.
Sloppy writing could explain the slam on my website but there is no
excuse for quoting a study that doesn't exist. Two psuedo-scientific
studies were recently released: one by Stuart Anderson for the American
Immigration Law Foundation and another one by Dr. Madeline Zavodny for
Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and both were analyzed on this
newsletter. Both of these studies purport to be objective but they have
obvious reasons to promote H-1B. The editorialist must have read a
quote by MPI that discussed one of these studies, and without checking
further blindly used it to refute the facts on ZaZona.
If all of that wasn't bad enough, raising the H-1B yearly cap is
characterized as "victories for business" while the ones that impede
immigration are called the "hairy-armed brutes at the Department of
Homeland Security."
I have requested that the Economist give me a chance to refute this
article. If you have something you would like to add, email the Editor
at:
letters@economist.com
Here is a letter by another activist that was sent as a Letter to the
Editor submission:
What was the purpose of the article Bush V Business of October 16,
2003? It had a glaring agenda that everyone who reads this article
can pick up. This would have been better posted as an editorial rather
than presented as an allegedly researched and hence an allegedly
unbiased article. Such comments as "The US only admits 1.1 million
immigrants a year..." are peppered throughout the article clearly
signaling the agenda of the unknown author of this piece of propaganda.
I was near side splitting laughter when I read the comment about the
"Migration Policy Institute" allegedly determining that imported
workers are paid higher wages than the US workers. One simply had to
look far and wide to find such a piece of pro-immigration propaganda
because by contrast the Office of Inspector General [OIG] which has
repeatedly investigated the H-1B and L-1 visa program has consistently
(almost a decade) reported to the public and the US Congress that
these visa programs are filled with fraud. These federal investigative
reports, which your author failed to even give a passing mention of
their existence, have determined time and again that US worker wages
are being depressed by the importation of alien workers contrary to the
mandates of federal immigration laws. Furthermore, OIG has stated in at
least one report that the false educational and work history claims
made by the alien applicant for the H-1B and L-1 visa cannot be
controlled and OIG has recommended that the H-1B program be ended. And
amazingly, the reporter didn't even bother to look at the cases of
abuses of the H-1B program that have been reviewed by INS and ETA that
have determined that the largest complaint they have been willing to
investigate against US employers is that the alien is not being paid
the prevailing wages as mandated by law. Things have to be pretty
rotten when the alien workers are ready and willing to file complaints
about being under-paid by their American employers. Perhaps, you would
consider hiring another reporter to do an objective story on this same
topic in which the facts are presented without the jaundice reporting.
CW
http://www.economist.com/world/na/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2144750
The politics of immigration
Business v Bush
Oct 16th 2003 | NEW YORK
From The Economist print edition
Why you may not need to rush to change your passport after all
Get article background
BASHING big business is part of the routine of "liberal" America: just
pluck any book written by Michael Moore from the bestseller lists. Yet
in between corrupting politicians, ripping off honest workers and
undermining democracy, the "stupid white men" who run America's evil
corporations have somehow found time to force the White House to
retreat on a subject close to the hearts of liberals of all sorts: the
rights of immigrants.
In the wake of September 11th, most people accepted that some form of
clampdown on immigrants was justified. The hijackers, all foreigners,
had brutally exposed the inadequacies of America's immigration system.
The Bush administration's response has come in three basic parts:
stepping up policing of immigrants inside the country; moving the
bureaucrats who deal with immigration into the new Department of
Homeland Security, alongside the customs and borders people; and making
it harder for visitors of all sorts to get into the country.
So far, the noisiest part of the debate has focused on the civil
liberties of those affected by the first two parts of this response.
Immigrant groups claim that, under cover of national-security
interests, officials have been harassing ethnic communities, especially
Muslim ones. The American Immigration Lawyers Association counts 50-odd
separate government actions which, it says, have undermined civil
liberties and due process for immigrants.
Critics also claim that moving the immigration bureaucrats from the
Justice Department to Homeland Security has produced a change of
attitude. Jose Pertierra, an immigration lawyer, says there is now "a
police mentality and a culture of no".
These protests have not gone unnoticed. Republicans worry about Mr
Bush's popularity with Arab-Americans, a group he has been courting. A
sharply worded report from the Justice Department's own
inspector-general in June caused embarrassment. But little change of
heart has resulted. For most conservatives, anything that increases
domestic security and annoys the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
must, per se, be good.
