2014 May

2014-05-08

2014-05-08 (5774 Ayyr 08)
Norm Matloff _H-1B/ L-1/ Off-Shoring News-Letter_
new STEM grads not quickly finding jobs
"According to the 2014 AfterCollege survey 81.6% of this year's new STEM graduates (actually 'TEM', if the wording is accurate) did not have a job offer, just weeks away from graduation.   My own personal surveys of CS students years ago showed that most did already have jobs lined up around this time.   It would be interesting to know more details, but in any case it's extremely difficult to justify claims of a STEM labor shortage, in the face of such data."

2014-05-08 (5774 Ayyr 08)
Mark Krikorian _National Review_
statute of limitations on illegal immigration!?!?

2014-05-08 (5774 Ayyr 08)
"Federale" _Jewish World Review_
impeach US ICE's Kevin Abar: "We've up-armored"
"The Left/Main Stream Media claims that local officers cannot enforce Federal immigration law or hold an illegal alien for ICE.   However, Federal officers can apparently enforce local laws against burglary and pickpocketing and perform background checks for a local agency.   Actually, the law explicitly prohibits DHS (and therefore ICE) from involving itself in law enforcement investigations not related to its immigration and customs law enforcement function, per HSA Section 101(b)(2).   Its responsibilities specifically include border security and the other immigration enforcement duties of agencies folded into it, per Section 101(b)(1)(D) and (E).   Even the investigation and prosecution of terrorism is technically left to be the purview of the FBI, state law enforcement agencies, and local law enforcement.   The sole counter-terrorism function of DHS: the enforcement of immigration and customs laws to keep terrorists and weapons of mass destruction out of the United States.   Part of that means removing illegal aliens who might provide cover for foreign enemies."

2014-05-08 (5774 Ayyr 08)
Victor Davis Hanson _Jewish World Review_
what do the Putins of the world want? lessons from history

2014-05-08 (5774 Ayyr 08)
Sharon Randall _Jewish World Review_
tread-mill with a view

2014-05-08 (5774 Ayyr 08)
Michael Reagan _Jewish World Review_
saving the children... for real

2014-05-08 (5774 Ayyr 08)
Jennifer Harper _Jewish World Review_
impeachment, longevity, Rubio's attempt at renaissance, Benghazi, believability of gov't statistics & more
"'Obama's presidency is a willful, systematic attack on the constitutional system of separation of powers, an enterprise that aims to bring about a new regime of government by executive decree.   This is exactly the kind of subversion the Framers designed the impeachment power to address.   The Nixon and Clinton episodes involved misconduct that did not aim to undermine our constitutional framework.', [former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy] says."

2014-05-08 (5774 Ayyr 08)
Cal Thomas _Jewish World Review_
praying in public

2014-05-08 (5774 Ayyr 08)
George Will _Jewish World Review_
praying in public

2014-05-08 (5774 Ayyr 08)
Bernard Goldberg _Jewish World Review_
more evidence of leftists' intolerance of others at Rutgers

2014-05-08 (5774 Ayyr 08)
Jonah Goldberg _Jewish World Review_
policing thought crime

2014-05-08 (5774 Ayyr 08)
Larry Elder _Jewish World Review_
professor blew whistle on illegal admissions practices at university
"...But perhaps more interesting than the data and statistical analyses is Groseclose's documentation of the suspicious ways that UCLA faculty and senior officials reacted when he asked for the data.   They seemed to know that UCLA was breaking the law, and they resorted to desperate measures to prevent Groseclose and others from seeing the proof.   Once Groseclose began to press them, he says, their responses became more and more fanciful.   For instance, they claimed that privacy was the reason they couldn't give him the data.   But then Groseclose suggested that they redact all names and personal identifiers from the applications.   They still refused.   Further, if they were so concerned with privacy, why did they give the data to the independent researcher'?   They never gave Groseclose a plausible answer...."

2014-05-08 (5774 Ayyr 08)
Paul Greenberg _Jewish World Review_
be not deceived... Benghazi

2014-05-08 (5774 Ayyr 08)
judge Andrew P. Napolitano _Jewish World Review_
Benghazi... finding the truth

2014-05-08 (5774 Ayyr 08)
Ann Coulter _Jewish World Review_
execution

2014-05-08 (5774 Ayyr 08)
Robert Emmett Tyrrell ii _Jewish World Review_
will Scotland go the way of Slovakia?

2014-05-08 (5774 Ayyr 08)
Joan Lowy _San Jose CA Mercury News_/_AP_
airlines fighting honesty in price-/fee-/tax-reporting

2014-05-08 (5774 Ayyr 08)
_San Jose CA Mercury News_/_AP_
Cogent Communications CEO Dave Schaeffer says Comcast purposefully slowed down Netflix streaming
"after Cogent began delivering Netflix's traffic in mid-2012, its relationship with Comcast worsened and Comcast began to stop increasing the capacity of its hardware to accommodate the increase in traffic."

2014-05-08 (5774 Ayyr 08)
Janine Turner _PJ Media_
praying in public: with victory comes responsibility & respect

2014-05-08 (5774 Ayyr 08)
Bridget Johnson _PJ Media_
the mean-spirited, power-mad Harry Reid strives to do more evil to people of all races, sexes, nationalities, ages

2014-05-08 (5774 Ayyr 08)
Roger Kimball _PJ Media_
the "law of the land" and race-obsessed anti-Semitic anti-Christian crony-socialist oath-breaker Barack Hussein Obummer's violations of it

2014-05-08 (5774 Ayyr 08)
Roger Kimball _PJ Media_
leftists/Dems believe lies will help them escape culpability for mishandling the terrorist attack on the USA consulate at Benghazi

2014-05-08 (5774 Ayyr 08)
Roger L. Simon _PJ Media_
real war against women

2014-05-08 (5774 Ayyr 08)
Bridget Johnson _PJ Media_
under pressure, Bernie Sanders calls VA hearing with VA secretary Eric Shinseki as star witness

2014-05-08 (5774 Ayyr 08)
Bill Straub _PJ Media_
first senate hearing on H377 and Human Suffering nominee suggests smooth path to convirmation

2014-05-08 (5774 Ayyr 08)
Tony Lee _Breitbart_
Mark Levin to the GOP losership: but for the Tea Party you'd be nothing

2014-05-08 (5774 Ayyr 08)
James Simpson _Accuracy in Media_
vote fraud is an existental threat to the USA

2014-05-08 (5774 Ayyr 08)
_US Patriot_
2 Obummer regime officials convicted of vote fraud for faking ballot petitions in 2008

2014-05-08 (5774 Ayyr 08)
Anthony Watts
CEI suing for release of John Holdren e-mail messages related to climate (more unofficial accounts seem to have been abused to avoid FOIA)

2014-05-08 (5774 Ayyr 08)
Anthony Watts
transient climate sensitivity to CO₂ is about 35% less than UN IPCC claims

2014-05-08 (5774 Ayyr 08)
Willis Eschenbach
cycling in central England
 
Proposed Bills 2014
 
 

2014-05-09

2014-05-09 (5774 Ayyr 09)
Norm Matloff _H-1B/ L-1/ Off-Shoring News-Letter_
more on the 2014 AfterCollege survey of new grads
"A survey had found that 81.6% of new grads in engineering, technology and math did not have a job lined up by April, just weeks away from graduation.   Some people wondered about the methodology in the survey, and I wondered this aloud too in my posting.   After all, I've often stated here that, at least in the case of computer science (which IS a very special case), the job market for new grads appeared to be fairly strong; it is those over 35 that find the job market to be challenging.   Well, I am obtaining a copy of the survey report, and will discuss it here in the next few days.   I'll also bring up a number of other related issues that I didn't have time for yesterday (I made the posting just before I left for the airport)."

2014-05-09 (5774 Ayyr 09)
Michel Martin _KERA_
corrupt race-obsessed anti-Semitic anti-Christian crony-socialist oath-breaker Barack Hussein Obummer regime proposed new depredations to waste highly-skilled US citizens' talents
Conservative News 24/7
Seattle WA Slimes idiotorial
Carolyn Lochhead: San Francisco CA Chronicle
Fox
Alicia A. Caldwell: Minneapolis MN Star Tribune/AP
Quincy IL Whig
Slash Dot/Dice discussion
Much of the following responds to... or restates and corrects... assertions made in the KERA program:
 
"spouses of some highly skilled, temporary immigrants to work in the United States"
 
There is no requirement that H-1b recipients be "highly skilled".   Government statistics (DoL & USCIS) show that nearly all of them are mediocre lights doing mediocre work.   Many of them are inexperienced, wet-behind-the-ears new grads.   Each year, thousands of approved applications go to those who don't have the equivalent of a US bachelor's degree, and a few hundred are typically approved for people lacking the equivalent of a US high school diploma...   which is not to say that high school and college students can't be good tech support people, system administrators, software product developers, cancer research assistants, physiology research assistants, oceanography research assistants, principal investigators, etc.
 
"others say their promise leaves fewer jobs for Americans."
 
And you probably believe that throw-away suffices for balance.   WRONG!
 
"He's advocated for immigration and visa reform." Well, finally we find some agreement.   Nearly all of the 6% [updated for more recent poll] who are interested in the subject advocate "reform", though one half believes what the other half is advocating is perversion of the immigration and visa laws.   We all support reform, but disagree about what constitutes reform vs. making the matter worse.
 
Hard data on numbers of H-1B grantees sponsored for green cards are scarce.   About a decade ago, professor Ron Hira at Rochester Institute of Technology found that only a fraction of 1% of H-1B grantees were sponsored for green cards at that time... and that it varies greatly depending on the nature of the employer.
 
H-1B visas have an initial term of up to 3 years, can be renews for an additional 3 years, and can then be extended on a year-by-year basis after that.   I've read of cases in which people were in the USA on H-1B visas for 9 years.
 
"employers have to have sponsored them for those green cards. So it's not a unilateral decision on their part", with the result that those with pending LPR applications are locked in to that employer/sponsor and have reduced freedom to negotiate compensation and working conditions.   They can move to another employer, but the costs attendant to disruption of their green card application are prohibitive.
 
Look, every step forward or backward is, I think, significant in the way we look at immigration reform or perversion, and this (allowing spouses to work without them going through the normal work-visa application process) is a huge step backwards.   It's a huge change for US citizen STEM professionals, sending out resumes and closely tracking the job markets, hoping for some hints of improvement.   It's a big change for US citizens who have been living here, you know, for many generations paying their taxes, you know, formerly productive members of society and having spouses and children...   To have their talents and knowledge and creativity being wasted so egregiously is just a terrible shame.
 
And so therefore, you know, it puts pressure on the families because you've got one less working spouse, or, combined households with fewer people fully employed.   It has taken a toll on full-time long-term employment, in particular.   And, you know, I think it's just unfair, right?   Someone has worked hard, kept their noses clean, invested so much in university and continuing education, and then the rug is pulled out from them by a corrupt government and they wonder what the heck happened to their dreams.
 
I think if you bring in hundreds of thousands on a student visas, hundreds of thousands more on exchange visas, hundreds of thousands more on low skilled visas like the H-1B, what's the point of all that work, all that investment?
 
What is the problem that this (unconstitutional and illegal action) is designed to address?   I mean, if someone is brilliant, if someone does have knowledge and skills in the top fraction of a percent, has genuinely rare skills, then they can and do apply for a visa in their own right.
 
One of the problems is that everyone has seen repeated examples of presidents (and their appointees) operating outside of and contrary to the US constitution and laws, and cousin/president/ race-obsessed anti-Semitic anti-Christian crony-socialist oath-breaker Barack Hussein Obummer has been orders of magnitude worse.   He's arbitrarily giving his permission to live and work in the USA illegally to millions.   Now he's illegally giving his permission for those not granted work visas under the laws, to work in the USA anyway.
 
These are not things he might do in the future, this is what we've seen him doing in violation of his oath of office.   Many are calling for writs of mandamus.   Others are calling for impeachment of race-obsessed anti-Semitic anti-Christian crony-socialist oath-breaker Barack Hussein Obummer and several members of his corrupt regime... which is not to say that Shrub, Clintoon, and GHWBush were without sin in this regard.   They all have been part of a worsening trend.
 
Over 135,991 grants of H-1B visa status were made in fiscal year 2012, according to State Department annual reports.   This makes a mockery of US citizens -- including the 30 million more who should be working (based on BLS employment/population statistics) -- and a mockery of the law and of the US constitution.
 
Yes, Google, FB, Oracle, GE, Siemens, LinkedIn... are disgusting, to bowdlerize Lingham, but that's just one more negative effect of the glut of STEM talent, the undermining of informal, social pressure to enforce ethical sanity.   By bringing in cheap, pliant foreign labor, all such standards are being violated without the usual negative consequences to the perpetrators.   Start-ups typically don't want to invest in flying in US candidates from across the country for interviews, anymore, don't want to provide relocation assistance, and don't want to invest in new-hire nor retained employee education and training the way more established, larger STEM firms did before changes in tax laws and creation of more guest-work visas like the H-1B.
 
Between 2 & 3 times as many US citizens have been graduating with STEM degrees as have been being hired to do STEM work... consistently over the last couple decades. (Michael Teitelbaum, B. Lindsay Lowell, Hal Salzman, Daniel Kuehn, Norm Matloff...) Certainly, the USA has only a fraction of the earth's area.   We could not admit even 1%, or even 0.5% of the world population, so obviously our standards should only admit those who are better than 99.5% by some generally objective measures, setting aside race, sex, country of birth, and other such irrelevant criteria.
 
The illegal Barack Hussein Obummer regime proposal only worsens an on-going problem of under-employment of US citizens and low standards and excessive influx of cheap, young, pliant, low-skilled labor with flexible ethics.
 
You should set higher standards.   You should run background investigations on all visa applicants.   You should accept far fewer students from other countries, and they should be only the very best applicants, not cheap labor (as NSF admitted they were after in the 1980s as they were lobbying for more student visas and creation of the H-1B visa).   You should accept only the very best guest-workers -- and they should be guest-workers (1-4 months), not long-term displacers of American talent.   They should be people bringing knowledge into the USA, not smuggling knowledge and methodologies and intellectual property out of the USA, as has been done repeatedly in the last several decades.
 
I think we've got something between 400K and 700K people in the USA at any one time on H-1B visas, but the federal government does not know.   DHS does not know.   They've run experiments from time to time, but give them up after only a couple months because they've never focused on this, can't think of or won't consider any reasonable ways to go about it.   These are the people Boehner should have criticized and mocked, "It's tooo haaaarrrrd!".
 
This insane notion of giving visa grantees' spouses work visas without individually considering their backgrounds, intelligence, skills, knowledge and experience would add, perhaps 100K more foreign workers to US job markets already flooded with talent going to waste.   This is about 100 times as many as the total numbers of guest-work visas that would be reasonable under current circumstances and government capabilities to track.
 
No, the US government has neither the will nor the capacity to conscientiously process that many visa applications.   They don't want to.   There are incentives in place which penalize conscientious examination and cross-checking of information from and about each applicant.   Examiners who merely ask that questionable assertions be corroborated are passed over for promotions, transferred to more difficult and less rewarding duties.   We know this from GAO and IG reports, and we know this from whistle-blowers inside the agencies.   Yet it continues.   So, as Murray-Tjan admits, most of the applications for this arbitrary, unconstitutional, unilateral executive grant of privilege would be rapidly and electronically rubber-stamped, regardless of the merits.
 
The rogue corrupt Barack Hussein Obummer regime has decided to move backwards, to increase its level of corruption, instead of adhering to the US constitution and laws and reduce their corruption.
 
So this is a huge number of people on top of an already vastly excessive number of illegal aliens.
 
The un-employed and under-employed US citizens might be going to school if they have the money and credit, or they might be staying with relatives or friends or former co-workers.   They might be pet-sitting or serving coffee or selling blue jeans or raking leaves instead of designing parts for new vehicles, cranes, power-tools, or nuclear power plants; or teaching biophysics or computer science or engineering courses at the university as they used to do.   You read stories about sadness, depression, alienation, suicidal thoughts, feelings of futility.   It's a major problem.
 
It really is a humanitarian issue.   It's cruel to US citizen STEM professionals to have to remain home or in homeless shelters and have so much knowledge and skill going to waste because their careers have been prematurely terminated.   They're being forced to languish and sacrifice their talents.   I think it's unfair.
 
You know, the president could reform, have his people fence the borders, patrol them conscientiously and consistently, deport and remove illegal aliens (including those who have over-stayed their temporary visas) consistently and conscientiously.   He could have his people running proper background investigations on visa applicants to avoid admitting malefactors like the Times Square Bomber, the Boston marathon bombers, the several Red Chinese spies, and human traffickers (i.e. slavers) caught in recent decades.   He could work with congress to reduce the numbers of student, exchange, guest-work and permanent residence visas to reasonable, manageable levels, and adjust the terms to make them more reasonable.   But it would have faced blow-back from the mean-spirited haters of America and our culture, the seekers of cheap, young, pliant, low-skilled labor with flexible ethics, and their immigration lawyers, who line their own pockets at others' expense.
 
Of course, there is nothing preventing spouses of visa grantees from properly applying for their own work visas.   But they keep whining that "It's tooooo haaaarrrd.", despite the process being under-priced and rigged in their favor.
 
We have seen the waste of highly-skilled US citizen talent for decades.   We have seen the excessive numbers of, and low standards for, foreign student, exchange, guest-work and permanent residency visas.   It needs to be stopped...jgo

2014-05-09 (5774 Ayyr 09)
John Miley _Jewish World Review_
free classes to boost your career
"employers are getting stingier with tuition-reimbursement benefits...   MOOCs...   (sometimes you have to pay a fee if you want a certificate upon completion).   While moving the class-room experience on-line may limit your time with the professor, the digital classes still encourage a high level of interaction with lots of multi-media extras [if you've got the band-width and latest expensive systems to use them], including forums to chat with class-mates, videos and quizzes.   Most courses are created and offered by traditional colleges or universities, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; others come from for-profit web sites...   Codeacademy...   Coursera.   Another option is edX, which was created at MIT and features classes from MIT, Harvard, Georgetown and other esteemed schools.   (Keep in mind that the vast majority of MOOCs currently lack accreditation.)..."

