6 Articles Worth Reading
6 Articles Worth Reading
Date: Friday, October 14, 2005 2:01 AM
JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER
by Rob Sanchez
October 14, 2005 No. 1346
COMMENT FROM ROB: Article #4 in the Washington Post is the sappiest H-1B sob story I have read in a long time. For additional background on this controversy read this:
http://www.ilw.com/articles/2005,0105-sanchez.shtm
Feminist Argument For H-4B Work Visas
Article 1:
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/oct2005/tc2005104_9029_tc121.htm
America's Fall in R&D: "Nobody Cares"
National Semiconductor CEO Brian Halla sees a dire emergency in U.S. tech prowess -- and he's vowing to try to fix it. He recently sat down with BusinessWeek reporter Arik Hesseldahl to explain why he's concerned about America losing its technological edge and what he thinks should be done about it, including eliminating the cap on so-called H1-B visas,
Article 2:
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/opinion/article/0,1299,DRMN_38_4138485,00.html
No way to handle immigration
Congress can't duck this issue forever
To maximize immigrants' contributions to our economy, Congress should hike the number of H-1B visas for foreign workers with special (often highly technical) skills. And it should create a guest worker program that allows employers to fill the many jobs for which they now have a hard time finding qualified or willing American applicants.
Article 3:
http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_1507483,0002.htm
US asks Indian cos to rebuild New Orleans
Indian construction companies are set to gain entry into the United States. In the aftermath of devastation by Hurricane Katrina, the US administration has announced a $200 billion reconstruction package. And several Indian companies like Punj Lloyd have been approached to facilitate the reconstruction. According to Atul Punj, chairman of Punj Lloyd, "US companies have approached us but the major hurdle is visa restrictions. We have asked for special visa permission for this purpose so that the reconstruction can be completed on schedule."
Article 4:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/02/AR2005100201377.html?sub=AR
Immigrant Wives' Visa Status Keeps Them Out of Workplace
She arrived in the United States in 2001, riding the coattails of her husband's H-1B visa, a guest-worker program for highly skilled professionals like him -- not that Samavedam wasn't. In India, she earned an MBA and worked as a finance manager at an accounting firm. But once she married, U.S. immigration policy put her in a different category: dependent.
Article 5:
http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asptID=19801
Immigration Deja Voodoo
After nearly two decades, it would seem our nation would have learned something about how to deal with its immigration problems. Sadly, it appears we have learned virtually nothing. Guest workers: This is essentially the same as legalization, with the provision of the alien needing to prove they have a waiting job. Just one more item of fraud for the applicant to plug into their application. The guest worker and legalization proposals are fantasies that will lead only to massive failure, fraud and a total collapse of an immigration system that is virtually there already.
Article 6:
http://www.manufacturingnews.com/news/05/1012/art1.html
Political Appointees Re-Write Commerce Department Report On Offshore Outsourcing; Original Analysis Is Missing From
The Commerce Department has responded to a half-year-old request by Manufacturing and Technology News for the release a long-awaited study on the issue of "offshore outsourcing" of IT service-sector jobs and high-tech industries. But the 12-page document represented by the agency as its final report is not what was written by its analysts. Rather, it was crafted by political appointees at Commerce and at the White House.
1. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/oct2005/tc2005104_9029_tc121.htm
OCTOBER 4, 2005
America's Fall in R&D: "Nobody Cares"
National Semiconductor CEO Brian Halla sees a dire emergency in U.S. tech prowess -- and he's vowing to try to fix it
National Semiconductor (NSM ) CEO Brian Halla is old enough to remember the day the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite and the reverberations of that event as America realized it wasn't the world's technological leader.
Halla was an 11-year-old living in Fort Dodge, Iowa, when he and his family, together with neighbors, scanned the night sky to watch the little dot of light that changed the world. America responded by pouring more money into the space program, developing computing muscle, and research and development in general.
By-products of that response include many of the high-tech innovations of the second half of the century: the personal computer, supercomputers, the Internet, and manned missions to the Moon.
BULLY PULPIT. To Halla, the U.S. is in the midst of a new Sputnik era, this time with China. The world's most populous nation already has more Internet users and wireless phone subscribers than the U.S. Its universities are producing roughly three times the number of college graduates in engineering, and its education system is catching up to the U.S. in accounting and life sciences (see BW Online, 8/22/05, "A New World Economy"). Halla says the U.S. has yet to respond with the same determination it did after Sputnik.
Next month, Halla will assume leadership of the Semiconductor Industry Assn. Using that position as a bully pulpit, he intends to promote American technological competitiveness.
He recently sat down with BusinessWeek reporter Arik Hesseldahl to explain why he's concerned about America losing its technological edge and what he thinks should be done about it, including eliminating the cap on so-called H1-B visas, which apply to foreign workers employed temporarily in a specialty occupation. Edited excerpts of their conversation follow:
Do Americans understand the competitive threat that China representst
Go to China, and then go again in three months, and your jaw will drop at the changes you see in that three months. Just to give you an example. I arrived on Thursday for a ribbon-cutting at our new testing facility in Suzhou. When I arrived, Suzhou was 75 kilometers on a side. By the time I left on Monday, the governor had made it 125 kilometers on a side.