In contrast, the business assault on immigration policy focuses on a
more sensitive subject for Mr Bush: the economy. Businessmen claim his
changes are choking tourism, hampering trade and preventing firms from
hiring workers. Their main target is the third part of Mr Bush's
strategy - the rule-changes that are making it harder for foreigners to
enter America.
America admits only 1.1m immigrants a year. Most of them are already
resident in the country in one way or another, having previously
entered the country on temporary visas. On top of this, America
probably gets 1m-2m more people a year coming across its frontier from
Mexico, though these border-slippers are not counted. Most of the
recorded 25m people who fly in for a holiday or to do business come
from rich countries, more than 4m of them from Britain alone. Under
America's visa-waiver programme, most European visitors do not need
special permission.
America has announced four recent changes to all this. From August 1st,
almost all travellers who need visas have had to go through interviews
at consulates, replacing a system in which the consulates decided whom
they should interview. Since October 1st, travellers from visa-waiver
countries have needed a machine-readable passport. From next January
1st, all visitors who travel on visas are supposed to be photographed
and fingerprinted on entry into America. And from next October new
passports issued by visa-waiver countries are supposed to include
"biometric" data taken from, say, fingerprints or a facial scan.
Foreign tourists spend $65 billion a year in America. Last year the
number of tourist and business arrivals dropped by 15%, the biggest
fall since 1983. Groups such as the Travel Industry Association and the
National Business Travel Association have been lobbying Congress to
"balance homeland and economic security".
On September 9th, they announced their first victory. Countries within
the visa-waiver scheme who have plenty of people with low-tech
passports (such as France, Italy and Spain) can now apply for an extra
year to get machine-readable passports into circulation. Should foreign
governments fail to meet next year's improbable deadline for the new
biometric rules, lobbyists think those rules too can be delayed.
The fingerprinting and photographing of foreign visitors on arrival may
also have to be put back. There had been talk of introducing the system
at America's 30 busiest airports at the start of next year. Now
managers at these airports are saying they have had no time to get
ready, and the travel industry is floating the idea of a further delay.
Another target for the business lobby is the growing queues for visa
interviews in non-waiver countries such as Brazil (up to six weeks) and
South Korea (up to seven). These are making spur-of-the-moment business
travel - often the most productive sort - impossible. Again, lobbyists
seem confident they can get the problem fixed, if the government pays
more money for more State Department officials.
Pleading for workers
Quietly, the business lobby is also pushing to change the rules for
foreign workers inside America. The main target is the annual quota for
H-1B visas (six-year work permits for white-collar employees, most
famously Indian software engineers). In 1990 Congress introduced an
annual H-1B quota of 65,000 people. This rose to 195,000 in 2000 as
firms lobbied for more engineers. This month, the cap reverted to
65,000. Even in recession, this will not be enough to meet demand.
Until recently, lobbyists had given up any hope of a higher cap.
America overflows with unemployed software engineers protesting about
imported foreigners. One otherwise out-of-work engineer, Rob Sanchez,
puts his energies into a website (zazona.com) that claims to lay bare a
policy "designed by big business to replace American workers with cheap
young blood" - even though a recent study by the Migration Policy
Institute (MPI) found that, when you allow for age, experience and
education, employers actually pay foreigners more than Americans.
Yet the politics has begun to brighten a bit recently. According to
Theodore Ruthizer of Bryan Cave, a law firm, lobbyists are hoping for
progress on two fronts: getting more exceptions to the sorts of work
and levels of experience that make a job count towards the annual H-1B
quota, and persuading Congress to put the yearly cap back to 115,000 or
so.
Business has also begun to fight on behalf of the 11m undocumented
workers it surreptitiously employs. Here the main problem is not the
hairy-armed brutes at the Department of Homeland Security, say lawyers,
but a law passed in the 1990s that took full effect in 2001. Before
then an employer could sponsor an undocumented employee for a work
visa, creating a "path to citizenship". Now anyone who has worked in
America illegally for more than a year must go home for ten years
before qualifying for sponsorship. Several bills (all deeply flawed,
complain immigration lawyers) are trying to overturn this rule in both
the House and the Senate.
These "victories" for business should not be exaggerated. Kathleen
Newland of the MPI argues that the law demanding machine-readable
passports was an example of "aspirational legislating". Congress set a
hopelessly optimistic goal, knowing full well that foreign bureaucrats
would inevitably fail to meet it. But, for the moment, businessmen are
having more effect on immigration policy than the ACLU can possibly
claim.
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