2014-05-09 (5774 Ayyr 09)
Brenda Walker _V Dare_
SF, the banana republic by the bay, as anti-American protests highlight leftist, racist "May Day"

2014-05-09 (5774 Ayyr 09)
Jonah Goldberg _Jewish World Review_
praying in public

2014-05-09 (5774 Ayyr 09)
Rich Lowry _Jewish World Review_
the Benghazi deniers

2014-05-09 (5774 Ayyr 09)
Charles Krauthammer _Jewish World Review_
Benghazi: how to run the hearings properly
"Where and to what extent was there dereliction of duty as memos, urgent pleas and mounting evidence of danger were ignored and the U.S. ambassador was allowed to enter a death-trap?   What happened during the 8 hours of the Benghazi attack, at the end of which the last 2 Americans (of 4) were killed by mortar fire?   Where was the commander in chief and where was the responsible Cabinet secretary, Hillary Clinton?   [Where were the closest CIA operatives?   Where were the nearest military forces?]   What did they do?"

2014-05-09 (5774 Ayyr 09)
Dick Morris _Jewish World Review_
Benghazi reality

2014-05-09 (5774 Ayyr 09)
Greg Crosby _Jewish World Review_
military honor on Armed Forces day, May 17
"Memorial Day honors the fallen.   Veterans Day honors the vets.   Armed Forces Day honors the ones who currently serve in the military...   On 1949 August 31, Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson announced the creation of an Armed Forces Day to replace separate Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force Days.   The single day celebration stemmed from the unification of the Armed Forces under the Department of Defense..."

2014-05-09 (5774 Ayyr 09)
David Limbaugh _Jewish World Review_
where are the "tolerant", "freedom-loving" Dems? Why the silence?

2014-05-09 (5774 Ayyr 09)
_Conservative HQ_
Viguerie and Horowitz: primaries matter
"Horowitz notes 9 [bad] bills that the House Republican [losership] has brought to the floor with majority [leftist/Dem] support..."

2014-05-09 (5774 Ayyr 09)
George Rasley _Conservative HQ_
we need more state legislators like Niceville Florida's Don Gaetz

2014-05-09 (5774 Ayyr 09)
Wesley Pruden _Jewish World Review_
pres. race-obsessed anti-Semitic anti-Christian crony-socialist oath-breaker Barack Hussein Obummer's dysfunctional DC

2014-05-09 (5774 Ayyr 09)
Jonathan Tobin _Jewish World Review_
pres. race-obsessed anti-Semitic anti-Christian crony-socialist oath-breaker Barack Hussein Obummer's holocaust hypocrisy: it is difficult to read some of the president's remarks without wincing

2014-05-09 (5774 Ayyr 09)
Mona Charen _Jewish World Review_
who created the "rape culture"?

2014-05-09 (5774 Ayyr 09)
Diana West _Jewish World Review_
Clinton's legacy: smut culture

2014-05-09 (5774 Ayyr 09)
_MarketWatch_
Klotho gene helps us live long and be smarter

2014-05-09 (5774 Ayyr 09)
Judy Gruen _Jewish World Review_
this Mother's day think long term
"...I told her the truth: job security.   While all kinds of jobs from technical support to web design are being [off-shored] to Mumbai or the Philippines, motherhood is one job that requires that you Be Here Now..."

2014-05-09 (5774 Ayyr 09)
Michelle Malkin _Jewish World Review_
back-lash against Communist Corpse claims new political casualties
"Judy ousted Heuer 57-43; Nisly defeated Kubacki 65-35...   Indiana parents led the lonely charge.   They were at the vanguard of challenging the constitutionality, costs, sub-standard academic quality, privacy invasions and special interest lobbyists fueling Fed Ed.   In 2012, Hoosiers Against [Communist Corpse] spearheaded the stunning ouster of Tony Bennett -- the Indiana GOP's scandal-plagued former state education secretary who fled to [Communist Corpse]-peddling former governor Jeb Bush's Florida for another educrat job...   The nonprofit startup 'inBloom Inc.' evolved out of this strange alliance to operate the invasive data-base.   The entity planned to compile everything from student and family health-care histories to income information, religious affiliations, voting status, blood types and homework completion.   Once again, grass-roots parents revolted.   Moms and dads on both sides of the political aisle rose up across the country to reject the latest tech boondoggle peddled by educrat nosy-bodies.   Last Fall, voters kicked out 3 school board members in Jefferson county CO, over their support of inBloom..."
please help find Marizela

2014-05-09 (5774 Ayyr 09)
Amy Peterson _Jewish World Review_
shifting from sing-song baby-talk to adult-speech can aid children's development

2014-05-09 (5774 Ayyr 09)
Chris Cioffi _Billings MT Gazette_
rodent population up in city parks

2014-05-09 (5774 Ayyr 09)
Teresa Mull _American Spectator_
interview with Jim DeMint about _Falling in Love with America Again_

2014-05-09 (5774 Ayyr 09)
_Knoxville TN News Sentinel_
another Cincinnati pizza franchise, La Rosa's, plans to open a Cedar Bluff Knoxville location

2014-05-09 (5774 Ayyr 09)
Joseph Cress _Cumberland PA Sentinel_
Boiling Springs HS students in engineering design, build, and test-drive hover-crafts

2014-05-09 (5774 Ayyr 09)
Anthony Watts
solar cycle update: M class flare, little change in metrics, solar dynamo still slumping
 
Proposed Bills 2014
 
 

2014-05-10

2014-05-10 (5774 Ayyr 10)
Tom Lutey _Billings MT Gazette_
towns rush to keep pace with Bakken economic boom

2014-05-10 (5774 Ayyr 10)
_Seattle WA Times_
hundreds of illegal aliens at apple-packing plant may be laid off following USICE audit

2014-05-10 (5774 Ayyr 10)
Anthony Watts
most Himalayan glaciers are stable and in a steady state

2014-05-10 (5774 Ayyr 10)
Anthony Watts & Zeke Hausfather
spiking temperatures in the USHCN -- an artifact of late data reporting
 
Proposed Bills 2014
 
 

2014-05-11: Mother's Day

2014-05-11 (5774 Ayyr 11)
Norm Matloff _H-1B/ L-1/ Off-Shoring News-Letter_
Michael Teitelbaum talk at EPI
 
In his recent EPI talk Michael Teitelbaum discussed his new book, _Falling Behind?: Boom, Bust, and the Global Race for Scientific Talent_, in which he disputes the claim made by the tech industry and other vested interests that we have a STEM labor shortage.   Though I have not seen Michael's book, I highly recommend that you view the video of his talk; there is thought-provoking material in virtually every sentence.
 
However, he did say that there are spot shortages, and cited Silicon Valley as a "hothouse", with a genuine shortages.   I'm not sure the basis on which he came to that conclusion (he mentiond having friends in Silicon Valley who apprise him of the situation there), but it didn't really jibe with what I know.   I do know that the market in Silicon Valley -- where most of my students get their first job -- has been strong for new graduates, as I have reported many times.   But I have been loosely following the OES wage data for the area, and haven't seen any big rises.
 
And most important, I know that OLDER WORKERS (35+) still have a difficult time in that supposedly-booming region.   I'll come back to this point later in this posting.
 
So, what is the real situation?   I've gathered some data from a few sources, and the net result seems to me that there has NOT been a strong upward trend in (real) wages in the last few years.
 
First, here are the OES data.   This data (including CPI) is for the job category, Software Engineer, Applications, in the San Jose/Sunnyvale/Santa Clara region:

year (all data from month of May)	median hourly wage	CPI increase from previous year
2013	61.15	2.60
2012	55.80	2.64
2011	56.44	2.43
2010	56.16	1.07
2009	55.89	1.07
2008	51.71	4.19
2007	50.27	3.36
2006	49.16	3.93
2005	46.73	1.11
year (all data from month of May)	median hourly wage	CPI increase from previous year

Except for the 9.6% increase in 2013, Silicon Valley wages have been flat, actually losing ground relative to inflation.   Even the 9.6% figure doesn't seem consistent with the "desperate to hire" claims made by employers, and as discussed below, the 9.6% figure itself may be somewhat misleading.
 
Note that the inflation figures above use the usual "market basket" measure.
 
If one homes in (pun intended) on housing, one sees an even worse picture.   The San Francisco Chronicle reports that apartment rentals jumped 21% in San Francisco in the past year.   (The big firms such as Google, FB, Apple and so on bus in workers from San Francisco, where it is fashionable among Silicon Valley tech workers to live these days.)   From personal experience, I know that apartment rents in Sunnyvale and Mountain View are currently in the $2,500-$5,000 per month range.   (No, you didn't read that wrong.)   Michael has also cited Bay Area housing prices as responsible for whatever "shortage" of labor Silicon Valley has; who wants to PAY MORE for a SMALLER house?
 
Speaking of housing prices, anyone who has studied real estate markets knows that the mix matters (condos, 3-bedroom homes, 4-bedroom etc.), rather than overall averages.   That is certainly true for programmer salaries, and the Dice.com report, makes a very interesting comment.   It found a 7.2% wage increase in Silicon Valley from 2013 to 2014, but upon a finer break-down found this:
 
"The 7% year-over-year increase in salary was partially driven by those tech professionals earning more than $250K being included in this year's results.   Excluding those highly paid professionals, Silicon Valley salaries still increased at a greater rate than the national average or 5% year-over-year."
 
Presumably the 9.6% figure I displayed above is also substantially lower when one removes the super-earners.
 
As all of you know, I have continually stressed the points that the primary reasons employers find it attractive to hire H-1Bs are that (a) it allows them to avoid hiring the older workers, who are more expensive in both wages and benefits, and (b) the H-1Bs, at least those being sponsored for green cards, are immobile and thus in no danger of jumping ship to another firm.   In view of (a) and my "real estate mix" example, it would not be numerically inconsistent for employers to increase wages somewhat for the younger workers while still shunning the older ones.
 
In that vein, recall what I reported here a few weeks ago.
 
I mentioned in that post that I was opting to not disclose the names of the participants or their affiliations, even though no one had asked me to do so.   Well, I now think it's important to loosen that slightly, and reveal that "Firm Y" was Dropbox.   VP X had said that most of his work involves hiring, and that he was "desperate" to hire.   But I replied that a friend with excellent qualifications -- except for age -- had applied to Dropbox on their web site just the previous week, and was rejected the very next day, without even a phone call.   VP X then admitted frankly that he didn't have time to go through the mountains of applicants his firm receives.   And...based on what I know of tech industry HR practices, it's likely that in order to reduce the size of those mountains to mere knolls, Dropbox filters OUT most older workers upon receipt of their applications.
 
This is vital to keep in mind when you hear employers say -- and sincerely, I believe in VP X's case -- that they are "desperate" to hire.   Desperate, maybe, but only desperate to hire the young and the foreign.
 
I should mention that this same rejected friend ("A") had applied for a position with another friend of mine ("B"), who at the time was Director-level in a small but thriving firm in San Francisco.   "B" gave "A" a trial period, and told me that "A" had done work of a quality commensurate with his other (younger) workers, but that "A" was perceived as too expensive by the boss.   "B" added that he doesn't have trouble hiring software engineers, and that he doesn't think there is a shortage.
 
Getting back to Michael, he of course focused on the national scale, and concluded that we don't have a national shortage, and that there is no justification for raising the H-1B cap.   But I think it's important to understand that even the exceptional regions may not be exceptions after all.
 
Norm
---30---

2014-05-11 (5774 Ayyr 11)
Norm Matloff _H-1B/ L-1/ Off-Shoring News-Letter_
2 yrs experience = mid career
"An alert reader pointed me to a perfect example of the age issue in the tech industry job market [at CrunchBoard].   A line in this job ad reads: "Career Level: Mid Career (2+ years of experience).   Yes, folks, 2 years of experience is mid-career!   This is common-place, and I have cited various examples of big, main-stream U.S. firms with this attitude over the years.   My favorite is a panel discussion on KQED-FM (the main San Francisco NPR affiliate) back in 1998, featuring myself and Warren Leiden, then president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association [AILA].   Leiden was also one of the drafters of the legislation that ultimately was enacted that year to double the yearly H-1B visa cap.   (You didn't think that CONGRESS are the ones drafting bills, did you now?)   On the show, Leiden defined 'mid-level' programmers to be those having only 'a year or 2 of experience'.   It didn't use to be this way.   Programming was a career job.   But the availability of H-1Bs, who are overwhelmingly young, changed all that."

2014-05-11 (5774 Ayyr 11)
_Conservative HQ_
_TakeOver_ strategy defeated Eric Cantor's machine in Virginia's 7th congressional district: Fred Gruber

2014-05-11 (5774 Ayyr 11)
Edwin S. Rubenstein _V Dare_
April jobs report: even leftists/Dems are questioning BLS's incredible rosy figures (with graph, tables)
"[according to BLS figures:] Total employment fell by 73K, or by 0.05%. Native-born American employment rose by 148K or by 0.12%. Foreign-born employment fell by 221K, or by 0.92%

2014-05-11 (5774 Ayyr 11)
Greg Richter _News Max_
Michael Savage said pope should "redistribute" the vatican's wealth & income first

2014-05-11 (5774 Ayyr 11)
Mark Steyn _Jewish World Review_
#BringBackOurCourage
"The blogger Daniel Payne wrote this week that 'modern [leftism], at its core, is an ideology of talking, not doing'.   He was musing on a press release for some or other 'Day of Action' that is, as usual, a day of inaction: 'Diverse grassroots groups are organizing and participating in events such as walks, rallies and concerts and calling on government to reduce climate pollution, transition off fossil fuels and commit to a clean energy future.'   It's that easy! [!?]   You go to a concert and someone 'calls on government" to do something, and the world gets fixed..."

2014-05-11 (5774 Ayyr 11)
Samantha Olson _Jewish World Review_/_Medical Daily_
shorter people live longer

2014-05-11 (5774 Ayyr 11)
Samantha Olson _Jewish World Review_/_Medical Daily_
new immunotherapy effective against 80% of cancers

2014-05-11 (5774 Ayyr 11)
Andrew Klavan _PJ Media_
death versus life

2014-05-11 (5774 Ayyr 11)
Rick Moran _PJ Media_
failed ObummerDoesn'tCare "exchanges" cost tax-victims $500M

2014-05-11 (5774 Ayyr 11)
Stephen Green _PJ Media_
ObumerDoesn'tCare: crushing the USA economy, impoverishing Americans

2014-05-11 (5774 Ayyr 11)
Eric Worrall
Financial Times: no one trusts DC on climate
 
Proposed Bills 2014
 
 

2014-05-12

2014-05-12 (5774 Ayyr 12)
_Conservative HQ_
Freedom Fest is an intellectual feast

2014-05-12 (5774 Ayyr 12)
Robert N. Charette _IEEE Spectrum_
exposing the roots of the perpetual "STEM crisis", continual campaign for an "infinite" supply of cheap, young, pliant, low-skilled foreign labor with flexible ethics

2014-05-12 (5774 Ayyr 12)
Reid Kanaley _Jewish World Review_
tips for the job interview... if you can ever get one in the current, dysfunctional economy

2014-05-12 (5774 Ayyr 12)
Howard Mintz _San Jose CA Mercury News_
Sili Valley no-poaching settlement in doubt: plaintiff says the deal is "grossly inadequate"
"'There's no justice for the class in that, nor is there any real deterrent to future wrong-doing.', wrote Devine, a former Adobe engineer who now lives in Seattle... Lawyers for an estimated 64K tech employees..."

2014-05-12 (5774 Ayyr 12)
_Jewish World Review_
Iranian government says they have copied a US UAV

2014-05-12 (5774 Ayyr 12)
Batsheva Sobelman _Jewish World Review_
Israeli legislative committee gave initial approval Sunday to legislation that would curb the release of convicted murderers

2014-05-12 (5774 Ayyr 12)
Glenn Kessler _Jewish World Review_
reality check: race-obsessed anti-Semitic anti-Christian crony-socialist oath-breaker Barack Hussein Obummer's filibuster claims unfounded
"there have been just 133 successful filibusters -- meaning a final vote could not take place -- since 2007..."

2014-05-12 (5774 Ayyr 12)
Bruce Bialosky _Jewish World Review_
from Target to Benghazi

2014-05-12 (5774 Ayyr 12)
Star Parker _Jewish World Review_
slowly more blacks are joining Tea Party ranks

2014-05-12 (5774 Ayyr 12)
Bernard Goldberg _Jewish World Review_
MSM reporters say they're not leftists, but their behavior contradicts those claims

2014-05-12 (5774 Ayyr 12)
Diane Dimond _Jewish World Review_
an intriguing method to reduce initiation of force and fraud

2014-05-12 (5774 Ayyr 12)
Mitch Albom _Jewish World Review_
leftist Detroit insanity: teacher used broom to break up fight... and was fired

2014-05-12 (5774 Ayyr 12)
George Will _Jewish World Review_
judge's ruling curbed political corruption in Wisconsin
"Eric O'Keefe's refusal to be intimidated by lawless law enforcement officials produced Randa's remarkably emphatic ruling against an especially egregious example of Democrats using government power to suppress conservatives' political speech."

2014-05-12 (5774 Ayyr 12)
Paul Greenberg _Jewish World Review_
praying in public
"The only surprise here was that a court which begins its every session with a prayer, 'G0D save the United States and this honorable court.', should have had any trouble reaching such a decision."