Five years ago, I talked with a peer CEO friend of mine who dismissed the China threat by saying he had heard it all 20 years before, with Japan. But Japan is a tiny island that ran out of people very quickly, and their cost of wages dramatically exceeded the U.S.'s. Second, Japan had to obey our laws, because the U.S. market was the only market, and so when it came to dealing with anti-dumping legislation, they had to obey, because they had to sell here.
But it's different with China. They have a total addressable market of 400 million upper- to middle-class spenders they can sell to without ever having to touch the U.S. And another thing China has done, just like we did during the Industrial Revolution: learning from the mistakes of others who have gone before you, and also learning from the things that work.
One of the things they found that works is stock options. And so stock options are very lucrative in China now, and there is no capital-gains tax. Now, do I think our politicians understand thist Absolutely not. And yet daily our politicians enact legislation without fully comprehending what's really going on in China at all.
What should politicians be doing to protect the U.S. technological leadt
Eliminate the cap on H1-B visas, because we don't grow enough math and science graduates here internally. We've got to increase research funding at the National Science Foundation. We've got to extend DARPA's [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the R&D arm of the U.S. Defense Dept.] horizon from 18 months to a longer time, because there's no Bell Labs doing basic research anymore.
And we've got to find a way to get kids interested in math and science. When I talk to people in the tech industry, we're all in such agreement, and yet nothing is happening.
The problem is that we're all in California and Texas and Massachusetts and New York. Beyond that, nobody cares. And not only do they not care, but they also think the people in the [tech] industry are a bunch of crooks and that their stock options are tools used by evil people for evil deeds. Tech people know tech issues.
But the President and the Congress aren't going to allocate dollars to Corporate America for something that people in the Midwest doesn't care about. They're looking for votes. You can explain textiles and farming. But almost everyone in Minnesota and Iowa has a cell phone and LCD TV or are about to get one. And they say we're still the leader in technology.
Do politicians in Washington realize the competitive edge is slidingt
Even if they do get it, they have to do what gets them votes. This is a tremendous opportunity for the Administration to get ahead of this and get ahead of it by funding a solution.
But I fear that the worst will happen, and the worst is that the whole issue gets politicized. And then it's condemned to death, and nothing will happen. The whole issue will be used to try to knock over the current Administration, and nobody benefits.
Take a guy like Representative Frank Wolf [R.-Va.]. He gave the introduction to a speech I gave in Washington last week, and I talked to him afterward.
He gave a brilliant, articulate presentation describing what the problems are. He said there are four precincts that you have to win in order to get movement on this: the President, the Vice-president, Josh Bolten (director of the Office of Management & Budget), and Karl Rove (President Bush's Deputy Chief of Staff).
And I said to him afterward that there's a fifth precinct, and that is the American public. And to the American public, this isn't Sputnik. And not only is it not Sputnik, but to them it looks like corporate fat cats trying to line their pockets.
I think the perception of most people outside the technology industry is that China is still full of people working with their hands by candlelight. It's not like that. China has state-of-the-art semiconductor fabs and state-of-the-art everything, and they're producing cool stuff.
And I don't think that most people understand that China is graduating 400,000 engineers a year when the U.S. is graduating 65,000. The U.S. is still the IQ magnet of the world, but the best and brightest are finding more and more reasons not to come here. One is they can't stay once they get their PhD. Two is that it's just tougher to get in here, post-9/11.
Does China have an educational advantaget
I often tell a story that illustrates this. There's a major university in the [San Francisco] Bay Area that you would have thought was one of the best-funded universities in the world. And one of our fellows at National is a professor there. And he said they just got a new gift of a network analyzer from Agilent (A ). It's worth about $110,000 and they put it on a metal cart, and professors will hide it away and hoard it. And to use it, you have to sign up for it days in advance, and they roll it around from lab to lab.
And then he was invited over to China to give a speech and was given a tour of Tsinghua University. And he was shocked and amazed that every lab had one of those very same Agilent network analyzers. Some of them had never been used or turned on, but they had them just in case they ever needed one. The funding is incredible, and meanwhile we're sitting here thinking we're doing fine.
I think our politicians believe that that the leadership we have enjoyed since Sputnik has been God-ordained. It's not. Someone has to fund it. We're not asking for handouts for companies. But the vast majority of companies these days don't do R&D, they just do D. And we work with universities to get the R, and now the universities are saying that they can't do basic research anymore.
Look at Bell Labs back in the 1940s. It was very unsuccessful in that only 1 of 20 projects was successful. But look at the successes: the transistor, the laser, the Telstar satellite, stereophonic sound. That's my long-winded way of saying funding needs to increase for basic research.
How does all this affect your own companyt
Thetood news is that National is an analog company [specializing in analog chips], and we won't have these problems until much later than everyone else, because we're still people-intensive.
How is business at National now that you're out of the business of trying to sell microprocessors for handheld computers and Web tabletst
We're No. 1 in power management, so if it's a device that you want to be portable or have a long battery life, or if it plugs into the wall and you don't want it to have fan noise, we're there.
We're No. 2, sometimes No. 3, in the market for amplifiers. And this is just things that amplify signals. We're now moving into high-speed and high-precision amplifiers. We're also strong in interfaces for flat-panel displays and in data conversion -- where you convert analog signals to digital or digital signals to analog.