2014-05-12 (5774 Ayyr 12)
Marga Lincoln _Helena Independent Record_/ _Billings MT Gazette_
abolitionist Edgerton, reputed "Father of Montana", all but lost in state's history

2014-05-12 (5774 Ayyr 12)
_PJ Media_
senator Mike Lee wants to end corporate energy subsidies (video)

2014-05-12 (5774 Ayyr 12)
George Rasley _Conservative HQ_
we love Rand Paul, but...

2014-05-12 (5774 Ayyr 12)
Matthew Burke _Tea Party News Network_
congress could jail Lois Lerner, but GOP losership refuses: "waiting for Eric Holder to do his job"... for a change
"Boehner then is asked by Bartiromo if the House has the authority to arrest Lerner, the 'retired' former head of the Obama IRS tax-exempt organizations division. Boehner responds that while Congress has the constitutional authority to arrest Lerner, he's depending on corrupt attorney-general Eric Holder, who himself was held in contempt of congress, to 'do his job'."

2014-05-12 (5774 Ayyr 12)
Chuck Ross _Daily Caller_
murderers, rapists, kidnappers: over 36K illegal aliens who had been convicted for nearly 88K additional crimes were released by the Barack Hussein Obummer regime in 2013
Jessica Vaughan: Center for Immigration Studies
J. Christian Adams: PJ Media
"Nearly 200 murderers, over 400 rapists, and 300 kidnappers in the U.S.A. illegally were released by Immigration and Customs Enforcement [US ICE] while awaiting deportation proceedings, according to a new report from the Center for Immigration Studies..."

2014-05-12 (5774 Ayyr 12)
Steve Goldstein _MarketWatch_
median single-family home in San Jose CA costs 12.5 times the median in Youngstown OH

2014-05-12 (5774 Ayyr 12)
Gosia Wozniacka _San Jose CA Mercury News_/_AP_
governments, tax-victim funded non-profits train immigrants, not US citizens, to establish micro-businesses

2014-05-12 (5774 Ayyr 12)
Alyssa A. Lappen _PJ Media_
Andrew Bostom's _Iran's Final Solution for Israel: The Legacy of Islamic Jihad and Shi'ite Islamic Jew-Hatred in Iran_ examines mullahs' genocidal intentions

2014-05-12 (5774 Ayyr 12)
Tom Blumer _PJ Media_
Communist Corpse: 2014's bi-partisan wedge issue

2014-05-12 (5774 Ayyr 12)
Jamie Radtke _Bull Elephant_
Rep's Campbell county VA 5th district committee taken over by Dems

2014-05-12 (5774 Ayyr 12)
Phyllis Schlafly _World Net Daily_
parents oppose Communist Corpse

2014-05-12 (5774 Ayyr 12)
_Washington DC Times_
restore real marriage in VA

2014-05-12 (5774 Ayyr 12)
Richard Ekman _Chronicle of Higher Education_
don't trust a school or university administration, let alone a state or federal department of educationism with a student data-base

2014-05-12 (5774 Ayyr 12)
Anthony Watts
Antarctic sea ice at record levels

2014-05-12 (5774 Ayyr 12)
Anthony Watts
what video(s) would you recommend to a 5th grade teacher to counter climate hysteria?
 
Proposed Bills 2014
 
 

2014-05-13

2014-05-13 (5774 Ayyr 13)
Jessica Vaughan _Center for Immigration Studies_
US ICE chose to free murderers and other criminals

2014-05-13 (5774 Ayyr 13)
Tom Purcell _Jewish World Review_
rudeness and incivility...

2014-05-13 (5774 Ayyr 13)
Dennis Prager _Jewish World Review_
why the leftists don't care about bad economic news... it has no effect on the ruling Dems, nor the leftist media

2014-05-13 (5774 Ayyr 13)
Thomas Sowell _Jewish World Review_
kangaroo courts on campus
"There seem to be a dangerously large number of people who think that the law exists to give them whatever they want -- even when that means denying other people the same rights that they claim for themselves.   Nowhere is this self-centered attitude more common than on college campuses.   And nowhere are such attitudes more encouraged than by the [Barack Hussein Obummer regime/Holder DoJ]...   The last thing attorney-general Eric Holder's Justice Department is interested in is justice."

2014-05-13 (5774 Ayyr 13)
Jeff Jacoby _Jewish World Review_
lawyer glut can't end soon enough

2014-05-13 (5774 Ayyr 13)
Richard. Z. Chesnoff _Jewish World Review_
What happened to the Jews who lived in Iraq?

2014-05-13 (5774 Ayyr 13)
David Limbaugh _Jewish World Review_
leftist thought police emboldened and on a tear

2014-05-13 (5774 Ayyr 13)
Alicia Colon _Jewish World Review_
Jimmy Carter threw the Iranian people under the bus and race-obsessed anti-Semitic anti-Christian crony-socialist oath-breaker Barack Hussein Obummer is doing the same

2014-05-13 (5774 Ayyr 13)
Debra J. Saunders _Jewish World Review_
"journalists" are mostly angry white leftist men

2014-05-13 (5774 Ayyr 13)
Christine M. Flowers _Jewish World Review_
Planned Parenthood's "repellent" spawn

2014-05-13 (5774 Ayyr 13)
Walter Hudson _PJ Media_
Communist Corpse melt-down

2014-05-13 (5774 Ayyr 13)
Walter Hudson _PJ Media_
chamber of crony socialists gives stark ultimatum to GOP losership: oppose immigration reform or we'll oppose the GOP presidential candidate in 2016
"[Perversion of US visa and immigration law is] an inside the Beltway issue being pushed by the business community that wants millions more low wage, low skilled workers... Reasonable people may disagree about immigration reform but the Senate bill [S744] that so enamors Mr. Donohue is far from reasonable... Of course, Donohue and the rest of his Business Roundtable friends want new immigrants [and even more E-3 and H and J and L visa guest-workers] so they can keep wages low. And that's the whole reason for this tirade..."

2014-05-13 (5774 Ayyr 13)
_Conservative HQ_
Richard Viguerie on Mark Levin show today

2014-05-13 (5774 Ayyr 13)
_Conservative HQ_
2 show-down GOP primaries today: Sasse and Mooney

2014-05-13 (5774 Ayyr 13)
_Conservative HQ_
property rights battle in York county VA

2014-05-13 (5774 Ayyr 13)
_Conservative HQ_
why knowing the why and how of the attack on the US embassy in Benghazi is important... and why the leftists are trying to block effective investigation (video)

2014-05-13 (5774 Ayyr 13)
Jenna Portnoy & Robert Costa _Washington DC Post_
David Brat picking up momentum in sub-urban Richmond VA's 7th congressional district

2014-05-13 (5774 Ayyr 13)
Selena Owens _World Net Daily_
Steve Lonegan is RINO hunting in NJ

2014-05-13 (5774 Ayyr 13)
_Breitbart_
Mike Pence blasted Communist Corpse

2014-05-13 (5774 Ayyr 13)
Jason Howerton _Blaze_
Glenn Beck's criticisms of Communist Corpse struck home on O'Reilly show: "This is about control and conform.   Period."
10 Communist Corpse "exercises" that will have you tearing your hair out

2014-05-13 (5774 Ayyr 13)
Jessica van Egeren _Madison WI Capital Times_/_LaCrosse Tribune_
Tea Partiers strong in WI "it will be tough to beat the tea party candidates that Republicans are likely to nominate in those districts.   'I predict 75% of those 15 seats will nominate a tea party Republican.', Barca said.   In 2010, 18 of the 25 new Assembly members were affiliated with the tea party.   That group has a strong hold on shaping policy and is impacting the decisions of several out-going representatives not to run again..."

2014-05-13 (5774 Ayyr 13)
Barry Farber _World Net Daily_
voting fraud is a serious threat to the USA: in 2010 "Dems simply failed to cheat enough to prevail"
"One single fraudulent vote is an 'attack' on our democratic system.   Massive voter fraud is a massive attack.   The web-site Watchdog.com tells us that a group known as the Virginia Voters Alliance counted 44K voters registered in Maryland as well as Virginia.   An additional 40K to 60K dead voters were found to be on the active voters list in that one state of Virginia, according to the [Socialist Insecurity Abomination].   It's not [only] Chicago any more...   [Leftists are] shameless in their insistence that, despite the non-controversial need for photo-ID for vastly less-important activities, the demand for photo-ID for voters is racist..."

2014-05-13 (5774 Ayyr 13)
Monica Crowley _Political Mavens_
bad jobs and economic numbers, the disaster of socialized medicine, a collapse of American power and prestige in the world, and scandals coming out of the leftists' ears

2014-05-13 (5774 Ayyr 13)
Stephen Kruiser _PJ Media_
Media Matters is upset that an Islamic terrorist group is being identified as such... not so much at the terrorism

2014-05-13 (5774 Ayyr 13)
Bridget Johnson _PJ Media_
global poll: shocking rate of holocaust denial

2014-05-13 (5774 Ayyr 13)
Andrew C. McCarthy _PJ Media_
race-obsessed anti-Semitic anti-Christian crony-socialist oath-breaker Barack Hussein Obummer's pro-Islamist policies have negative practical results in Nigeria

2014-05-13 (5774 Ayyr 13)
Roger L Simon _PJ Media_
holocaust re-visited: an open "thank you" note to the apparently clueless Ed Schultz

2014-05-13 (5774 Ayyr 13)
Chris Queen _PJ Media_
Sean Astin opens up about his Christian world-view

2014-05-13 (5774 Ayyr 13)
Bryan Preston _PJ Media_
leftists' ridiculous Koch obsessive hysteria reaches a whole new level

2014-05-13/1940-05-13
PM Winston Churchill
I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.   We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind...
Winston Churchill Centre

2014-05-13 (5774 Ayyr 13)
Don J. Easterbrook
"national climate assessment" vs. reality

2014-05-13 (5774 Ayyr 13)
Anthony Watts
What caused a 1300 year deep freeze 12,800 years ago? New PNAS paper says it wasn't a meteorite impact
 
Proposed Bills 2014
 
 

2014-05-14

2014-05-14 (5774 Ayyr 14)
_Center for Immigration Studies_
May 20 panel to discuss extent of glut of STEM professionals

2014-05-14 (5774 Ayyr 14)
David North _Center for Immigration Studies_
more universities that have repeatedly violated immigration laws... + report on exchange students

2014-05-14 (5774 Ayyr 14)
Dan Cadman _Center for Immigration Studies_
el Camino Americano rally permitted by Interior during "shut-down"
"Remember the budget impasse last Fall that shut the government down at the beginning of the new federal fiscal year in October? You know: [The one in which the leftists -- notably race-obsessed anti-Semitic anti-Christian crony-socialist oath-breaker Barack Hussein Obummer, Reid and Pelosi -- refused to negotiate while claiming the Reps were being too inflexible?]   The one that resulted in all 401 of the national parks, monuments, and other properties under supervision of the National Park Service being closed, even though it cost millions of dollars in tourist and associated business revenues?   The one so rigid that even octogenarian and nonagenarian veterans of the Second World War were locked out of the World War 2 memorial despite having traveled hundreds of miles...   Even as veterans and tourists were being turned away from any number of park and monument facilities, the Camino Americano ('American Road') Rally for [Reprehensible Immigration Law Perversion] was granted a permit by the Interior Department to demonstrate on the National Mall in Washington, DC -- presumably incurring substantial costs in Park Police salaries and overtime, not to mention the amount needed for maintenance crews and clean-up afterward...."

2014-05-14 (5774 Ayyr 14)
Norm Matloff _H-1B/ L-1/ Off-Shoring News-Letter_
disgraceful USCIS
 
There is a bit of a drama in progress at the Federal Register site.
 
(For those whom I've already mentioned this to, the site now seems to have changed to the above address.)   Here is what the situation is:
 
The USCIS proposes a new regulation, under which the spouses of some H-1B visa holders, here in the U.S.A. under an H-4 visa, would be granted work authorization.   DHS, by law, must open the proposal to public comment, which anyone can submit at the above site.
 
I use the word "drama", because the contrast is quite striking: There are huge numbers of posts supporting the proposal by people with Indian names, many of whom identify themselves as H-1Bs or H-4s, with the opposing posters being almost all Anglo-surnamed.
 
No one here will be surprised to hear that I think this proposal is a not a good idea.   But what really concerns me is PROCESS.   I regard this as one of the most blatant acts of deception and abuse by a presidential administration I've ever seen, by either party.
 
First, there is the usurpation of the powers of the Legislative Branch.   Though there may well be a loop-hole or 2 that USCIS found for their action, the fact is that it at least violates the spirit of the Constitution, if not the letter.
 
I'm not even sure that it is proper for USCIS to solicit comments from non-citizens.   But it's definitely wrong to take an action that USCIS knows will adversely impact citizens.
 
In that light, it's truly outrageous that USCIS says the proposal is designed to prevent "economic hardship" to the H-1B families.   In fact, some of the H-1B comments make the same point, along the lines of, "It's hard to live on a single income, especially for families with children..."   The obvious question -- obvious even to the USCIS, I'm sure -- is, What about the economic hardships brought upon Americans by the H-1B (and now, H-4) program?
 
Yes, I do sympathize with the frustations of highly-educated H-4s who must stay home idle.   But let's put things in perspective, OK?
 
The industry lobbyists (whom USCIS seems to have close relations with, judging from their use of all the industry's talking points) always argue that American tech workers aren't impacted by H-1B, citing low unemployment rates.   As I've said before, this is highly misleading.
 
People who can't find work are forced to leave the field; the former engineer now working as a school-bus driver or box packer (to cite 2 instances I've seen personally) counts as employed, even though he is under-employed.   Many software developers are independent contractors, who count as employed even though H-1B causes them to have fewer contracts and lower rates.   Of course, EVERYONE in H-1B-heavy fields is impacted in the form of lower wages, due to simple supply and demand; even the NRC commission, with reps from Intel and MSFT, conceded this.   H-1B software developers form a substantial fraction of the new jobs created each year in that occupation.
 
Yes, this does cause economic hardship among Americans.   In some cases, it has even been a factor in heart attacks and suicides.   (When I mentioned this once to Neflix CEO and strident advocate of H-1B expansion Reed Hastings, he replied sarcastically, "Yeah, and it causes them to beat their wives.")
 
The USCIS has estimated that as many as 100K H-4s might benefit from the proposed rules change.   Their more detailed computation suggests that the actual number may be less than this, but they fail to account for the fact that this change would create its own demand.   In any case, the actual number is at least in the tens of thousands.
 
As I've pointed out many times, I personally have no stake in the H-1B issue.   But whenever I see an issue on which I know the conventional wisdom (typically shaped clandestinely by PR experts working for the vested interests) to be wrong, I tend to speak out.   And when a government agency is involved in deliberate deception (yes, deliberate), I am doubly motivated to call them out on it.
 
The agency has been involved in flagrant bias from the beginning, when it used the term "our broken immigration system" on its home page, a code phrase for desiring an expansionist immigration policy.   But USCIS has really outdone itself this time.
 
Just look at the research they cite in support of the rules change.   It's extremely selective, all portrary H-1B in a good light, with NO research cited from other authors.   Indeed, even countering statements by the same authors are ignored.   USCIS cites an old paper by Hunt and Gauthier-Loiselle that found strong immigrant patenting rates, without telling readers that Hunt subsequently did a more detailed study, with very different findings than in the first.   I quote from my EPI paper:
 
"Hunt's second study (Hunt 2009 is the working paper version; Hunt 2011 the final) addressed this question.   In the working paper, she wrote, 'After I control for field of study...and education...both main work visa groups and student/trainee visa holders have statistically significantly lower patenting probabilities than natives.'   In the final published version the data-set coverage was somewhat different, but she still found no statistically significant difference between immigrants and natives."
 
Similarly, USCIS cites work by Vivek Wadhwa, ignoring his repeated statements that H-1B is a bad, abusive program, such as, "I know from my experience as a tech CEO that H-1Bs are cheaper than domestic hires.   Technically, these workers are supposed to be paid a "prevailing wage", but this mechanism is riddled with loop-holes", and "I was one of the first [CEOs] to use H-1B visas to bring workers to the U.S.A.   Why did I do that?   Because it was cheaper."   Vivek also spoken many times about the problems older American programmers and engineers have in finding work, which goes directly to the fact that "economic hardship" applies to Americans too.   Various congressionally-commissioned studies that have discussed abuse of H-1B are completely ignored by USCIS.
 
I've written elsewhere about the entrepreneurship issue, and will say more soon, but again, the research cited by USCIS is misleading.   In any case, though, point here concerns the blatant lack of balance.
 
The irony of all this is that many of the H-4s will be in for a rude awakening when they hit the job market.   A lot of them will find that the market is just as tough for them as it is for Americans, and that the reason their spouses were able to find work in many cases was employers' desire for cheap, immobile labor -- in contrast to the H-4s, who will be free agents.
 
The people at USCIS will treat the posted comments as indicating a ground-swell of public support for the proposed change, drowning out the ones by Americans, most of whom are not even aware of the rules change or the comments side [or are using superannuated systems which won't work with the evil MSFT Javascript abused on the site].   The folks at USCIS [along with the rest of the corrupt Barack Hussein Obummer regime] are giving a bad name to the notion of being a "public servant".
 
Norm
---30---

2014-05-14 (5774 Ayyr 14)
Steven Emerson _Jewish World Review_
NYTimes: making the world safe for terrorism

2014-05-14 (5774 Ayyr 14)
Allan Wall _V Dare_
it's high time for an immigration shut-down, a pause, a time of recovery from decades of excessive legal and illegal influx

2014-05-14 (5774 Ayyr 14)
"Hugh Pickens DOT Com" _Slash Dot_/_Dice_
your CDs and DVDs are dying

2014-05-14 (5774 Ayyr 14)
_Slash Dot_/_Dice_
RFC7258/BCP188: defending against pervasive privacy violation
"Internet Engineering Task Force consensus on the fact that many powerful well-funded entities feel it is appropriate to monitor people's use of the Net, without telling those people.   The consensus is: 'This monitoring is an attack and designers of Internet protocols must work to mitigate it.'"