Analog Devices (ADI ) owns that space, and we've just released some absolutely killer technology in that space with average selling prices above $300, which is not your father's National Semiconductor. We've got no place to go but up in that market.
It looks like the chip industry is getting ready for another downturn. How will National fare this time aroundt
We've divested ourselves of all the business units that don't meet our criteria of 60-30-30 -- that is 60% gross margin, with a 30% combined R&D and selling, general, and administrative spending, to yield a 30% operating margin. Our gross margin just hit about 56.2%, which is a record in the history of the company. And when we get to 60%, we'll raise the bar again.
We've divested ourselves of about six businesses over the last three years. Also, we have had a strategic disassociation with commodity products. We try not to do anything that other people can do. So to that extent we're somewhat inoculated against the cycles.
2. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/opinion/article/0,1299,DRMN_38_4138485,00.html
No way to handle immigration
Congress can't duck this issue forever
October 7, 2005
In one corner we have three pistol-packing Colorado lawmakers who toured the U.S.-Mexican border this week, hobnobbing with members of the Minutemen Project and suggesting that Colorado somehow owed assistance to border states in order to control the influx.
In the other corner we have those whose first instinct in debating immigration issues is to denounce their opponents as a pack of racists. "Their actions and words are hateful and inhumane," declared the president of the Denver Area Labor Federation of the trio of lawmakers.
Yes, the news stories recounting a trip to the border by Reps. David Schul- theis, R-Colorado Springs; Bill Crane, R-Arvada; and Jim Welker, R-Loveland, and the reaction here in Colorado, tend to highlight the two extremes of the immigration debate. But the stories also underscore why Congress needs to get off the dime and address the issue of illegal immigration: Even Americans who dispute what should be done usually agree that the present system is dysfunctional.
Our own thinking on this issue is grounded in several premises.
The thought of rounding up millions of hard-working illegals and sending them home is repulsive. Such a crackdown would also be economically disruptive and those advocating it are damaging the anti-immigration cause. Not all illegal immigrants work, of course; a few are indeed the parasites of anti-immigration lore, preying on the fringes of society. But most came here for honest labor.
Our southern border is a sieve, and that's a scandal. No, it can't be sealed as tightly as, say, the Soviet Union once sealed its borders. But there is no excuse for policies that in some cases merely go through the motions of deterrence.
For example, tens of thousands of non-Mexicans who cross the border and are caught by immigration agents are given citations to appear in court and immediately released. This is an absurd practice - an invitation to wholesale migration from countries such as Brazil.
Illegal immigrants who break the law should be deported, not released back into the community. Local police and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency have been derelict on this vital crime front.
To maximize immigrants' contributions to our economy, Congress should hike the number of H-1B visas for foreign workers with special (often highly technical) skills. And it should create a guest worker program that allows employers to fill the many jobs for which they now have a hard time finding qualified or willing American applicants.
Details of a guest worker program would of course have to be worked out. For example, should multi-year work permits be renewablet (Yes, in our opinion.) Should permit holders jump to the head of the line for green cardst (Not in our view.) But such matters can be settled through negotiation.
No one doubts that any serious effort to reform immigration laws will provoke a bitter congressional debate. But Congress has successfully tackled equally difficult issues - welfare reform in the 1990s, for example. For too long it has simply closed its eyes and ignored the growing clamor for action. So long as that's the case, activists on the extremes will continue to dominate the headlines.
3. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_1507483,0002.htm
US asks Indian cos to rebuild New Orleans
Arun Kumar
New Delhi, October 2, 2005
Indian construction companies are set to gain entry into the United States.
In the aftermath of devastation by Hurricane Katrina, the US administration has announced a $200 billion reconstruction package. And several Indian companies like Punj Lloyd have been approached to facilitate the reconstruction.
According to Atul Punj, chairman of Punj Lloyd, "US companies have approached us but the major hurdle is visa restrictions. We have asked for special visa permission for this purpose so that the reconstruction can be completed on schedule." With New Orleans having been devastated, major reconstruction potential exists and Punj wants to take advantage of this opportunity. The construction giant is also planning to mop up over Rs 500 crore from the capital market.
The company is in the process of hiring lead managers and is expected to file the draft red herring prospectus shortly.
However, Atul Punj denied having any plan to enter the capital market in the near future as the company has sufficient cash flows internally to meet the future growth requirements. The company had raised $50 million last year through private placement of 18 per cent stake to leading private equity funds like Merlion. Temasek, New York Life and StandChart private equity fund. At this price the company was valued at $300 million.
Punj Lloyd has posted revenues of around Rs 2,000 crore in the last fiscal ending March 2005. In the next three years, the company is all set to cross the $1 billion mark. "We are growing at around 30-40 per annum, and have an order book position of around $1.2 billion," Punj said.
With the surge in oil prices and Katrina and its aftermath, there was a sudden increase in work for the construction and engineering company, said Punj. "We have a strong foothold in the global market with 59 per cent revenues coming from international business and only 41 per cent business from the domestic market," he said.
It is already working with some of the leading oil companies in the Middle East as well as in India.
It is also working on some of the power projects in India. In the domestic market, the company is currently working on six projects of roads and highways worth Rs 1300 crore. In addition, it is working with Delhi Metro and other infrastructure projects.
4. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/02/AR2005100201377.html?sub=AR
"Your most productive years for work out of college were spent e-mailing all day and collecting recipes from the Internet and waiting for your husband to come home so he can take you grocery shopping," she said.
Some women are so unhappy that they'd rather leave the United States -- and their husbands. After Brazilian native Marselha Goncalves married a Frenchman on an H-1B visa, she felt her world shrink down to the walls of their Arlington apartment. Night after night, Bruno Margerin found his bride on the couch crying. They bickered over stupid things like how much salt she had put in dinner.
To save the marriage, Margerin told his wife -- who had a master's degree in international peace and conflict resolution from American University -- to get as far away from him as she needed to find work.
Goncalves accepted a job this year in Haiti with a division of the United Nations.
"I'd rather be in a place where the two of us can work," she said during a recent visit to Arlington. "The hardest thing for me is to be apart. But here, I don't feel fulfilled. The Food Network cannot be the highlight of my day. We live in a capitalist world, so for you to be recognized, you have to get a paycheck."
Some women work illegally, while others fill their time on Web sites and listservs for dependent spouses, where they can swap recipes and status reports on green card applications. There is even a Yahoo group for dependent spouses in Dallas.
To combat the silence of suburbia that seemed so at odds with the bustling, crowded India she left, Bindu Reddy went to the library and volunteered at a school when she arrived in the United States. Sometimes the former special-education teacher browsed job listings on the Internet, knowing that few schools would sponsor her work permit.
She says she still wonders what would have happened if she had not immigrated. She probably would have opened her own school by now. Her house would probably dwarf the Germantown two-bedroom apartment she calls home.
Before coming to the United States in 1998, the Reddys lived in London -- where spouses like Bindu are given work permits.
Like Samavedam, Bindu Reddy has been waiting years for her husband to get his green card so she can begin to have choices again. In a region where economists estimate that a family of three needs to earn $47,000 to $62,000 a year to get by, the Reddys, like many U.S. families, would like two incomes to earn money for savings or extras, such as dinners out or DVDs for the boys.
"We feel not for ourselves but for our kids. They ask us, 'Why can't we move?'" said Reddy, who has a master's degree in special education. "My son asks me, 'When are you going to work? I want to go to day care, too.' Sometimes I shout at him for saying that, and I feel bad."
In the case of India, where matchmakers do not hesitate to ask potential mates details about their salaries, skin color, even weight, observers say women's families are getting more inquisitive about immigration status. Because of a robust Indian economy and advances they have made in the workplace, fewer Indian women want to leave to become housewives, said Murugavel Janakiraman, chief executive of BharatMatrimony Group, a global matchmaking service.
"In the late 1990s, the people were more interested in going abroad and wanted a foreign groom. They were not really concerned about whether they could get a job," Janakiraman said in a phone interview from the southern Indian city of Chennai. "Now they prefer to be in India."
Mostly via e-mail, Hanuma Samavedam keeps up with news of former colleagues and the various job opportunities they are finding in India. Some have been promoted two, even three, times since she left. She acknowledged the education her son will get in the United States and the job opportunities for her husband. But she wondered aloud whether her sacrifice is worth it.
"I became a housewife here, but my mind wants to work," she said. "If I get a job today, I will like this country, too."
5. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asptID=19801
Immigration Deja Voodoo
By Bill West
October 12, 2005
After nearly two decades, it would seem our nation would have learned something about how to deal with its immigration problems. Sadly, it appears we have learned virtually nothing. Judging by the proposed immigration legislation coming from the administration and key Congressional leaders, those making and supporting those legislative initiatives all think they have the answerstto Americat immigration ills. There are three such primary bills, and they all have various versions of temporarytor tuesttworker programs combined with varying degrees of law enforcement enhancements both at the border and in the interior.
One of these, the Kyl-Cornyn bill sponsored by Senators Jon Kyl (R-Arizona) and John Cornyn (R-Texas), has the toughest enforcement provisions and proposes to hire as many as 20,000 new immigration enforcement agents to get tough on employer sanctions and round up deportation case absconders. This bill would allow for a temporary guest worker program, but tequiretthese workers to leave after a period of time. Presumably, one of the duties of those 20,000 new enforcement agents would be to make sure those temporary guest workers that decide not to leave actually leave. Well, at least to try to find them, arrest them, detain them, place them into removal proceedings and hope the Immigration Court removal system, after all those appeals are exhausted (wetl cover that shortly), actually realizes the forced removal of those temporarytworkers. And, allegedly, employers of illegal aliens under these bills would have much to fear since the Feds would REALLY get serious about enforcing sanctions laws against them. Right.
Well, virtually all of this was heard before. Nearly twenty years ago, many of the same arguments about how immigration was out of controltith then upward of three million illegal aliens estimated to be in the UStere used to support the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). Now, of course, those estimates range to somewhere around eleven or twelve million. In 1986, Congress, at the request of the conservative Reagan Administration, passed that sweeping immigration reform legislation that included legalization provisions and first-ever employer sanctions statutes, which under most circumstances made it illegal to employ illegal aliens.