2014-05-14 (5774 Ayyr 14)
"Soulskill" _Slash Dot_/_Dice_
major ISPs warn that FCC moves to increase consolidation of telecomm are likely to throttle innovation and slow network upgrades

2014-05-14 (5774 Ayyr 14)
_Conservative HQ_
Judicial Watch says new documents show IRS HQ was in control of attacks on Tea Partiers
"The documents also show extensive pressure on the IRS by senator Carl Levin (D-MI) to shut down conservative-leaning tax-exempt organizations.   The IRS's e-mail messages by Lois Lerner detail her misleading explanations to investigators..."

2014-05-14 (5774 Ayyr 14)
_Conservative HQ_
Ben Sasse in Nebraska and Alex Mooney in West Virginia, won convincingly

2014-05-14 (5774 Ayyr 14)
Joseph Farah _World Net Daily_
diversity? tolerance?   not in today's leftist, hypocritical, corrupt media
"Take the latest intel from Federal Elections Commission chairman Lee Goodman.   He told a reporter for the Washington Examiner recently that there are 'impulses in the government every day to second-guess and look into the editorial decisions of conservative publishers' -- and, he explained, his own commission has been used in efforts by Democrats... and 'progressives' to squelch constitutionally protected political speech...   they don't really value diversity and tolerance.   Those are merely convenient buzz-words they cite when they are shouting down opposition."

2014-05-14 (5774 Ayyr 14)
Thomas Sowell _Jewish World Review_
the height of power-mad left-coast utopianism
"...Comparing -- weighing one thing against another -- is what rational decision-making is all about.   Exempting what some segment of the population wants from the process of weighing alternatives is what rhetoric-driven political stampedes are all about...   Constitutionally protected property rights, which have been seriously eroded by judicial 'interpretation', were meant to keep many decisions out of the political arena..."

2014-05-14 (5774 Ayyr 14)
Betsy McCaughey _Jewish World Review_
more than talk needed to rescue veterans victimized by government-run medical care

2014-05-14 (5774 Ayyr 14)
Bill Gertz _Jewish World Review_
Red Chinese general gets a warm welcome in U.S.A. despite increased tension; Work for 'influence'; An illegal carrier visit?

2014-05-14 (5774 Ayyr 14)
Ann McFeatters _Jewish World Review_
confront evil, DC wimps

2014-05-14 (5774 Ayyr 14)
Michelle Malkin _Jewish World Review_
ObummerDoesn'tCare gold-bricks
"Multi-national tech management company Serco won a $1.2G contract with the federal Center for Medicare and Medicaid last summer to 'support' the beleaguered Obamacare health care exchanges.   (According to the latest estimates, nearly half a billion dollars in taxpayer subsidies have now been squandered on inoperable or defunct health care exchanges in Massachusetts, Oregon, Nevada and Maryland.)   In addition to the office in Missouri, Serco over-sees [ObummerDoesn'tCare] processing centers in Rogers, AR, Lawton, OK, and London, KY, which are projected to 'employ' up to 10K people.   Not long after Serco snagged its billion-dollar Cash for [ObummerDoesn'tCare gold-bricks] contract, news broke in Britain of a massive probe of fraud involving Serco's parent company.   The firm allegedly over-billed the government by 'tens of millions of pounds' on a public contract to electronically monitor parolees.   Investigators found that Serco had billed British [tax-victims] for tracking criminals who were dead or still in prison...   Serco's American subsidiary is one of the largest federal prime contractors in the USA, with oversight of our patent application and visa application processing systems, as well."
It's getting a bit grafty in here...jgo
please help find Marizela

2014-05-14 (5774 Ayyr 14)
Gannon LeBlanc _PJ Media_
environmental safety and sustainability exist in large parts because of free markets and capitalism

2014-05-14 (5774 Ayyr 14)
Scott Ott _PJ Media_
teaching a GOP senator how to talk about poverty

2014-05-14 (5774 Ayyr 14)
Andrew G. Bostom _PJ Media_
US government is sacrificing US citizen toddler to sharia in Sudan?
Bridget Johnson: Barack Hussein Obummer regime "deeply disturbed" by death sentence for Christian woman

2014-05-14 (5774 Ayyr 14)
Rod Kackley _PJ Media_
leftists mount massive negative research effort against Rich Snyder

2014-05-14 (5774 Ayyr 14)
Paula Bolyard _PJ Media_
11 curious spurious correlations

2014-05-14 (5774 Ayyr 14)
_PJ Media_
the run-down: Timothy Geithner says he was asked to mis-lead the public (video)

2014-05-14 (5774 Ayyr 14)
_PJ Media_
young Hitlery supporters struggle to name anything positive she has achieved (video)

2014-05-14 (5774 Ayyr 14)
Cory Franklin _Jewish World Review_
Roger Bannister: the man who confronted barriers... and broke them

2014-05-14 (5774 Ayyr 14)
David Archibald
weaker solar activity means colder, and colder also means drier

2014-05-14 (5774 Ayyr 14)
Anthony Watts
off the rails -- Godzilla and climate

2014-05-14 (5774 Ayyr 14)
Bob Tisdale
2014 April global surface (land+ocean) and lower troposphere temperature... anomaly
 
Proposed Bills 2014
 
 

2014-05-15

2014-05-15 (5774 Ayyr 15)
Victor Davis Hanson _Jewish World Review_
the modern world is still premodern in many ways

2014-05-15 (5774 Ayyr 15)
Lenore Skenazy _Jewish World Review_
reason and insanity in war against terrorists

2014-05-15 (5774 Ayyr 15)
Sharon Randall _Jewish World Review_
taming the little dragon

2014-05-15 (5774 Ayyr 15)
Jack Kelly _Jewish World Review_
dig into the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi: the Barack Hussein Obummer regime must provide answers

2014-05-15 (5774 Ayyr 15)
Jay Ambrose _Jewish World Review_
Communist Corpse is risky, widely misunderstood, and should be abandoned

2014-05-15 (5774 Ayyr 15)
Cal Thomas _Jewish World Review_
there is less respect for freedom of speech when discussing gays' rights and privileges

2014-05-15 (5774 Ayyr 15)
George Will _Jewish World Review_
when politicians'... and voters'... desires run up against reality... and the primaries leave voters with a choice between bad and worse

2014-05-15 (5774 Ayyr 15)
Ann Coulter _Jewish World Review_
death penalty opponents, have I got a deal for you

2014-05-15 (5774 Ayyr 15)
judge Andrew P. Napolitano _Jewish World Review_
partisan political messages implicit, or even contrary to what was explicitly stated

2014-05-15 (5774 Ayyr 15)
Larry Elder _Jewish World Review_
Hollywood's Beverly Hills hotel boycott

2014-05-15 (5774 Ayyr 15)
Debra J. Saunders _Jewish World Review_
today's motto at colleges and universities: shut up

2014-05-15 (5774 Ayyr 15)
Paul Greenberg _Jewish World Review_
today's motto at colleges and universities: shut up

2014-05-15 (5774 Ayyr 15)
David Steinberg _PJ Media_
top Cantor aide Ray Allen angrily says he'll bankrupt VA GOP, install his operatives, and rebuild it in the perverted RINO way he wishes, and alienate the non-leftist base: Dave Brat popularity continues to rise

2014-05-15 (5774 Ayyr 15)
Chris Chmielenski _Conservative HQ_
Sal Russo's opposition to immigration reform
"Russo's immigration proposal is nearly identical to the principles pushed by GOP House [losers] -- John Boehner, Eric Cantor, and Paul Ryan -- back in January."

2014-05-15 (5774 Ayyr 15)
George Rasley _Conservative HQ_
how a reformed GOP can win the White House: senator Jeff Sessions gets it

2014-05-15 (5774 Ayyr 15)
Tony Lee _Breitbart_
Ben Sasse victory after pro-reform movement coalesced around him in Nebraska

2014-05-15 (5774 Ayyr 15)
Tony Lee _Right Scoop_
Allen West considering run for president

2014-05-15 (5774 Ayyr 15)
William A. Jacobson _Legal Insurrection_
after admin encouraged Palestinian advocates, condemned anti-semitism, students defaced pro-Israel "Wall of Truth", after which Vassar admins took it down
Jeff Dunetz: Truth Revolt
vile at Vassar

2014-05-15 (5774 Ayyr 15)
Robert Emmett Tyrrell ii _Jewish World Review_
the left has no practical, reasonable solutions for the problems that agitate it

2014-05-15 (5774 Ayyr 15)
Anthony Watts
solar wind to lightning strike link discovered
 
Proposed Bills 2014
 
 

2014-05-16

2014-05-16 (5774 Ayyr 16)
OAS
Operation American Spring begins today: kick out the oath-breakers who are trying to destroy the USA
Cheryl K. Chumley: Washington DC Times
Talking Points Memo
Resistance United advocates prayer
fire Andrea Mitchell
Liberty Beacon
Tea Party News Network
Freedom Outpost
Before It's News
Truth and Action
Debate Politics
Ron Paul Forums
Free Republic
Shoebat
Vol Nation
OAS FAQ

2014-05-16 (5774 Ayyr 16)
_Conservative HQ_
bring bull-dog Bob Barr back to DC in Georgia's 11th congressional district

2014-05-16 (5774 Ayyr 16)
Paul Nachman _V Dare_
Mexican government to peddle reconquista matricula-consular kkkards in Wyoming

2014-05-16 (5774 Ayyr 16)
Caroline May _Breitbart_
Jeff Sessions updated reasons to impeach race-obsessed anti-Semitic anti-Christian crony-socialist oath-breaker Barack Hussein Obummer due to adamant refusal to enforce visa and immigration laws
"time-line begins in early 2009 with the administration's announcement that that it is 'not doing raids or audits' of workplaces potentially employing illegal immigrants. The time-line ends this week on 2014 May 12 with an internal US ICE document revealing that last year ICE released more than 36,007 criminal immigrants convicted of nearly 88K crimes... interior deportations have declined more than 40% since 2009 and some 75% of all 'deportations' are [barbarian invaders caught at the borders]."

2014-05-16 (5774 Ayyr 16)
_Conservative HQ_
end the scandals: vote Chris McDaniel for senator from MS

2014-05-16 (5774 Ayyr 16)
George Rasley _Conservative HQ_
Valerie Jarrett, arguably president race-obsessed anti-Semitic anti-Christian crony-socialist oath-breaker Barack Hussein Obummer's most trusted adviser and political confidant, told attendees at the yearly invitation-only SkyBridge conference that House loser John Boehner would help the White House make a push to oppose immigration reform, but impose immigration law perversion, in the next 3 months

2014-05-16 (5774 Ayyr 16)
Jennifer Burke _Tea Party News Network_
Greg Abbott leading polls in election for governor of Texas

2014-05-16 (5774 Ayyr 16)
Mona Charen _Jewish World Review_
making college/university affordable

2014-05-16 (5774 Ayyr 16)
Suzanne Fields _Jewish World Review_
today, there's no room at universities for that bigot Shakespeare

2014-05-16 (5774 Ayyr 16)
Lori Borgman _Jewish World Review_
be glad you weren't invited to speak at graduation

2014-05-16 (5774 Ayyr 16)
Michelle Malkin _Jewish World Review_
the Veterans Administration's deadly bureaucratic drones
please help find Marizela

2014-05-16 (5774 Ayyr 16)
Jonah Goldberg _Jewish World Review_
moral compass points toward use of force in Nigeria

2014-05-16 (5774 Ayyr 16)
Dave Weinbaum _Jewish World Review_
if pres. race-obsessed anti-Semitic anti-Christian crony-socialist oath-breaker Barack Hussein Obummer (or either of the Clintons) says the sky is blue bring your umbrella

2014-05-16 (5774 Ayyr 16)
David Limbaugh _Jewish World Review_
spin: "pro-choice"

2014-05-16 (5774 Ayyr 16)
Diana West _Jewish World Review_
no end in Afghanistan to the government's war against US tax-victims

2014-05-16 (5774 Ayyr 16)
Jeremy C. Owens _San Jose CA Mercury News_
Sili Valley employment recovered to depressed levels of early 2008; now, if we could only recover to the pre-2001 levels, or better, the late 1980s levels
George Avalos: San Jose CA Mercury News/Oakland CA Tribune
few STEM opportunities advertised in Mountain View Patch

2014-05-16 (5774 Ayyr 16)
Tony Lee _Breitbart_
Scholars Debunk Claims of High-Tech Workers Shortage, Question Industry's "Free Pass"

2014-05-16 (5774 Ayyr 16)
Jean Kaufman _PJ Media_
apparently, there's no statute of limitations on Bush bashing

2014-05-16 (5774 Ayyr 16)
Thomas E. Brewton
race-obsessed anti-Semitic anti-Christian crony-socialist oath-breaker Barack Hussein Obummer's pull-back from selling defense system to Poland encouraged Putin's move on the Ukraine

2014-05-16 (5774 Ayyr 16)
Patrick J. Buchanan
left-right convergence?
"...Congress voted with [crony socialist business executives] -- against the country.   Result: 20 years of the largest trade deficits in USA history.   Trans-national corporations have prospered beyond the dreams of avarice, as Middle America has seen its wages frozen for a generation...   America never voted for NAFTA, GATT, the WTO, mass immigration, amnesty, or more H-1Bs to come take the jobs of our workers.   These votes have been forced upon members of congress by [business and academia executives and their lobbyists and lawyers] carrying out their assignments from corporate America and its PACs, which reward the compliant with campaign checks.   Both parties now feed at the same K Street and Wall Street troughs.   Both have oligarchs contributing tens of millions to parties and politicians who do their bidding..."

2014-05-16 (5774 Ayyr 16)
_Fox_
UMich consumer sentiment index down from 84.1 in late April to 81.8 in mid-May
Bill McBride: Calculated Risk
CNBC
St. Louis Fed
Federal Reserve Board St. Louis

2014-05-16 (5774 Ayyr 16)
P. Gosselin
internal concern over professional ethics within meteorology and climate scientists in Germany

2014-05-16 (5774 Ayyr 16)
Michael Balter _AAAS Science_
DNA tests confirm 13K year old bones from watery "Black Hole" cave in Yucatan peninsula is related to modern Amerindians
 
Proposed Bills 2014
 
 

2014-05-17

2014-05-17 (5774 Ayyr 17)
OAS
Operation American Spring continues today: kick out the oath-breakers who are trying to destroy the USA
Cheryl K. Chumley: Washington DC Times
Talking Points Memo
Resistance United advocates prayer
fire Andrea Mitchell
Liberty Beacon
Tea Party News Network
Freedom Outpost
Before It's News
Truth and Action
Debate Politics
Ron Paul Forums
Free Republic
Shoebat
Vol Nation
OAS FAQ

2014-05-17 (5774 Ayyr 17)
Michael Curtis _American Thinker_
liberals must refute the leftist bigots on campuses

2014-05-17 (5774 Ayyr 17)
Thomas E. Brewton
take a look at the whole chess-board: the winner in Ukraine is Red China

2014-05-17 (5774 Ayyr 17)
Christopher Monckton
pseudo-scientists' 8 climate claims debunked

2014-05-17 (5774 Ayyr 17)
Willis Eschenbach
the tip of the Gleissberg: counting and measuring solar activity

2014-05-17 (5774 Ayyr 17)
David Archibald
dial M for Maunder Minimum
 
Proposed Bills 2014
 
 

2014-05-18

2014-05-18 (5774 Ayyr 18)
Norm Matloff _H-1B/ L-1/ Off-Shoring News-Letter_
Irony in Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article
 
A major newspaper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, is running a major series on immigration, starting today [with this article].
 
The title of the article (chosen by the editor, not the reporter) says it all: "Pittsburgh's economy has gained from high-skilled immigrants."   Unfortunately, the article doesn't make a case for this.
 
Take for instance the CMU professor profiled in the piece, Tai Sing Lee.   As some readers know, I'm partial to the Cantonese, and I say, good for him.   (And for his cancer researcher wife.)   But surely the P-G can't be saying that without immigration, CMU wouldn't have been able to fill Dr. Lee's position.
 
I've always strongly supported the notion of facilitating the immigration of the world's best and brightest, and CMU faculty such as professor Lee presumably qualify.   He SHOULD be here.   But even then, an internal paper at the National Science Foundation correctly forecast in 1989 that the large influx of foreign students would suppress STEM PhD wages, causing Americans to avoid doctoral work.   IOW, foreign students have displaced U.S. citizens and permanent residents in grad school, and thus also in university faculties.   In light of my work and that of others that the average quality of foreign students is somewhat lower than that of the Americans, this displacement represents a net loss to the U.S. economy, contrary to the title of the P-G article (which, in fairness, was likely chosen by the editor, not the reporter).
 
When one talks about immigration and the economy, it is important to define one's terms.   For the "We need America to rule the world" types, immigration has arguably achieved their goal, in terms of absolute GDP.   But for the rest of us, measures such as per-capita GDP are far more relevant.   There are a number of studies showing that the American middle claas has lost ground in the past few decades, and I think it's clear that immigration has played a role in that.   In STEM areas the evidence connecting stagnant wages and "challenging" job searches to immigration is compelling, in my view.
 
To me, the economic case for immigration is weak at best.   Instead, I regard the big success story for immigration to be another theme of the P-G article, demographic diversity.   Things are much better in that aspect since when I was a kid.
 
(If you aren't interested in diversity, skip down to the material on Mastech below.)
 
Ironically, immigration is actually now REDUCING diversity in some ways.   I grew up in the then lower middle class white area of the San Gabriel Valley in the LA region.   In my high school graduating class of 400, we had just 1 black, 2 Asians and maybe 3 or 4 Latinos.   For a while, immigration worked very nicely to diversify the area, but today it is solidly Chinese, from Alhambra to Diamond Bar.   Mark Keppel High School in Alhambra is 70% Asian.   (Though Valley Blvd. is a 15-mile long Chinese epicurean delight.)
 