The 1986 IRCA concept was carrot and stick. The legalization provisions would provide a way to bring those tndocumentedtaliens who met certain requirements to tome out of the shadowstand obtain legal status and get on the path to ultimate US citizenship. The employer sanctions laws, that were supposed to be aggressively enforced, would cut off the incentive for future illegal immigration and therefore turn off the magnet and essentially solve the illegal immigration problem. By the way, during the work-up of the 1986 legislation, various txpertsttestified that no more than 300,000 illegal aliens would qualify for and actually legalize under the new law. The 1986 legalization process, which included something on the order of fifteen years of te tootlegislation by various special interest groups and their apologist supporters, realized more than 2 million aliens legalizing under the program.
As for the ttick,tthat aggressive employer sanctions enforcement never happened. The INS hired several hundred new investigators, but assigned them primarily to work administrative fines cases against employers who blatantly hired illegals. Criminal sanctions cases were rare. Over a several year period in the late 1980s, the process became almost a competitive game within INS among District Offices trying to see which office could generate the highest fines. Arresting illegal aliens or making criminal sanctions cases was not a priority; however, generating civil fines was. Eventually, by the early 1990s, the whole employer sanctions program essentially fizzled to not much more than a paper shuffle.
It is clear the 1986 immigration teformtlegislation was an abject failure. It did not stem the flow of illegal aliens, since we now have many more times the number of illegal aliens in the US than we did before 1986. The legalization process created a huge venue for fraud. Legalization included a Special Agricultural Worker (SAW) provision that allowed illegal aliens who could establish they worked in certain types of agriculture during certain time periods to gain legalized status. This opened the door to massive fraud.
The legalization adjudication system, counting on the txperttnumbers in the few hundred thousands, was soon completely overwhelmed. Temporary adjudicators were quickly hired on contract and given little training. Documentary evidence provided by the alien applicants was given little review and analysis and sometimes none. When aliens had no such supporting documentation, they were allowed to simply present a sworn affidavit attesting to their work background, along with an affidavit of another titnesstand these affidavits were accepted as the totality of their supporting evidence (what, an illegal alien lie to get an immigration benefitt). As noted, fraud was rampant and there were few investigative resources to pursue it.
Even when solid criminal fraud cases were made, few US Attorneys offices were inclined to prosecute such cases. Very few perpetrators went to jail over legalization fraud. Few even had their applications denied. Over the years, the legalization system basically became a sad joke, and the United States saw a massive influx of illegal aliens who became lawful permanent resident aliens as a result. Very many of those people obtained that status by committing fraud. Many of those persons later went on to petition for alien relatives to immigrate to the US. Many then became naturalized United States citizens. The tegaltchain migration that resulted from this process was easily in the millions.
So now various political leaders say things are different. Their proposed legislation, to give a legalization process to those tndocumentedtworkers already here so they can legally work, to crack down on employers who dont abide by the rules, to hire more enforcement agents, will solve the problems. Of course, they havent explained how and why their proposals are really so different from things in 1985/1986teyond, of course, there being maybe 8 or 9 million more illegal aliens in the country than there were back when the politicians last passed a law to solve the immigration problems.
Even the Kyl-Cornyn bill, with its seemingly tough enforcement provisions, falls short. Here are a few reasons why none of these bills will really work.
Employer sanctions: The 1986 law proved that American business, with its close relationship to government no matter which political party is in power, will never tolerate being aggressively policed concerning alien employees. Thatt not to say investigating and targeting the aliens is a problem, but targeting the employers is. The Feds can arrest and deport illegal workers all day and night long, and businesses will barely raise an eyebrow, so long as they can replace those workers. But, arrest a business owner for hiring those aliens and see how fast the Chamber of Commerce, the local City Council, the Mayor and other community leaders rally around that business owner. It wouldnt take too many such cases before enough Congressmen and Senators started getting into the rallies, and then itt over. Thatt why it didnt happen after 1986. The fines eventually generated enough of a hassle and even those civil enforcement procedures ended.
Guest workers: This is essentially the same as legalization, with the provision of the alien needing to prove they have a waiting job. Just one more item of fraud for the applicant to plug into their application. Even the legitimate alien applicants who swear they only intend to remain in the US for whatever temporary period the law will say they are allowed to stay will, for the most part, be on the very edge of making a false statement. Consider that once such a temporarytworker has his/her legal status, is working legitimately, has put down some roots in the promised land, is perhaps sending their kids to school without fear of looking over their shoulder, has bought a car, maybe gets a promotion at work, and then a couple of years later the US Government sends them a form letter that says, time to go home.tSPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> How many will really pack up and leavet
Remember, these are people with a history of once living in the shadows. And when those huge numbers fail to report their departuretia whatever toolprooftmechanism the Government will create for that purposethen whatt Even those 20,000 new agents in the Kyl-Cornyn bill wont be able to find and arrest all of them, because theytl likely still be busy detailed to the Adjudications Branch of US Citizenship and Immigration Services trying to wade through the backlog of millions of legalizationtorry guest workertpplications that have befallen an already overwhelmed agency. Thatt the other part of this equation. Just what Federal bureaucrats are supposed to process all those hundreds of thousandstnd more likely millionstf legalization applications that will surely come into the system in very short ordert
The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS) agency presumably will be responsible for this. It adjudicates immigration benefits. Its first director publicly stated that reducing backlogs was a higher priority than national security, so what would that mean for ferreting out fraud in any guest worker/legalization programt If history nearly two decades ago were any indicator, it would not be good. Also remember, CIS is primarily managed by the leftover immigration benefit managers from the old INS. And recent Congressional and news reports indicate CIS may have large-scale internal corruption and continued mismanagement problems. This agency cannot properly handle its existing workload. It could not possibly deal with the results of a new legalization program.