I couple of years ago I attended a meeting with other researchers at Company X, one of the very top household name tech firms.   One of the people we met with, Ms. Y, is of Indian ethnicity, and she proudly told us of the diversity immigration had brought to the top ranks of Company X.   But of the names she rattled off of vice presidents at X, every single one was Indian.
 
I am delighted to see more Indians rising to top positions in industry and government, but the pattern is a little troubling to those of us who do value diversity.
 
Now, let's look at Westinghouse and Mastech, the firms the article lauds for contributing to Pittsburgh's economy:
 
"The first big wave of Asian immigrants came here in the 1960s and 1970s, when the former Westinghouse Electric Co. nuclear research operations in Monroeville hired many Indian engineers, and the regions' hospitals and universities began to recruit Indians as professors and doctors.
 
A later surge of Indian immigrants arrived in the 1980s and 1990s to work as computer scientists for companies like Mastech, founded by Indian-American entrepreneur Sunil Wadhwani."
 
Well, not so fast.   Let's take Mastech first.
 
Mastech is one of the firms that placed "H-1B only" job ads in 2006, as reported at the time in Computerworld, which reported:
 
"For instance, in a search on the job board run by Dice Inc., iGate Mastech, a Pittsburgh-based IT staffing agency with about 1K employees, has an advertisement for 8 Java developers with 3 to 5 years of Java development experience.   The ad says: 'Only looking for H-1B visas and should be willing to transfer.'"
 
Mastech claimed the ad to be a "typo".   Well, that would be a whale of a typo, thus hard to imagine, especially since Web data seems to indicate that Mastech is one of those firms that hires almost all of its workers from abroad.   Mastech doesn't seem qualified for the "poster-boy" status given it by today's P-G article.
 
Nor does Westinghouse, another firm cited positively by the P-G article.   I'll come back to Westinghouse shortly, but guess which law firm Westinghouse chooses for at least some of its immigration work: Cohen & Grigsby, of "Remember, we're trying to NOT find an American to fill the job" notoriety.   This will take a bit of explaining -- I'm not engaging in guilt by association here, which the "MSFT hired Abramoff!" people do in my opinion -- so please bear with me.
 
Back in 2007 the firm Cohen & Grigsby, highly prominent in Pittsburgh, held an information session for clients, and as a marketing tool, placed videos of the proceedings on the web, involving green card applications.   Unlike H-1B [visas, the] employer-sponsored green card law requires the employer to show that qualified Americans could not be found to fill the job.   C&G showed how employers could make a pretense of looking for Americans yet still be in full compliance with the law.   The MC of the videos, C&G partner Larry Liebowitz, introduced the topic with his infamous statement:
 
"And our goal is clearly, not to find a qualified and interested U.S. worker.   And you know in a sense that sounds funny, but it's what we're trying to do here.   We are complying with the law fully, but ah, our objective is to get this person a green card, and get through the labor certification process.   So certainly we are not going to try to find a place [at which to advertise the job] where the applicants are the most numerous.   We're going to try to find a place where we can comply with the law, and hoping, and likely, not to find qualified and interested worker applicants."
 
Remember, this is fully legal, and standard.   In fact, various lawyers, and the AILA, jumped to C&G's defense in the furor that resulted from publicization of the videos by the Programmers Guild.   The lawyer who literally wrote the book on the green card process, Joel Stewart, has said, "Employers who favor aliens have an arsenal of legal means to reject all U.S. workers who apply."
 
Note carefully that another video in the series advises clients how to get around the prevailing wage requirement, again fully legally.   Prevailing wage applies to both green cards and H-1B.
 
Cohen & Grigsby is, as I mentioned, highly prominent in Pittsburgh, and it appears to have an excellent relationship with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the newspaper whose article I'm reviewing in this posting.   The paper has quoted C&G on various occasions, and ran an op-ed by Liebowitz, the partner mentioned above, in which he said,
 
"U.S. companies that bring in foreign professionals usually do so as a last resort...   These rules actually help U.S. workers, too, by...ensuring that U.S. workers are not displaced..."
 
The reason all this is legal is that Congress -- or actually the industry lobbyists -- inserted huge loopholes in the laws and regulations.   Before 2004, for instance, it was legal to pay an H-1B 5% below prevailing wage.   The latter has its own loop-holes, and is a flagrantly low-ball figure to begin with (as even strident H-1B program advocate representative Zoe Lofgren has admitted), but hey every loop-hole counts.   And my point is that you can see that C&G's clients were typically paying 5% below prevailing wage -- including Westinghouse.
 
Note, by the way, that the firms listed there are mostly main-stream U.S. firms such as Westinghouse, NOT the Indian off-shoring firms (though Mastech, mentioned earlier in this posting, is one).   Abuse of H-1B pervades the entire industry.
 
All in all, a very one-sided article.   However, the reporter interviewed me for almost an hour, and I sensed that he is astute and fair.   I'm looking forward to seeing the subsequent pieces in the series.
 
Norm
canonical Norm Matloff archive

2014-05-18 (5774 Ayyr 18)
Norm Matloff _H-1B/ L-1/ Off-Shoring News-Letter_
tele-conference/media briefing by Teitelbaum et al.
 
At the invitation of senator Jeff Sessions' staff, I participated in a phone-in media briefing on the issues of H-1B, alleged STEM shortages, and so on.   The other participants were Michael Teitelbaum, who has a long interest in STEM-related issues and whose book debunking the STEM shortage claims just came out; and Hal Salzman and Ron Hira, both of them professors of public policy who are long-time, frequently-cited researchers in the H-1B and/or shortage issues.   Each of us presented for about 5 minutes.
 
The [Breitbart] article Scholars Debunk Claims of High-Tech Workers Shortage, Question Industry's "Free Pass", by Tony Lee) gives a good summary.
 
However, there are some ambiguities in the account, and also some of the things that Hal and Ron said were incorrectly attributed to me.   So, here is a "translation":
 
1.   In my comment "When you talk about solutions..." the context was solutions to the supposed STEM labor shortage.
 
2.   Michael, ever the urbane, smooth, eloquent senior voice, probably didn't use quite the fractured language in the quote "nobody who is not..."   At any rate, what he was saying was that other than industry-sponsored studies, no study of depth has ever found a general STEM or computer field-specific labor shortage.
 
3.   The quote of me regarding "handcuffing" [I'd probably use "ball and chain" or "hobbling" to refer to chaining guest-workers to their employer/sponsors] is accurate -- and is one of the very core issues of H-1B -- but I should point out, as I usually have, that the H-1Bs who are clearly hand-cuffed are those being sponsored for green cards.   Other H-1Bs often are immobile for various reasons too, but with the green card issues it's structural.   AND...keep in mind that it is the main-stream U.S. firms that sponsor for green cards, not the Indian off-shoring firms.
 
4.   The 2 paragraphs beginning with "He also mentioned..." and "Further, Matloff emphasized..." are misattributed to me.   I believe most of the statements in those 2 graphs were made by Hal Salzman, and at least one by Ron Hira.
 
In other news: You may recall the AfterCollege press release last week that claimed that 80% of engineering students graduating this May/June had not gotten jobs lined up by April 15.   I mentioned that I would look into this.
 
Since that time, I've: talked to the AfterCollege person involved with their study; obtained their written report; talked to placement officers at 2 universities; and done an informal survey of this year's graduating seniors in Computer Science at my institution, UC Davis.
 
I'll wait one more day to see if any more survey responses come in, and will report on it all here within the next few days. Advance summary: Although the numbers in the AfterCollege survey should not be taken literally and are probably overly grim, they do seem to reflect reality fairly well.   The job market for new CS grads is apparently not very good.
 
Norm
---30---

2014-05-18 (5774 Ayyr 18)
OAS
Operation American Spring continues today: kick out the oath-breakers who are trying to destroy the USA
Cheryl K. Chumley: Washington DC Times
Talking Points Memo
Resistance United advocates prayer
fire Andrea Mitchell
Liberty Beacon
Tea Party News Network
Freedom Outpost
Before It's News
Truth and Action
Debate Politics
Ron Paul Forums
Free Republic
Shoebat
Vol Nation
OAS FAQ

2014-05-18 (5774 Ayyr 18)
Walter Hudson _PJ Media_
Christian and Jewish ministries going Galt by resurrecting mutual aid societies

2014-05-18 (5774 Ayyr 18)
Robert Spencer _PJ Media_
5 sharia atrocities for Hollywood to protest against
"5. Egypt: Woman kicked off TV show for expressing skepticism about Islam...
4. Malaysia: 2 nuns viciously attacked on church grounds...
3. Sudan: Pregnant Christian convicted of apostasy, adultery...
2. Pakistan: 68 lawyers accused of blasphemy for protesting against namesake of caliph Umar...
1. U.S. Muslim groups won't move to excommunicate Boko Haram..."

2014-05-18 (5774 Ayyr 18)
David P. Goldman _PJ Media_
what does "Judaism" mean?

2014-05-18 (5774 Ayyr 18)
Rick Moran _PJ Media_
Swiss voters decisively rejected $25/hour minimum wage

2014-05-18 (5774 Ayyr 18)
Ron Radosh _PJ Media_
from the "free speech movement" of the mid-1960s to the no speech movement

2014-05-18 (5774 Ayyr 18)
Bridget Johnson _PJ Media_
DC officials to be asked to rename "Chinese Embassy Street" after imprisoned protestor and Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo
"Liu is currently on his 4th prison term, but his first incarceration was a 2-year sentence in 1989 following the Tiananmen Square protests.   The anniversary of the brutal crack-down in the square is June 4..."

2014-05-18 (5774 Ayyr 18)
Claudia Rosett _PJ Media_
our inalienable right and duty to stop Iran's rogue, terrorist regime's nuclear weapons program

2014-05-18 (5774 Ayyr 18)
Rod Kackley _PJ Media_
bare-knuckle battle between RNC losership and Tea Partiers to highlight Michigan GOP convention
"Tea party activist Wes Nakagiri, a 55-year-old automotive engineer... dreams of leading a conservative revival under the Michigan Republican tent.   He is more than ready to fight the Democrats, when the time is right.   But first he will have to battle his way through establishment Republicans and his fellow tea party activists.   Nakagiri is campaigning to be selected as the state GOP's lieutenant governor candidate at the party's convention in August..."

2014-05-18 (5774 Ayyr 18)
Victor Davis Hanson _PJ Media_
the unforgiving moment

2014-05-18 (5774 Ayyr 18)
Ken Klukowski _Breitbart_
evil Harry Reid: political dissent to my opinions must be suppressed

2014-05-18 (5774 Ayyr 18)
Clarice Feldman _American Thinker_
corporate money in politics: where's it coming from, going to, and who is complaining?: dark money from mega-corporations flowing around Dem circles and IRS corruption

2014-05-18 (5774 Ayyr 18)
Richard Muller
shale gas technology should be advanced as rapidly as possible

2014-05-18 (5774 Ayyr 18)
Eric Worrall
Queenslander's guide to Australian universities... WRT climate hysteria

2014-05-18 (5774 Ayyr 18)
Anthony Watts
Brandon Schollenberger has called Cook's and University of Queensland's bluff!

2014-05-18 (5774 Ayyr 18)
Willis Eschenbach
the effect of Gleissberg's "secular smoothing"

2014-05-18 (5774 Ayyr 18)
_Free Republic_
Rush Limbaugh has 13.5M listeners; Sean Hannity 12.75M; Dave Ramsey 7.50M; Glenn Beck, Mark Levin 7.25M; Michael Savage 5.5M; Jim Bohannon, Mike Gallagher, Michael Medved, Doug Stephan 3.25M; Bill Bennet, Clark Howard, Laura Ingraham, George Noory 3M; Thom Hartman, Dennis Miller, Ed Schultz 2.25M; Alan Colmes, Don Imus, Stephanie Miller, Todd Schnitt 1.75; Herman Cain 1.5M
 
Proposed Bills 2014
 
 

2014-05-19

2014-05-19 (5774 Ayyr 19)
OAS
Operation American Spring continues today: kick out the oath-breakers who are trying to destroy the USA
Cheryl K. Chumley: Washington DC Times
Talking Points Memo
Resistance United advocates prayer
fire Andrea Mitchell
Liberty Beacon
Tea Party News Network
Freedom Outpost
Before It's News
Truth and Action
Debate Politics
Ron Paul Forums
Free Republic
Shoebat
Vol Nation
OAS FAQ

2014-05-19 (5774 Ayyr 19)
Patrick Thibodeau _"IT" News_/_IDG_
another H-1B increase would mean a grim future for US STEM workers: in the immigration debate, it's tech executives versus tech professionals and academic researchers
ComputerWorld

2014-05-19 (5774 Ayyr 19)
Joseph Perkins _Jewish World Review_
race-obsessed anti-Semitic anti-Christian crony-socialist oath-breaker Barack Hussein Obummer, Dems, GOP losership fighting against immigration reform
There was no reform in S744, nor in the GOP House losership's visa and immigration proposals...jgo

2014-05-19 (5774 Ayyr 19)
James Kirkpatrick _V Dare_
ruling class openly rebelling against USA and US constitution, violating oaths of office

2014-05-19 (5774 Ayyr 19)
R' Avi Shafran _Jewish World Review_
religious bias apparently acceptable to some NY media

2014-05-19 (5774 Ayyr 19)
Debra J. Saunders _Jewish World Review_
negative campaigning: MugShotMary.com vs. BobProtectedRapists.com

2014-05-19 (5774 Ayyr 19)
Star Parker _Jewish World Review_
religious Americans will continue fighting for "traditional" marriage

2014-05-19 (5774 Ayyr 19)
Michael Smerconish _Jewish World Review_
why violence has declined

2014-05-19 (5774 Ayyr 19)
George Will _Jewish World Review_
the destructiveness of LBJ's "great society"

2014-05-19 (5774 Ayyr 19)
Jeff Jacoby _Jewish World Review_
Pfizer and the flight from excessive taxes

2014-05-19 (5774 Ayyr 19)
David M. Shribman _Jewish World Review_
how qualified are recent candidates for president and those who have been president?

2014-05-19 (5774 Ayyr 19)
Jack Kelly _Jewish World Review_
politicians speak out against terrorism only when they think doing so will benefit them

2014-05-19 (5774 Ayyr 19)
Alicia Colon _Jewish World Review_
GOP losership is incompetent in reaching out to the base, let alone to most of the poor, and low-info voters

2014-05-19 (5774 Ayyr 19)
George Rasley _Conservative HQ_
LBJ's disastrous "great society" and the left's war against the USA

2014-05-19 (5774 Ayyr 19)
Jason Hart _Federalist_
why John Kasich is the leftist media's favorite "Republican" governor

2014-05-19 (5774 Ayyr 19)
Melanie Batley _News Max_
polls: GOP candidates lead in mid-term elections as ObummerDoesn'tCare drags down leftists/Dems

2014-05-19 (5774 Ayyr 19)
Ed Driscoll _PJ Media_
Wait! Who trusted the NYTimes before?

2014-05-19 (5774 Ayyr 19)
Bryan Preston _PJ Media_
what trait do most Americans not want in a president?

2014-05-19 (5774 Ayyr 19)
Bridget Johnson _PJ Media_
race-obsessed anti-Semitic anti-Christian crony-socialist oath-breaker Barack Hussein Obummer tells fund-raiser he doesn't take seriously the abuse by IRS, the Benghazi fiasco, ObummerDoesnt'Care

2014-05-19 (5774 Ayyr 19)
Roger L. Simon _PJ Media_
he rise of the university brown-shirts

2014-05-19 (5774 Ayyr 19)
Mark Krikorian _Center for Immigration Studies_
laughable amnesty polling, Politico edition... and deceptive terminology created by spin doctors

2014-05-19 (5774 Ayyr 19)
David North _Center for Immigration Studies_
court records show massive USCIS neglect in Chinese asylum cases
"The Anaheim (CA) USCIS asylum office... had been granting asylum to many hundreds of Chinese asylum applicants based on mass-produced and totally false applications over a period of more than 10 years... 'From 2000 November to 2010 February, on 440 asylum petitions and immigration benefit petitions, petitioners listed [the same California address] as their place of residence.'..."