Enhanced enforcement: A quick lesson in the immigration removal (deportation) process. This is not a criminal court proceeding. It is civil/administrative in nature, but occurs in an administrative hearing court setting before an Immigration Judge. The rules of evidence, while somewhat similar to those in criminal court, are more lax and more generally favor the Government. However, the alien tespondenttdoes have the right to legal representation and the right to contest the Governmentt case against him/her. Both the alien and the Government may appeal the Immigration Judget decision to (1) the Board of Immigration Appeals [BIA]; (2) Federal Circuit Court; (3) US Supreme Court. The alien, if detained, may seek release from via a Habeas Corpus action in US District Court. The alien may also file Motions to Reopen before the Immigration Judge and the BIA virtually at anytime. The appeals process can often take many months and even years to complete, even in relatively simple removal cases, if the alien chooses to contest their removal.
Mexican aliens caught at the border almost always choose return to Mexico via something called toluntary Returntby waiving their right to formal removal hearings. By doing this, there is no formal removal, or deportation, on his or her records. Of course, they are simply put back across the border, to try to sneak back into the US again, and again, and again until they finally succeedtnd they know it. Think for a moment, if those many hundreds of thousands of illegal Mexicans captured at the border suddenly chose to have formal removal hearings, as is their legal right under US law, instead of Voluntary Return. What little there is that passes for border control would quickly collapse. There would be no detention space for those Mexicans seeking such hearings and they would be issued Notices to Appear (Notices to Disappear as the Border Patrol despairingly calls them) as most non-Mexican aliens caught at the border are issued and then released. Ironically, they would be in a form of quasi-legal status until their court hearing dates, wherein of course they would fail to appear and become immigration fugitives, to be found by the Kyl-Cornyn bill 20,000 new agents, perhapst
Another bill, arguably a non-legalization piece of legislation, sponsored by Congressman J.D. Hayworth (R-Arizona), which links to a bill introduced by Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-Colorado), may be a step in the right direction. The Hayworth bill would grant illegal aliens 30 days to leave the US and then subject them to a potential felony criminal charge. The bill would also stiffen penalties for employers of illegal aliens, including criminal penalties. The Tancredo version would only allow a guest worker program to occur after key strict immigration law enforcement goals were met. As laudable as these bills might be, they would still face the nearly overwhelming obstacles noted previously concerning even the stricter enforcement efforts.
Is the illegal immigration problem in America hopelesst Not if America and its political leadership are willing to make tough and truly meaningful changes in the way the Government deals with immigration matters, and while these measures would surely be tough, they would not be draconian and could still be administered with fairness. In a nutshell, heret how it can be done:
1) Secure the border. This can be done without a two thousand mile wall or an armed soldier every hundred yards. Ironically, as much as the Feds may not like it, the Minutemen demonstrated how. The key is having sufficient and effective surveillance capability at the right locations all along the border combined with sufficient and effective response and arrest capability combined with sufficient and effective detention and removal capability (more on that later). Surveillance capability can be a combination of cameras and remote sensors, but must also employ human observation capability. This is where properly trained personnel manning fixed observation posts along key border locations are critical. If active duty Border Patrol Agents are not available, alternative manpower sources should be considered. Such personnel might be National Guard soldiers, or some form of Border Patrol Auxiliary or Reserve Homeland Security Force composed of retired law enforcement officer volunteers who are already trained, experienced and cleared for such duty. The active duty Border Patrol needs to be staffed adequately to provide for that effective response and arrest capability. Observing and reporting illegal crossings and swiftly and effectively responding to those observations will result in apprehensions.
2) Detention capability. Arresting and processing illegal aliens is nearly meaningless if most cannot be detained and of those released some 85% fail to appear for court appearances, therefore becoming fugitives from the immigration justice system. That is the situation for non-Mexican aliens caught at the border, and it is estimated that only one in two are caught. In reality, it is likely that far more get through. Assuming enhanced border interdiction is put into place as noted in #1, above, such actions would be pointless unless those aliens could be detained. Historically, the key to successful and effective deportation is detention during the removal process. It almost really is that simple. When illegal aliens are caught, processed and released, they are seldom ever forced to eventually leave the US. Even those relative few who choose to engage the full panoply of legal appeal rights they have under the law, if they are not detained, manage to tie the system up for years and then often simply disappear when they ultimately lose their cases. Legally, border interdiction cases are almost never resolved in favor of the illegal entrant alien, and therefore those aliens should almost never be released from detention until they are deported. This effort may require the conversion of existing military facilities, to immigration detention centers, much as was done during temporary mass immigration emergencies of the past, and could include using military security personnel as immigration detention officers.
3) Change in tue process.tSPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> This is the Big One. As noted previously, immigration deportation/removal cases are administrative in nature. They are not criminal proceedings. While they should be fair, they should entirely be stacked in favor of the American people and their representative in such matters, the US Government. This does not mean aliens should be mistreated. All persons deserve to be treated humanely, with respect and given the opportunity to present their case before a fair decision-maker when an adverse decision might be made against themthat is the American way and the Constitution, under the 14th Amendment, requires such fairness. But fairness in immigration proceedings should be considerably limited. For an alien presenting him/herself at the border, it is incumbent on them to prove they are legally admissible and if they cannot, they should be detained until they can be removed. For aliens found within the interior of the US who are suspected to be illegally present, the Government must establish (a) they are aliens and (b) they are in the US in violation of law. Once the Government establishes those elements, the alien should be detained, with only very few exceptions (such as extreme humanitarian reasons or the public benefit) until the completion of the deportation proceedings. A suspected illegal alien should be entitled to one hearing before an Immigration Judge with one appeal to the Board of Immigration Appeals, such an appeal to be completed within a strict time limit. There should be no other judicial review in deportation cases. There should be very limited relief from deportation, such as genuine political asylum, extreme humanitarian hardship and exceptional public benefit (such as critical informants). The legal defense bar would, of course, hate all this. Whyt Altruism aside, mostly because reduced immigration litigation would mean reduced revenue for them. This approach might even require the repeal of various Federal statutes. Imagine that concepttongress actually getting rid of laws to make things better.
4) Interior enforcement. The Kyl-Cornyn bill provision of 20,000 new Special Agents would be very helpful in this. In the early 1980s, the old INS Investigations Division once had only 600 agents nationwide. Today, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the interior immigration (and customs) enforcement agency for Homeland Security that replaced INS, has about 5500 agents, less than 2000 of which came from INS. The number of law enforcement personnel to investigate and enforce violations of immigration law in the interior of the US has always been disastrously under-resourced. The 20,000 agents would be the minimum effective number to accomplish the kind of tasks required to begin getting illegal immigration under control, and that would only be if the other reforms noted above were implemented.
However, with those reforms and additional resources, what appears to be a hopeless and uncontrollable situation with illegal immigration could be turned around. As large numbers of illegal aliens are routinely detained and quickly removed from the United States, both at the border and from within the interior, it would soon become known within illegal immigrant populations that America is a hostile environment. Many would simply leave on their own. This actually happened in certain illegal alien Middle East and Arab populations within the US after heavy, but limited and narrowly focused, immigration enforcement crackdowns post-9/11 (something actually decried by various immigrant rights activists and certain others who, for whatever reason, believed enforcing immigration laws is a bad thing). Many aliens outside the US considering making an attempt at illegal entry wont, knowing they would likely be caught, detained and deported. Again, these measures may seem harsh by todayt enforcement standards, but they are not mass roundups and summary deportations (the traconiantmeasures dreaded by many). They would be increasing existing enforcement operations by expanding resources, implementing nearly mandatory detention in removal proceedings, and significantly streamlining the legal removal process while retaining an adversarial and appellate structure within that system.
What is the alternativet The guest worker and legalization proposals are fantasies that will lead only to massive failure, fraud and a total collapse of an immigration system that is virtually there already. If Americans want to have any hope of bringing order to their current immigration system of law and disorder, they had better tell their so-called political teadershiptof both parties, who have failed miserably for decades at this critical issue, to get their collective act together before it is too late. It almost is.
Bill West is a retired INS/ICE Supervisory Special Agent
6. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
http://www.manufacturingnews.com/news/05/1012/art1.html
October 12, 2005 Volume 12, No. 18
Political Appointees Re-Write Commerce Department Report On Offshore Outsourcing; Original Analysis Is Missing From Final Version
BY RICHARD McCORMACK richard@manufacturingnews.com
The Commerce Department has responded to a half-year-old request by Manufacturing and Technology News for the release a long-awaited study on the issue of "offshore outsourcing" of IT service-sector jobs and high-tech industries. But the 12-page document represented by the agency as its final report is not what was written by its analysts. Rather, it was crafted by political appointees at Commerce and at the White House, according to those familiar with it.
At an estimated cost of $335,000 -- or $28,000 per page -- the document MTN received from the Commerce Department's Technology Administration contains no original research and forsakes its initial intent of providing a balanced view of outsourcing, according to those inside and outside the agency.
The report was requested by Congress in an appropriations bill in December 2003, with a six-month deadline of June 2004. A 12-page version, entitled "Six-Month Assessment of Workforce Globalization In Certain Knowledge-Based Industries," was released on September 8, 2005, as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request that MTN had filed on March 17, 2005. The report, which carries a July 2004 date, has not been posted on the Technology Administration's Web site and is not available to the public.
According to those who have tracked the report's whereabouts, it was completed well before the November 2004 presidential election but was delayed for clearance by the White House and the Republican-controlled Congress due to the controversial nature of the subject. Outsourcing had become a contentious campaign issue, particularly in the swing states.
After the November election, a draft of the report prepared by a "braintrust" of Technology Administration analysts went into a vetting process among political appointees at the Commerce Department and White House. It never resurfaced. The analysts never received any feedback on their work, which is unusual, say those who have written similar reports.