2014-05-19 (5774 Ayyr 19)
Stanley Renshon _Center for Immigration Studies_
immigration reform/perversion (part 2)

2014-05-19 (5774 Ayyr 19)
Reid Wilson _Washington DC Post_
Tim Donnelly's campaign for California governorship scaring RINO GOP losership... and the leftist media
Woodland CA Daily Leftist
Minneapolis MN Star Tribune/AP
Contra Costa CA Times
Quincy IL Herald-Whig

2014-05-19 (5774 Ayyr 19)
Megan O’Neil _Chronicle of Higher Education_
door by door, room by room, shop by shop, walk by walk universities install privacy violation systems with ever-more-integrated data-bases for on-line control of professors, staff, students, parents, and other tax-victims

2014-05-19 (5774 Ayyr 19)
Nate Hoffelder _Digital Reader_
National Journal shut down their public comment feature, because the idiotors can't stand for opinions different from theirs to see the light of day

2014-05-19 (5774 Ayyr 19)
Willis Eschenbach
scientists respond to Barack Hussein Obummer regime's 2014 climate assessment

2014-05-19 (5774 Ayyr 19)
Jan H. Blits
climate wars and the U of Delaware

2014-05-19 (5774 Ayyr 19)
Tim Ball
atmospheric layers, the biosphere, the boundary layer, micro-climate and inadequate models

2014-05-19 (5774 Ayyr 19)
Paul Homewood
how GISS temperatures are diverging from Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) temperatures

2014-05-19 (5774 Ayyr 19)
Larry Hamlin
AP misleads the public, again, saying man made global warming worsens wild-fires

2014-05-19 (5774 Ayyr 19)
_WikiPedia_
1828-05-19: president John Quincy Adams signed the tariff of 1828 into law, protecting wool manufacturers in the United States of America
Harmonic Life
Dates in History
Day of the Week
First Thoughts
GeneAll
HisDates
 
Proposed Bills 2014
 
 

2014-05-20

2014-05-20 (5774 Ayyr 20)
_Conservative HQ_
Paul Broun and Bob Barr in Georgia's primary, today

2014-05-20 (5774 Ayyr 20)
_Conservative HQ_
national security alert: race-obsessed anti-Semitic anti-Christian crony-socialist oath-breaker Barack Hussein Obummer's scheme to allow more illegal aliens in the US military

2014-05-20 (5774 Ayyr 20)
"Federale" _V Dare_
Barack Hussein Obummer regime policy: release illegal aliens who have committed additional crimes, import terrorists
Joe Fallon: broken promises since 1965 Hart-Celler-Kennedy immigration changes

2014-05-20 (5774 Ayyr 20)
Michael Bargo ii _American Thinker_
illegal immigration is also immoral: ghettoization being driven by the left/Dems

2014-05-20 (5774 Ayyr 20)
OAS
Operation American Spring continues today: kick out the oath-breakers who are trying to destroy the USA
Cheryl K. Chumley: Washington DC Times
Talking Points Memo
Resistance United advocates prayer
fire Andrea Mitchell
Liberty Beacon
Tea Party News Network
Freedom Outpost
Before It's News
Truth and Action
Debate Politics
Ron Paul Forums
Free Republic
Shoebat
Vol Nation
OAS FAQ

2014-05-20 (5774 Ayyr 20)
Mona Charen _Jewish World Review_
Margaret Thatcher of India?: India's recent election of a new PM

2014-05-20 (5774 Ayyr 20)
Jack Kelly _Jewish World Review_
revealing the criminal fraud of ObummerDoesn'tCare... by the numbers

2014-05-20 (5774 Ayyr 20)
Debra J. Saunders _Jewish World Review_
leftist university students want warnings that information may upset them are saying they can't cope with free speech

2014-05-20 (5774 Ayyr 20)
David Limbaugh _Jewish World Review_
obsessive racial rhetoric inflames rather than unites

2014-05-20 (5774 Ayyr 20)
Thomas Sowell _Jewish World Review_
poverty and snow storms

2014-05-20 (5774 Ayyr 20)
Chris Weller _Jewish World Review_
deep-brain stimulation cured OCD except... he can't stop listening to the growling, throaty, raw power of Johnny Cash, and every time it's as if his brain were hearing it for the first time

2014-05-20 (5774 Ayyr 20)
Catey Hill _MarketWatch_
the most-hated cable company in the USA is...
"Data released Tuesday by the American Customer Service Index show that cable companies are one of the most hated industries in America.   Indeed, while the average company scores in the high 70s on the index (out of 100), subscription-TV companies (these include traditional cable companies and fiber-optic and satellite cable companies) scored just 65 on the index.   Only Internet companies (many of which also provide your cable service, so it's sometimes impossible to differentiate) were worse, scoring just 63.   It doesn't stop there.   Customer satisfaction with subscription-TV services fell 4.4% in the last year alone and with Internet companies it declined 3.1%... Satisfaction with cable companies plummets..."

2014-05-20 (5774 Ayyr 20)
Jeffry Bartash _MarketWatch_
Charles Plosser: Fed excessive issuance of scrip is ticking time bomb

2014-05-20 (5774 Ayyr 20)
Dan Cadman _Center for Immigration Studies_
national socialist television's Judy Woodruff threw cream-puffs and soft-balls to DHS secretary Jeh Johnson

2014-05-20 (5774 Ayyr 20)
David North _Center for Immigration Studies_
memories: when illegal aliens could vote in Arlington, VA

2014-05-20 (5774 Ayyr 20)
Stanley Renshon _Center for Immigration Studies_
immigration reform/perversion legislation
"Of course, the fact that the system is broken and needs to be fixed says nothing whatsoever about how, exactly, it should be fixed.   It also says nothing about why Republicans shouldn't wait until after the midterm elections, a matter of a few more months.   And it doesn't take up the questions of whether they, and the country, wouldn't be better off if they did so, and why that would be true.   Moreover, while the rationale behind this bad idea is probably not designed to inflict substantial harm to the Republican Party, it nonetheless is tailor-made to do so..."
...so the leftists/Dems and the GOP losership are bound to push for it...jgo

2014-05-20 (5774 Ayyr 20)
Theodore Dalrymple _PJ Media_
should convicts, prisoners receive better medical care than the general population? than veterans?

2014-05-20 (5774 Ayyr 20)
Michael Ledeen _PJ Media_
the leftist censors and their tyrannical friends

2014-05-20 (5774 Ayyr 20)
Bridget Johnson _PJ Media_
US Marine Amir Hekmati has been held in Iran prison for 1K days

2014-05-20 (5774 Ayyr 20)
Pete Kasperowicz _Blaze_
yet another ObummerDoesn'tCare abuse everyone expected has come to light

2014-05-20 (5774 Ayyr 20)
Jeffrey L. Scribner _American Thinker_
IRS's political attacks are yet another easily foreseen consequence of the 16th amendment

2014-05-20 (5774 Ayyr 20)
Anthony Watts
U of Leeds claims Antarctic ice losses
ClimateSanity: conversion factors for ice and water mass and volume

2014-05-20 (5774 Ayyr 20)
Steven Burnett
applying the scientific method to both hard sciences and those widely considered to be "soft"... and pseudo-scientists who do not use the scientific method
"...The soft sciences spend the first 2 weeks of a course talking about how they are a science, and the next 13 weeks destroying every pillar of the scientific method..."
 
Proposed Bills 2014
 
 

2014-05-21

2014-05-21 (5774 Ayyr 21)
Norm Matloff _H-1B/ L-1/ Off-Shoring News-Letter_
followup on job market for new grads
 
Recently I reported on a press release by an organization named AfterCollege.
 
Among other things, the organization had found that 81.6% of this Spring's new engineering grads nationwide did not have a job lined up by April.   The survey has been cited widely since then.
 
I'd mentioned many times in this e-news-letter that the job market in computer science typically starts to become tough at age 35.   But generally the market for new CS grads has been good.   Not sensational, as can be seen in the fairly flat salaries in the NACE reports, but solid.
 
Though the CS job market doesn't necessarily correlate with the general engineering market (at many universities, including mine, CS is considered part of engineering), the AfterCollege survey made me wonder if there had been a sudden change.   I mentioned that I would look into this.
 
Since that time, I've: talked to the AfterCollege person involved with their study; obtained their written report; talked to placement officers at 2 universities; and done an informal survey of this year's graduating seniors in Computer Science at my institution, UC Davis.
 
Though the results are not conclusive, it does appear to me that the finding a job has indeed become somewhat tougher for the new CS grads.   Here are the details:
 
1.   The AfterCollege press release and full report had been vague in several aspects.   It stated the percentage of respondents who had not found a job by April 15, but also stated that the survey had begun on February 27.   Had they re-contacted the earlier respondents on April 15?   The answer turns out to be no.   Thus some respondents had not found a job as of, say, March 10.   On the other hand, the speculation one reader posed to me that the survey was biased because it focused on those who were having trouble in the market doesn't seem to be correct either.   The firm surveyed students from a variety of sources, though it was definitely not a true random sample from the population of all graduating seniors.
 
2.   I queried placement officers whom I know at 2 universities in Northern California.   Neither thought the AfterCollege survey was based on solid data.   But OTOH, although I had expected them to make statements along the lines of, "No, our students are doing great in the job market.", citing high placement rates, neither did so.
 
One said that her university's engineering program is so demanding that many students don't have time to look for a job until AFTER graduation.   This person did say that a large number of companies had booked time at the school's recruiting events.
 
The placement officer at the second university also did not have data that was at odds with the AfterCollege survey.   She did indicate that most students start their job search well before they graduate, but she stressed several times that many don't work hard enough at it.   She said, "I will say that there are a number of graduating students still looking for jobs but I do not think there are 81%", and added "...if the CS student has been looking...and they have good grades and communication skills they probably have a job."
 
3.   I used to take an informal job survey of graduating seniors every year around this time, but had not done so for a few years.   So, I tried it again last week.
 
Of those responding, 46% did not yet have a job, well below the 81% figure, but the overall figure is likely considerably higher than 46%, for the following reason.
 
I got about a 20% response rate, about half of which came only after I sent a followup reminder.   That's not too bad, but my experience over the years has been that the ones who don't respond typically don't have a job, and are embarrassed to say so.   I tried to blunt that in my survey question, stressing that the students should reply either way.   But I believe the "embarrassment" phenomenon was definitely still at work, as evidenced by the fact that the responses that came in after my reminder message were strongly in the not-yet-employed category.   And I would guess that a big majority of the nonrespondents are in that category.
 
4.   Two pieces of anecdotal information move me here.   One really top student, top grades (about 3.9, as I recall), highly adept at software design, very knowledgeable about computer systems, and personally out-going and well-spoken, could only get a software testing job in Silicon Valley, though he did accept a developer position out of state.   Another student, a family friend at UCB with good grades, also was offered only a testing job in Silicon Valley, which he accepted.   Though almost all the students in my survey with job offers had developer positions, these 2 exceptions really got me wondering.
 
So, what is the bottom line?
 
Again, these results are not solidly conclusive.   Neverthelss, I believe that the market has softened somewhat for new CS grads, and that the AfterCollege figures, though probably not to be taken literally, do reflect a problem situation.
 
BTW, it was interesting to me that of my respondents who did have jobs lined up, 2 companies were disproportionately represented.   The same 2 firms were big last year, based on informal conversations I had with students at the time.   Both of the firms, a smaller but somewhat known Silicon Valley company, and a very well-known one out of state, have a reputation for hiring heavily but retaining lightly.
 
Norm
---30---

2014-05-21 (5774 Ayyr 21)
Karen Zeigler & Steven A. Camarota _Center for Immigration Studies_
the glut of STEM professionals: a look at employment and wages
"Consistent with other research, the findings show that the country has more than twice as many workers with STEM degrees as there are STEM jobs...   there is no shortage of STEM workers in the United States.   Using the most common definition of STEM jobs, total STEM employment in 2012 was 5.3M workers (immigrant and native), but there are 12.1M STEM degree holders (immigrant and native).   Only one-third of native-born Americans with an under-graduate STEM degree holding a job actually work in a STEM occupation.   There are more than 5M native-born Americans with STEM under-graduate degrees working in non-STEM occupations: 1.5M with engineering degrees, [about 500K] with technology degrees, 400K with math degrees, and 2.6M with science degrees.   An additional 1.2M natives with STEM degrees are not working -- unemployed or out of the labor force in 2012.   Despite the economic downturn, Census Bureau data show that, between 2007 and 2012, about 700K new immigrants who have STEM degrees were allowed to settle in the country, yet at the same time, total STEM employment grew by only about 500K.   Of these new immigrants with STEM degrees, only a little more than a third took a STEM job and about the same share took a non-STEM job.   The rest were not working in 2012.   Overall, less than half of immigrants with STEM degrees work in STEM jobs.   In particular, just 23% of all immigrants with engineering degrees work as engineers.   In total, 1.6M immigrants with STEM degrees worked outside of a STEM field and 563K were not working.   The supply of STEM workers is not just limited to those with STEM degrees.   Nearly one-third of the nation's STEM workers do not have an under-graduate STEM degree.   Wage trends are one of the best measures of labor demand.   If STEM workers are in short supply, wages should be increasing rapidly.   But wage data from multiple sources show little growth over the last 12 years.   Real hourly wages (adjusted for inflation) grew on average just 0.7% a year from 2000 to 2012 for STEM workers, and annual wages grew even less -- 0.4% a year.   Wage growth is very modest for most subcategories of engineers and technology workers...   over 37K post-2007 [foreign residents] with non-STEM under-graduate degrees also found work in a STEM field...   the Census Bureau data show that in recent years the [United States of America] has admitted about 129K immigrants with STEM degrees each year, yet total STEM employment growth since 2000 has averaged only about 84K jobs each year.   If we examine growth from 2007 to 2012, we find that STEM employment growth was somewhat higher, but it still averaged only 105K jobs annually.   Thus, based on the ACS, the number of new immigrants with STEM degrees admitted each year is by itself higher than the total growth in STEM employment.   This is truly extraordinary when one considers that the same data show that the number of U.S.-born STEM graduates is growing by 115K a year...   there are 6.7M natives and immigrants already here with STEM degrees working in non-STEM jobs.   There are an additional 1.8M STEM degree holders in the country not working at all...   the total number of people (immigrant and native) working in STEM occupations is only 5.3M...   STEM graduates are spread out in many different occupations, including 66K in community and social service jobs, a similar number in protective services (e.g. security guard), 62K in food preparation and serving, and 45K in building cleaning and maintenance occupations..."

2014-05-21 (5774 Ayyr 21)
Jon Feere _Center for Immigration Studies_
why Hillary Clinton, the haughty John Kerry who served in VietNam, & Eric Holder share responsibility for criminal alien releases
"federal law requires the Secretary of State to stop issuing visas to the citizens of any country that refuses to take back its nationals...   Less than 4 months after Zadvydas, the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act (the USA PATRIOT Act) of 2001 was signed into law.   It authorizes the continued detention of any alien whose removal is not reasonably foreseeable if the U.S. Attorney General has 'reasonable grounds to believe' that the alien represents a security threat or has been involved in terrorist activities.   Such detention is indefinitely renewable in 6-month increments...   ICE officials mentioned that they have significant problems with Cuba, Laos, VietNam, [Red China], India, Jamaica, former Soviet Republics, Iraq, Iran, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Poland, and Nigeria.   Vaughan found that the lengthiest waits included Qatar (800 days), Cambodia (522 days), St. Kitts and Nevis (410 days), Kuwait (376 days), and Vietnam (368 days)..."

2014-05-21 (5774 Ayyr 21)
David North _Center for Immigration Studies_
immigration flood continues as US + foreign government tear at the USA's levees

2014-05-21 (5774 Ayyr 21)
Stanley Renshon _Center for Immigration Studies_
Tea Partiers vs. GOP losership on border security, visas, immigration

2014-05-21 (5774 Ayyr 21)
Reihan Salam _National Review_
Hispanic Americans face real challenges

2014-05-21 (5774 Ayyr 21)
Bill Gertz _Jewish World Review_
Russia tests new inter-continental ballistic missile warhead; report on Red Chinese elites' spy gains; cyber-spying concerns

2014-05-21 (5774 Ayyr 21)
OAS
Operation American Spring continues today: kick out the oath-breakers who are trying to destroy the USA
Cheryl K. Chumley: Washington DC Times
Talking Points Memo
Resistance United advocates prayer
fire Andrea Mitchell
Liberty Beacon
Tea Party News Network
Freedom Outpost
Before It's News
Truth and Action
Debate Politics
Ron Paul Forums
Free Republic
Shoebat
Vol Nation
OAS FAQ

2014-05-21 (5774 Ayyr 21)
Ben Ledbetter _PJ Media_
GOP losership fueling down-and-dirty senate contest in Mississippi where Chris McDaniel leads by 4 to 7 points in polling

2014-05-21 (5774 Ayyr 21)
_Conservative HQ_
Ted Cruz grilled FBI director James Comey over investigation, prosecution of IRS officials and functionaries who targeted non-leftists: Comey ducked
"Specifically, senator Cruz asked: To date, how many victims, or alleged victims, of improper targeting have been interviewed by the FBI?   More or less than 10 victims?   Can you tell this committee, to date, how many White House employees the FBI has interviewed for this investigation?   The [DoJ prosecutor] appointed to lead this investigation a major [Barack Hussein Obummer] donor who has given [president race-obsessed anti-Semitic anti-Christian crony-socialist oath-breaker Barack Hussein Obummer] and Democrats over $6K.   Do you see any actual or apparent conflict of interest in that?   Do you think it would have been appropriate to trust John Mitchell to investigate Richard Nixon?   Four days after attorney-general Eric Holder told the committee that this was a vigorous investigation, the president of United States went on national television and told the American people, categorically, there was not a smidgen of corruption… [these statements] are facially inconsistent...   which of those statements was true and which was false?'   None of these questions were fully answered..."

2014-05-21 (5774 Ayyr 21)
Doug Bandow _Conservative HQ_
will Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi be PM of all Indians?
Richard L. Benkin: American Thinker
"The mandate was also an explicit rejection of the Congress Party, whose big government policies had slowed India's economy to a trickle over the past two years, with the nation's 'best and the brightest' hit especially hard.   A 2013 December study found almost half of India's graduates 'unemployable for any job'.   Those same policies had entrenched an endemic corruption that made our own Tammany Hall and Chicago machine politics look like amateur night..."

2014-05-21 (5774 Ayyr 21)
George Rasley _Conservative HQ_
Al Cardenas resigned as chair of the American Conservative Union; is this a sign he will be heading campaign of John E. Bush?