The 12-page version that was released focuses on the allegedly positive impacts for the U.S. economy of the offshore outsourcing -- and "insourcing" -- of jobs in the IT, semiconductor and pharmaceutical industries, argue those who have read it. The report quotes research conducted by organizations and individuals that have been funded by multinationals that benefit from shifting jobs overseas. No mention is made of the conflict of interest inherent in the studies cited by the Commerce report.
Manufacturing & Technology News requested an interview with Ben Wu, the Commerce Department's assistant secretary for Technology Policy, seeking information on why the published version bears little resemblance to the one prepared by his agency's analysts. The interview request was not fulfilled. The following questions were submitted to the Technology Administration via e-mail by MTN:
Why did it take so long to release the report, given that the date upon it is July 2004?
Why is the final version so different from earlier versions of the report?
Why is it so short? What happened to the bulk of the report?
Can you talk about the internal vetting process both within the agency and the administration that the report went through?
Is offshore outsourcing a problem or an opportunity?
Responding to the questions was Dan Nelson, deputy director of media affairs for Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, in the following e-mail, dated October 6: "Here's the Commerce Department statement responding to all of your questions: Fostering innovation and competitiveness that leads to job creation in America is a top priority of the Administration. We remain committed to making sure every American who wants to work finds a good-paying job. In carefully developing the report, we sought to ensure that it was thorough, objective and that the competitive environment was properly assessed and supported by hard data."
The final report says that government data "can offer only very limited insight into the extent and impact of workforce globalization," and that "it was not possible to determine whether the shift of U.S. work to non-U.S. locations resulted in jobs losses for U.S. workers..." The report then spends one of its 12 pages describing research conducted by McKinsey Global Institute highlighting "opportunities" for U.S. firms and workers.
But two Technology Administration analysts involved in writing the IT services and software section of the report made a public presentation to the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in December 2004 describing their findings. The 43-page PowerPoint presentation, provided to MTN by those attending a meeting of ACM's Job Migration Task Force, offers a detailed analysis of the trend, including charts on the growth of Indian outsourcing firms and strategies adopted by IBM, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo. It also describes the IT jobs that will likely remain in the United States and notes that most overseas IT companies are not doing research. It states that "knowledge work can move offshore more quickly and cheaply than manufacturing," and notes that "companies are moving up the off-shoring learning curve."
The analysts say that there is a "surplus of low-cost, technically skilled labor in other countries" that is taking advantage of the "digitization of work" and standardization of software platforms such as Oracle, Peoplesoft and SAP. Foreign workers have benefited from the "development and adoption of standard IT training programs and skill certification." A large Indian-American IT business community is "tapping [the] low-wage Indian workforce...Offshoring destination nations [are] expanding technical workforce skills training." They noted that venture capitalists are encouraging IT start-ups to use offshore software developers to reduce their cash burn rates. And that there is "growing pressure in corporate America to offshore IT work." There is also "political pressure to stem the flow of jobs."
Little of that work made it into the final report.
"There is nothing in here that is original research," says outsourcing expert Professor Ronil Hira of the Rochester Institute of Technology, who chairs the Career & Workforce Policy Committee of IEEE-USA. "It's not a balanced or an objective study of what's happening and what the implications are," he adds. "It is missing a lot of the information that was available at the time. It's equivalent of the work of a sophomore at the college where I teach."
Martin Kenney, a professor at University of California-Davis and a member of the ACM panel investigating the issue, concurs. "It's a little bit shocking that that level of work could come out of anybody with a college education," he says. "I mean, I wouldn't accept that from my students in a class."
The report states that the Commerce Department was not able "to perform detailed empirical estimation" of the trend, and was thus forced to "summarize information gathered from a variety of sources in order to provide a snapshot of current trends in workforce globalization."
The report said its sources of information included "industry surveys, annual reports, Securities and Exchange Commission 10 K and 20-F filings, government data on employment, direct investment and trade and published articles and reports." Additional information was gathered through interviews conducted by Technology Administration analysts with companies and with academic and industry experts. No SEC filings or experts were cited in the released version of the study.
"The U.S. government is different from most other countries because most other countries are taking this very seriously and are trying to think through where this global shift of call centers and rather sophisticated service types of activities and mental labor is going to be located in the next 20 years," says Kenney. "How does one position one's economy and one's educational system, particularly at the university level, to make sure that you can continue to add value at a sufficient level to keep you as an advanced developed country? The United States seems to be treating this even more cavalierly than it treated the relocation of manufacturing, which has been very important for the rise of China as a new global superpower."
Services are expected to generate even more value than manufacturing "and are the basis of another major global shift," says Kenney, author of the 2003 book "Locating Global Advantage: Industry Dynamics in the International Economy." "To ignore what's happening won't mean it won't happen -- but, on the other hand, it will prevent you from having to do anything. It's pretty amazing that the government would put out something like that report."
www.ZaZona.com
Support this Newsletter and ZaZona.com by donating:
www.zazona.com/Donations.htm
To Subscribe, Unsubscribe or to view the Archive go to:
http://www.zazona.com/shameh1b/JobDestructionNews.htm
Back to archives