2014-05-21 (5774 Ayyr 21)
Greg Richter _News Max_
Louie Gohmert: Boehner needs to be removed from speakership

2014-05-21 (5774 Ayyr 21)
Elliot Jager _News Max_
Bob Barr campaign on track going into primary run-off

2014-05-21 (5774 Ayyr 21)
Julia Dent _Daily Caller_
U of NC at Wilmington admin planning to appeal court ruling in favor of conservative professor

2014-05-21 (5774 Ayyr 21)
Bob Unruh _World Net Daily_
Communist Corpse even politicizes math

2014-05-21 (5774 Ayyr 21)
W. James Antle iii _Daily Caller_
some of the many things the Tea Patiers have correct

2014-05-21 (5774 Ayyr 21)
Susan Ferrechio _Washington DC Examiner_
Darrell Issa has sub poenaed DoJ on political targeting by IRS, elections crimes branch director refused to answer some questions

2014-05-21 (5774 Ayyr 21)
Jennifer Harper _Jewish World Review_
what the chief SEAL told the grads; leftist media still eager to bury the Tea Party; GOP vs. leftist war chests + more

2014-05-21 (5774 Ayyr 21)
David P. Goldman _PJ Media_
the new alliance between Russia and Red China

2014-05-21 (5774 Ayyr 21)
Ed Driscoll _PJ Media_
interview of Mark Steyn on _Passing Parade: Obituaries and Appreciations_ (audio)

2014-05-21 (5774 Ayyr 21)
Bridget Johnson _PJ Media_
with time running out, senators apply pressure on race-obsessed anti-Semitic anti-Christian crony-socialist oath-breaker Barack Hussein Obummer regime to help condemned Sudanese Christian Meriam Yahya Ibrahim Ishag

2014-05-21 (5774 Ayyr 21)
Tom Blumer _PJ Media_
$5,782 to $17,345 per ObummerDoesn'tCare application

2014-05-21 (5774 Ayyr 21)
Don Sucher _PJ Media_
the origins of the electric guitar

2014-05-21 (5774 Ayyr 21)
Walter E. Williams _Jewish World Review_
USA's budding tyrants
"From the Nazis to the Stalinists, tyrants have always started out supporting free speech, and why is easy to understand.   Speech is vital for the realization of their goals of command, control and confiscation.   Basic to their agenda are the tools of indoctrination, propagandizing, proselytization.   Once they gain power, as leftists have at many universities, free speech becomes a liability and must be suppressed.   This is increasingly the case on university campuses..."

2014-05-21 (5774 Ayyr 21)
Roger Simon _Jewish World Review_
fire-plug felons won't wreck Rahm!

2014-05-21 (5774 Ayyr 21)
Trudy Rubin _Jewish World Review_
news spurs my visit to Ukraine which my grand-parents had fled in 1905

2014-05-21 (5774 Ayyr 21)
Michelle Malkin _Jewish World Review_
Michelle Obummer's control-freak lunch program
"Mrs. Obama has been working the food circuit since 2005, when the wife of newly elected senator [Obummer] was named to the corporate board of directors of Wal-Mart processed foods supplier TreeHouse Foods Inc. -- collecting $45K in 2005, $51,200 in 2006, and 7,500 TreeHouse stock options worth more than $72K for each year. Fact: The first lady has been the most insatiable crony at the center of the Fed Foods racket. Her non-profit Partnership for a Healthier America has reported assets of $4.5M from secret donors..."
please help find Marizela

2014-05-21 (5774 Ayyr 21)
Dick Morris _Jewish World Review_
negatives building up for Hitlery
"In her full-throated defense of her tenure as America's top diplomat, delivered to the American Jewish Committee last week, Clinton touted her efforts to impose, strengthen and enforce sanctions against Iran in an effort to stop its nuclear weapons program.   But the record shows she fought tooth and nail against each new round of sanctions and had her minions in the State Department do all they could to kill them...   In 2009, the administration opposed the passage of gasoline sanctions against Iran, which eventually passed unanimously.   In 2011, Clinton sent her under-secretary, Wendy Sherman, to state her 'strong opposition' to sanctioning the Central Bank of Iran...   In 2012, Clinton opposed barring Iranian financial institutions from doing business with SWIFT, the global financial clearing-house..."

2014-05-21 (5774 Ayyr 21)
Betsy McCaughey _Jewish World Review_
ObummerDoesn'tCare's negatives for elder people

2014-05-21 (5774 Ayyr 21)
Nat Hentoff _Jewish World Review_
Hentoff's imperfect but more pro-constitution choice for president

2014-05-21 (5774 Ayyr 21)
Kathleen Parker _Jewish World Review_
provoking thought (not quashing it) is literature's job...
...and the peculiar madness of "trigger warnings": Jonah Goldberg

2014-05-21 (5774 Ayyr 21)
Paul Greenberg _Jewish World Review_
Frank Lloyd Wright lives again... in Arkansas
"...There's a moral to this story.   It's symbolized by this little modern house before Wright's work was eclipsed by the postmodernism of today's deconstructionist architects.   You know the sort: iconic figures whose much celebrated and over-paid efforts tend to come out looking like botched intestinal operations.   And the moral of the story is: America is still out here, somewhere in a clearing, waiting to be found again, saved, rediscovered, restored, brought back to life, revived.   Then we Americans will be, too..."

2014-05-21 (5774 Ayyr 21)
Ana Veciana-Suarez _Jewish World Review_
let's not forget the play part of kinder-garten

2014-05-21 (5774 Ayyr 21)
_Right Scoop_
Mark Levin expressed support for Tea Partiers
"He says 4 years ago 'the establishment was tripping over itself to get Tea Party support' and today 'they think they've killed it'.   But Levin knows what many of us know, that they can't kill it."

2014-05-21 (5774 Ayyr 21)
Noah Wiener _Biblical Archaeology_
early Bronze Age: Megiddo's Great Temple and the birth of urban culture in the Levant

2014-05-21 (5774 Ayyr 21)
Anthony Watts
Climategate as belief-system tipping-poing

2014-05-21 (5774 Ayyr 21)
Anthony Watts
congressman Howard P. McKeon offered amendment to end spending any money on UN climate programs

2014-05-21 (5774 Ayyr 21)
Anthony Watts
61 questions asked of U of Delaware about FOIA abuse

2014-05-21 (5774 Ayyr 21)
Anthony Watts
O'Keefe outs more leftist corruption
 
Proposed Bills 2014
 
 

2014-05-22

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
John Soderman _KUSI San Diego CA_
Marine combat veteran Andrew Tahmooressi, being held in Mexican jail, ordered to report for duty
Joseph J. Kolb: Fox: ordered to report
2Fox: attorney stone-walled
WGN: mother asks for help
Joseph J. Kolb: Fox: mother says ordeal is worse than when he was in combat
Why was he not allowed to turn around at the USA exit port?   Because the USA refuses to put an exit port facility there...jgo

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
Mark Fitzgibbons _Conservative HQ_
conservatives lead by reducing crime, saving money
"Texas reduced the number of returning prisoners through education and training for non-violent offenders, and better treatment of drug addiction, which is a major causative factor in many crimes, especially property crimes."

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
Mark Fitzgibbons _Real Clear Politics_
Mark Levin: get rid of Veteran's Admin bureaucracy, substitute a voucher system... maybe congress-critters should resign, maybe race-obsessed anti-Semitic anti-Christian crony-socialist oath-breaker Barack Hussein Obummer should resign, they're all in on it (with video)

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
Chuck Ross _Daily Caller_
Al Sharpton tries to defend his racist, anti-Jewish remarks (with video)

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
J.R. Dunn _American Thinker_
how the leftist media can be defeated

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
Rick Moran _American Thinker_
unethical leftists caught red-handed by O'Keefe on video, and Hollyweird big-shots, ask FBI to attack the whistle-blower, instead of the perps

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
Jonathon Moseley _American Thinker_
Tea Partiers still winning against corrupt politicians, leftists

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
M. Catharine Evans & Ann Kane _American Thinker_
race-obsessed anti-Semitic anti-Christian crony-socialist oath-breaker Barack Hussein Obummer's leftist regime squeezing "white suburbia"

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
Rick Moran _American Thinker_
DHS HQ is a sink-hole for pilfered tax-victims' earnings
"is running more than $1.5G over budget, is 11 years behind schedule and may never be completed"

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
Rick Moran _American Thinker_
Clintoon team begged fellow leftist Dems to protect Hillary from Benghazi investigation

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
Ethel C. Fenig _American Thinker_
Iranian regime attacking people for singing "Happy" song

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
David Siders _Sacramento CA Bee_
Tim Donnelly retains lead in California governor campaign despite big-money leftist and GOP losership opposition and over $11M

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
Jennifer Harper _Jewish World Review_
what the chief SEAL told the grads; leftist media still eager to bury the Tea Party; GOP vs. leftist war chests + more

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
Sharon Randall _Jewish World Review_
grace in a batch of biscuits

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
Victor Davis Hanson _Jewish World Review_
president Barck Hussein Obummer's ethical vacuum

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
George Will _Jewish World Review_
obviously arbitrary, notably complex and certainly unconstitutional campaign finance laws
"the legislature was not entirely altruistic with rules that handicap challengers more than officials who enjoy the many advantages of incumbency...   But of course.   Class solidarity unites incumbent politicians of all stripes, and all the laws that ever have regulated campaigns, or ever will regulate them, have had or will have one thing in common: They have been, or will be, written by incumbent legislators.   This is why such laws are presumptively disreputable and usually unconstitutional."

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
Ann Coulter _Jewish World Review_
NYTimes's statistical methods suggest that 4% of NYTimes reporters are serial killers

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
Paul Greenberg _Jewish World Review_
the morning after an election in Arkansas

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
Bernard Goldberg _Jewish World Review_
leftist authoritarians on campus

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
judge Andrew P. Napolitano _Jewish World Review_
another week of government lawlessness

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
Dana Milbank _Jewish World Review_
is pres. race-obsessed anti-Semitic anti-Christian crony-socialist oath-breaker Barack Hussein Obummer really angry about abuses by the Veterans Admin?

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
Jay Ambrose _Jewish World Review_
criticisms of Thomas Piketty's leftist tome

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
Cal Thomas _Jewish World Review_
the Veterans Admin, Britain's National Health Service & ObummerDoesn'tCare vs. freedom & competition

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
Larry Elder _Jewish World Review_
white, black, red, yellow, orange... leftists be playing the race card

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
Michael Reagan _Jewish World Review_
innocence violated and unbridled abuse

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
Benjamin Pimentel & Therese Poletti _MarketWatch_
H-P cutting an additional 11K to 16K jobs
"Lesjak says H-P now expects roughly 45K to 50K people to leave the company as part of an ongoing restructuring program, up from the earlier plan to slash 34K jobs."

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
_Conservative HQ_
Phil Robertson's Judeo-Christian beliefs are under fire... again

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
Neil Munro _Daily Caller_
Tom MacArthur vs. Chamber of Crony Socialists in heated primary in NJ
"Critics of the current large-scale immigration say it under-cuts Americans' salaries [and employment opportunities, and ethics] by flooding the labor market with 1 immigrant and 1 short-term-guest worker for every 4 Americans who graduate each year...   The Senate immigration bill supported by the chamber would roughly double the current inflow of foreign workers and legal immigrants...   'There is a huge schism in the GOP' between establishment Republicans who will compromise on [ObummerDoesn'tCare] and support [leftist] goals, such as federal housing for poor people in middle-class neighborhoods, said Lonegan.   'I want to stand up for the grass roots.' he said.   MacArthur, however, countered by saying that 'voters expect their leaders to get [bad, harmful] things done'."

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
Thomas E. Brewton
service clubs and mutual benefit associations are worthwhile

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
Thomas E. Brewton
while race-obsessed anti-Semitic anti-Christian crony-socialist oath-breaker Barack Hussein Obummer and the haughty John Kerry slept

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
Walter Hudson _PJ Media_
Chasing Financial Freedom in a Down Economy (flash audio)

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
"Liberty Island" _PJ Media_
_That In Those Times We Will Remember_: new historical fiction from David Churchill Barrow

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
Tony Guerra _PJ Media_
Tightening Polls in Wisconsin Could Shape Walker's Presidential Aspirations

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
Bridget Johnson _PJ Media_
Obummer Regime IRS Drops Controversial Re-Definition of 501(c)(4)s, But Re-Incarnation of Rule Looms

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
Rod Kackley _PJ Media_
Jim Sensenbrenner Loses Key Backer Justin Amash in Vote to Reform Government Surveillance
Brandon Bailey: San Jose CA Mercury News

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
Roger L. Simon _PJ Media_
The Veterans Administration (and Indian Health Service) Scandal: Socialized Medicine on Trial

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
Michael Patrick Leahy _Breitbart_
David Brat victory in primary in VA may block immigration law perversion

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
_Highland CA Community News_
Tim Donnelly going door to door with Redlands Tea Party Patriots on Saturday May 31
Tim Donnelly is top contender for CA governor

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
Anthony Watts
NOAA predicts near-normal or below-normal 2014 Atlantic hurricane season

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
Anthony Watts
what the world needs now is a lot less poverty

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
Anthony Watts
interesting graph -- fraction of the world in drought 1982-2012

2014-05-22 (5774 Ayyr 22)
OAS
Operation American Spring continues today: kick out the oath-breakers who are trying to destroy the USA
Cheryl K. Chumley: Washington DC Times
Talking Points Memo
Resistance United advocates prayer
fire Andrea Mitchell
Liberty Beacon
Tea Party News Network
Freedom Outpost
Before It's News
Truth and Action
Debate Politics
Ron Paul Forums
Free Republic
Shoebat
Vol Nation
OAS FAQ
 
Proposed Bills 2014
 
 

2014-05-23

2014-05-23 (5774 Ayyr 23)
Norm Matloff _H-1B/ L-1/ Off-Shoring News-Letter_
MSFT et al. in Vancouver
"...First, it notes that a major attraction to MSFT and other U.S. software firms setting up shop in Vancouver is that '...salaries for tech workers are about 10% to 15% [below those] in the U.S.A....'   The article adds, 'Last year, as [U.S.A.] salaries and hiring rebounded from their post-recession lull, other companies began looking for talent north of the border..   This month [MSFT] announced lans to more than double its roughly 300-employee office in Vancouver, where video games have been the focus   There, MSFT will hire and train 400 software developers from around the world to work on mobile and cloud projects.'...   Again, it is clear that Bradley was not willing to pay the salaries paid by other firms   The main issue was money, not skills..."

2014-05-23 (5774 Ayyr 23)
Joe Guzzardi _Jewish World Review_
limit guest-workers
"That an immigration lawyer advocates for more immigration is hardly surprising (Business Forum: 'H-1B Visa Shortage A Serious Impediment to Local Hiring', May 10).   But Robert Whitehill's message that more H-1B visas are of urgent importance to the business community is wrong.   Numerous non-partisan studies have debunked the long-promoted idea that America needs more foreign-born workers, especially H-1Bs.   The H-1B narrative has been skill fully packaged and promoted by well-funded advocacy groups like Mark Zuckerberg's... as essential to the national interest.   In reality, it reflects the economic interests of [executives of] tech companies and universities that employ non-immi­grant visa holders.   Read 'It Doesn't Add Up', published in the Columbia Journalism Review, 2013 June.   With about 90M Americans not attached to the labor force, the nation needs fewer over-seas workers, not more.   As for the 'O' visa that Mr.   Whitehill said had 'limited applications', I suggest they're 'limited' only by the applicants' creativity or lack thereof.   Justin Bieber, he of questionable character, came to America with an 'O' visa."

2014-05-23 (5774 Ayyr 23)
David W. Walker _Conservative HQ_
the lingering costs to USA's defenders

2014-05-23 (5774 Ayyr 23)
George Rasley _Conservative HQ_
leftists file bill aimed at quashing free speech

2014-05-23 (5774 Ayyr 23)
Jeff Jacoby _Jewish World Review_
how political insiders control the ballot
"Ballot-access hurdles are a classic incumbent-protection device, one of the techniques political insiders use to protect their monopoly from pesky challengers and citizen initiatives.   So it's tempting to chortle when one of those hurdles trips up an incumbent...   His campaign turned in more than the necessary number of signatures from registered voters in the district -- 1,236 of them, according to local election officials.   But nearly half of those signatures were thrown out because the petition circulators hired to collect them weren't themselves registered voters.   Why in the world should it make the slightest difference whether the people canvassing for signatures outside the local supermarket or at the town dump are registered to vote?   It shouldn't.   Conyers fell afoul of a proviso whose only real purpose, like so many other election-law conditions, is to ensnare the unwary or to make ballot access more difficult for insurgents and outsiders.   Such traps are not just obnoxious, they are unconstitutional...   Politicians and their cronies, jealous of sharing power with the great unwashed, devise inventive ways to keep people and propositions off the ballot.   Collecting the necessary signatures and jumping through all the other needed hoops to put something on the ballot is a lot harder than many realize..."

2014-05-23 (5774 Ayyr 23)
Michael Liedtke _San Jose CA Mercury News_/_AP_
STEM pros targeted by execs in tech no-poaching case likely to get only $4K each

2014-05-23 (5774 Ayyr 23)
Charles Krauthammer _Jewish World Review_
race-obsessed anti-Semitic anti-Christian crony-socialist oath-breaker Barack Hussein Obummer out-maneuvered by Putin on deal with Red China for natural gas

2014-05-23 (5774 Ayyr 23)
David Limbaugh _Jewish World Review_
pres. race-obsessed anti-Semitic anti-Christian crony-socialist oath-breaker Barack Hussein Obummer, the disengaged scold

2014-05-23 (5774 Ayyr 23)
Michelle Malkin _Jewish World Review_
compare and contrast how the race-obsessed anti-Semitic anti-Christian crony-socialist oath-breaker Barack Hussein Obummer regime treats veterans vs. illegal aliens
please help find Marizela

2014-05-23 (5774 Ayyr 23)
Mona Charen _Jewish World Review_
campus barbarism experiences a small set-back

2014-05-23 (5774 Ayyr 23)
Rich Lowry _Jewish World Review_
the Veterans Administration's socialist "paradise"

2014-05-23 (5774 Ayyr 23)
Melanie Phillips _Jewish World Review_
Israel's Christian friends

2014-05-23 (5774 Ayyr 23)
R' Tzvi Hersh Weinreb _Jewish World Review_
the secret to becoming historical spiritual heroes

2014-05-23 (5774 Ayyr 23)
Jamie Radtke _Bull Elephant_
NSA can you hear me now? NO!
"Unfortunately, while the victory in the House was overwhelming, [race-obsessed anti-Semitic anti-Christian crony-socialist oath-breaker Barack Hussein Obummer] and select legislators diluted the bill in a way that some civil liberty advocates could not swallow."

2014-05-23 (5774 Ayyr 23)
OAS
Operation American Spring continues today: kick out the oath-breakers who are trying to destroy the USA
Cheryl K. Chumley: Washington DC Times
Talking Points Memo
Resistance United advocates prayer
fire Andrea Mitchell
Liberty Beacon
Tea Party News Network
Freedom Outpost
Before It's News
Truth and Action
Debate Politics
Ron Paul Forums
Free Republic
Shoebat
Vol Nation
OAS FAQ

2014-05-23 (5774 Ayyr 23)
Larry Hamlin
climate hysterics make major blunder in reporting Antarctica ice change results

2014-05-23 (5774 Ayyr 23)
Anthony Watts
the haughty John Kerry makes a fool of himself with remarks about European temperatures

2014-05-23 (5774 Ayyr 23)
Tim Ball
Hard Sciences vs. the Soft "Sciences" Is an Ongoing Debate Central To Climate

2014-05-23 (5774 Ayyr 23)
Joe Bastardi & Anthony Watts
NOAA forecasts above normal Arctic ice extent for summer
 
Proposed Bills 2014
 
 

2014-05-24

2014-05-24 (5774 Ayyr 24)
MMMM MMMM _MMM MMM MMM MMM_
MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

2014-05-24 (5774 Ayyr 24)
OAS
Operation American Spring continues today: kick out the oath-breakers who are trying to destroy the USA
Cheryl K. Chumley: Washington DC Times
Talking Points Memo
Resistance United advocates prayer
fire Andrea Mitchell
Liberty Beacon
Tea Party News Network
Freedom Outpost
Before It's News
Truth and Action
Debate Politics
Ron Paul Forums
Free Republic
Shoebat
Vol Nation
OAS FAQ

2014-05-24 (5774 Ayyr 24)
Willis Eschenbach
It's The Evidence, Stupid: I still haven't found any climate data-sets that show any traces of the 11-year sun-spot cycles
 
Proposed Bills 2014
 
 

2014-05-25

2014-05-25 (5774 Ayyr 25)
Jennifer Harper _Jewish World Review_
low support for McConnell; federal government's uncountably numerous departments, agencies, offices...
"'The last time a sitting senator from the Bluegrass State registered less voter support than McConnell's 60% was during a primary election 76 years ago...'..   'Even the experts can't agree on the total number of federal government agencies, commissions and departments   Most estimates suggest there are probably more than 2K of these.', notes an analysis from the Independence Hall Association, a historically minded nonprofit organization in Philadelphia   Academic sources, and even the White House varies on the count, with estimates starting at a minimum of 500...meanwhile, the federal government took in $2.8T in revenue during fiscal year 2013, but spent $3.5T, this according to the Congressional Budget Office   The feds currently employ 2.7M civilians, 1.5M uniformed military personnel and 64M judicial or legislative folk, says the Office of Personnel Management..."

2014-05-25 (5774 Ayyr 25)
Rick Moran _PJMedia_
opportunity differences are what should concern us

2014-05-25 (5774 Ayyr 25)
OAS
Operation American Spring continues today: kick out the oath-breakers who are trying to destroy the USA
Cheryl K. Chumley: Washington DC Times
Talking Points Memo
Resistance United advocates prayer
fire Andrea Mitchell
Liberty Beacon
Tea Party News Network
Freedom Outpost
Before It's News
Truth and Action
Debate Politics
Ron Paul Forums
Free Republic
Shoebat
Vol Nation
OAS FAQ
 
Proposed Bills 2014
 
 

2014-05-26: Memorial Day

2014-05-26 (5774 Ayyr 26)
Bernard Goldberg _Jewish World Review_
A Community Organizer in Way Over His Head

2014-05-26 (5774 Ayyr 26)
Paul Greenberg _Jewish World Review_
forgotten massacres

2014-05-26 (5774 Ayyr 26)
Star Parker _Jewish World Review_
Republicans should not fear being ideological
"The Republican 'establishment' is complicit in the problem because none of today's biggest problems are new   They have been growing and obvious for many years, and Republicans who have held power in Washington, both in the White House and in the congress, have ignored it all [or actively worked with the leftists/Dems to make them worse]."

2014-05-26 (5774 Ayyr 26)
George Will _Jewish World Review_
the ideal 2016 candidate the USA really needs

2014-05-26 (5774 Ayyr 26)
Mark Steyn _Jewish World Review_
Where's the Dream Act for Meriam Ibrahim?

2014-05-26 (5774 Ayyr 26)
Jack Kelly _Jewish World Review_
2 potential GOP candidates for president...who just might make the leftists' heads explode

2014-05-26 (5774 Ayyr 26)
David M. Shribman _Jewish World Review_
USA looks back to go forward

2014-05-26 (5774 Ayyr 26)
Bruce Bialosky _Jewish World Review_
curing the Veterans Admin problems

2014-05-26 (5774 Ayyr 26)
Kathleen Parker _Jewish World Review_
our irresponsible presidents, congress-critters, judges, cabinet secretaries, agency directors...

2014-05-26 (5774 Ayyr 26)
Richard Rahn _Jewish World Review_
race-obsessed anti-Semitic anti-Christian crony-socialist oath-breaker Barack Hussein Obummer regime's program to control the citizenry through financial tyranny: Operation Choke Point
Richard Rahn: Washington DC Times
Todd Zywicki: Washington DC Post
Kelly Riddell: Washington DC Times
WikiPedia
Michael Patrick Leahy: Breitbart
Kelly Riddell: World Net Daily
NRAILA: InfoWars
American Banker
Chris Dixon: Conceal & Carry Network
Rick Moran: American Thinker
Victor Keith: American Thinker: the weaponization of the federal bureaucracy
Jana Kasperkevic: Manchester Guardian

2014-05-26 (5774 Ayyr 26)
_PJMedia_
British historian Andrew Roberts makes the case for how to defeat tyranny (video)

2014-05-26 (5774 Ayyr 26)
Scott Ott _PJMedia_
USS California BB-44

2014-05-26 (5774 Ayyr 26)
Victor Davis Hanson _PJMedia_
race-obsessed anti-Semitic anti-Christian crony-socialist oath-breaker Barack Hussein Obummer
"If we were living in normal times, the following scandals and failures -- without going into foreign policy -- would have ruined a presidency to the point of reducing it to Nixon, Bush, or Truman poll ratings.   Think of the following: the Fast and Furious scandal, the VA mess, the tapping of the communications of the Associated Press reporters, the NSA monitoring, Benghazi in all of its manifestations, the serial lies about [ObummerDoesntCare], the failed stimuli, the chronic zero interest/print money policies, the serial high unemployment, the borrowing of $7T to no stimulatory effect, the spiraling national debt, the customary violations of the Hatch Act by Obama cabinet officials, the alter ego/fake identity of EPA head Lisa Jackson, the sudden departure of Hilda Solis after receiving union freebies, the mendacity of Kathleen Sebelius, the strange atmospherics surrounding the Petraeus resignation, the customary presidential neglect of enforcing the laws from immigration statutes to his own health care rules, the presidential divisiveness ('punish our enemies', 'you didn't build that', Trayvon as the son that Obama never had, etc.), and on and on..."

2014-05-26 (5774 Ayyr 26)
OAS
Operation American Spring continues today: kick out the oath-breakers who are trying to destroy the USA
Cheryl K. Chumley: Washington DC Times
Talking Points Memo
Resistance United advocates prayer
fire Andrea Mitchell
Liberty Beacon
Tea Party News Network
Freedom Outpost
Before It's News
Truth and Action
Debate Politics
Ron Paul Forums
Free Republic
Shoebat
Vol Nation
OAS FAQ

2014-05-26 (5774 Ayyr 26)
"Just The Facts"
new WUWT ENSO forecast page, under-water up-grades to the WUWT ENSO page and a disturbance in the equatorial Atlantic

2014-05-26 (5774 Ayyr 26)
Willis Eschenbach
well, color me gobsmacked
 
Proposed Bills 2014
 
 

2014-05-27

2014-05-27 (5774 Ayyr 27)
Dennis Prager _Jewish World Review_
brain-washed in college

2014-05-27 (5774 Ayyr 27)
Jeff Jacoby _Jewish World Review_
the vaunted "competence" of president race-obsessed anti-Semitic anti-Christian crony-socialist oath-breaker Barack Hussein Obummer

2014-05-27 (5774 Ayyr 27)
A. Barton Hinkle _Jewish World Review_
a modest proposal to ban volunteering
"If we don't let someone work for $5 an hour, why do we let anybody work for $0 an hour?...   If you help build a 2-story starter house for Ryland Homes, the 7th-largest home-builder in the U.S.A., you're guaranteed a minimum hourly wage.   If you help build the exact same house for Habitat for Humanity, the 10th-largest home-builder, you're guaranteed squat.   And squat doesn't put groceries on the table."

2014-05-27 (5774 Ayyr 27)
Jennifer Harper & John Stossel _Jewish World Review_
here comes the biggest breach; The "new" conservative woman emerges; Can a doctor be president? + more
"...'Over the past 40 years, murder dropped by 40%, rape by 80%, and, outside of war zones, Islamic terrorism claims fewer than 400 lives a year.   The last decade saw the fewest lives claimed in war since record keeping began.   One unnecessary death is tragic, but the big picture is good news.'..."

2014-05-27 (5774 Ayyr 27)
Alicia Colon _Jewish World Review_
draft, and include women in combat?

2014-05-27 (5774 Ayyr 27)
Tom Purcell _Jewish World Review_
why spy, Red China?
"I admit that I am envious of your pluck -- how you're so full of pep and vinegar in your desire to compete and grow.   America was like that once.   Sure, we were never communists at heart like you.   We believed in freedom.   We believed government should mostly stay out of our way so that individuals could freely pursue life, liberty and happiness.   Our approach worked mighty well.   We were always blessed with natural resources, which we exploited mightily in our early years.   We were blessed with millions of proud immigrants who came to our country to improve their lot and give their children educational and professional opportunities that they never had.   Our work ethic was incredible.   Hard work begat wealth production, which fed investment into innovative new ideas that further expanded growth and opportunity..."

2014-05-27 (5774 Ayyr 27)
Thomas Sowell _Jewish World Review_
random thoughts on current events
"Will the Veterans Administration scandal wake up those people who have been blithely saying that what we need is a 'single payer' system for medical care?   Delays in getting to see a doctor have been a common denominator in government-run medical systems in England, Canada and Australia, among other places.   Class warfare rhetoric would have us resenting 'the top 10%' in income.   But that would be a farce, because most of us would be resenting ourselves, since more than half of all Americans -- 54% -- are in the top 10% at some stage of their lives.   Some people act as if the answer to every problem is to put more money and power in the hands of politicians.   Freedom means nothing if it does not mean the freedom to do what other people don't like..."

2014-05-27 (5774 Ayyr 27)
Cal Thomas _Jewish World Review_
the Rich List and the West's culture of envy
"Titled 'Don't beat the rich: just join them', the Times writes: '(the list) is a picture of self-made millionaires and billionaires, many of whom have overcome educational disadvantages and personal set-backs -- including poverty and the loss of a parent -- to succeed.   Most eschewed cozy normality, taking risks and putting their livelihoods on the line in their determination to succeed.'...   In Britain and America, just a few generations ago, those who came by their wealth and success honestly and through hard work were idolized and emulated.   The attitude shared by those who began life in modest circumstances, was, 'if they can do it, so can I.'..."

2014-05-27 (5774 Ayyr 27)
Jonathan Spyer & Aymenn Jawad al Tamimi _PJMedia_
Syria's ISIL/ ISIS/ IS/ daesh/ calipate crucifying opponents, justifying horror with Quran passages

2014-05-27 (5774 Ayyr 27)
Mike Lumish _Times of Israel_
so, just what is a "Palestinian" anyway?
Philistines/Pleshtim/Flishtim/Plistim/Allophyloi/Kaphtor (wikipedia)
"Palestinian people" (wikipedia)
About Ancient History: "Sea People", Hittites
K. Kris Hirst: About Archaeology: "Sea People": Philistines & Etruscans
Moshe Dann: PJMedia: the dirty little secret about the "Palestinians"
Free Republic: the history and meaning of "Palestine" and "Palestinians"
Phoenicia (wikipedia)
Erythraean Sea (wikipedia)
Bedouins/Arabs/Arbaaa/Aarab/Qedarites (wikipedia)
Gaza City (wikipedia)
Gaza Strip=Palestine (wikipedia)
Islamization of the Gaza Strip=Palestine=Filistia (wikipedia)
Palestinian refugee (wikipedia)
Jewish exodus from Arab lands (wikipedia)
Jewish refugees from Arab & Muslim countries (wikipedia)
Jewish refugees (wikipedia)

2014-05-27 (5774 Ayyr 27)
Bill Straub _PJMedia_
Ken Blackwell: GOP must fight rapid decline in USA morality, emphasize "social issues"
"Former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell warned that Republicans ignore social issues at their peril in the upcoming November election, maintaining that the nation's only path to a robust economy is an adherence to a strong moral code and the traditional family..."

2014-05-27 (5774 Ayyr 27)
Clayton E. Cramer _PJMedia_
California has more than enough laws

2014-05-27 (5774 Ayyr 27)
Michael Ledeen _PJMedia_
Italian News: We are not afraid

2014-05-27 (5774 Ayyr 27)
Catey Hill _MarketWatch_
top paid CEOs get 400%+ raises, other high-paid employees 4.3%, average salaried employees 2.9%, average employees 2.6%

2014-05-27 (5774 Ayyr 27)
Peter Ferrara _Heartland Institute_/_Forbes_
Obummer's perfect plan for economic destruction of the USA

2014-05-27 (5774 Ayyr 27)
_RTT News_
Conference Board: consumer confidence index up from revised 81.7 in April to 83 in May
"The assessment of the labor market was more favorable, as consumers saying jobs are 'plentiful' rose to 14.1% from 13.0% and those claiming jobs are 'hard to get' dipped to 32.3% from 32.8%."

2014-05-27 (5774 Ayyr 27)
OAS
Operation American Spring continues today: kick out the oath-breakers who are trying to destroy the USA
Cheryl K. Chumley: Washington DC Times
Talking Points Memo
Resistance United advocates prayer
fire Andrea Mitchell
Liberty Beacon
Tea Party News Network
Freedom Outpost
Before It's News
Truth and Action
Debate Politics
Ron Paul Forums
Free Republic
Shoebat
Vol Nation
OAS FAQ

2014-05-27 (5774 Ayyr 27)
Anthony Watts
Antarctica climate alarmism frenzy revisited -- ill-informed, exaggerated and erroneous media claims galore

2014-05-27 (5774 Ayyr 27)
Anthony Watts
"extreme weather" before climate hysteria

2014-05-27 (5774 Ayyr 27)
Anthony Watts
still ice on Lake Superior -- never before seen in satellite era

2014-05-27 (5774 Ayyr 27)
Anthony Watts
natural fires contributed to carbon sequestration 15K years ago
 
Proposed Bills 2014
 
 

2014-05-28

2014-05-28 (5774 Ayyr 28)
Byron York _Jewish World Review_
chicken plants, high-tech visas and the immigration dilemma
"...Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies -- the only participant who [supports] reform...   [People of most] political parties support reform...   [T]here are [many] voices -- not just Krikorian, but Bernstein [Teitelbaum, Kuehn, Matloff, Salzman, Lowell, Cappelli, Berry, Miano, Shah, Hira, Wedel, Huber, Levin, Ingraham, Savage, Stein, Brimelow, Sanchez, Emmons... and millions of others], too -- to remind [those opposed to reform, such as Barbour, Gates, Bush, Reid, Pelosi, Donohue, Zuckerberg...] of the costs involved.

2014-05-28 (5774 Ayyr 28)
Guy P. Raffa _Chronicle of Higher Education_
what the head of hiring at Google doesn't understand about skills

2014-05-28 (5774 Ayyr 28)
Walter E. Williams _Jewish World Review_
the "white privilege" scam

2014-05-28 (5774 Ayyr 28)
Nat Hentoff _Jewish World Review_
the distinctive core of senator Rand Paul

2014-05-28 (5774 Ayyr 28)
Betsy McCaughey _Jewish World Review_
government employee unions share the blame for Veterans Administration deaths

2014-05-28 (5774 Ayyr 28)
Michelle Malkin _Jewish World Review_
justice for Taryn and Tanner
please help find Marizela

2014-05-28 (5774 Ayyr 28)
Dick Morris _Jewish World Review_
a step toward victory over leftist/Dems
"If [Tea Party] Republicans control the Senate, they can block the confirmation of judges who will allow [the race-obsessed anti-Semitic anti-Christian crony-socialist oath-breaker Barack Hussein Obummer's] power over-reach   You can bet majority-leader Harry Reid will confirm every judicial nomination in sight before relinquishing control of the chamber in 2015 January   But he can't stop [Tea Party] Republicans from blocking confirmations on any new judges the president appoints after [a Tea Party GOP] takes the senate."

2014-05-28 (5774 Ayyr 28)
Jonah Goldberg _Jewish World Review_
Putin's well-worn fascist lies

2014-05-28 (5774 Ayyr 28)
Bill Gertz _Jewish World Review_
illegal directive outlines the race-obsessed anti-Semitic anti-Christian crony-socialist oath-breaker Barack Hussein Obummer regime's policy to use the military against citizens; House hits Office of Net Assessment down-grade; no Dennis Rodman defense
"Defense analysts say there has been a buildup of military units within non-security-related federal agencies, notably the creation of Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams   The build-up has raised questions about whether the [Obummer regime] is undermining civil liberties under the guise of counter-terrorism and counter-narcotics efforts   Other agencies with SWAT teams reportedly include the Department of Agriculture, the Railroad Retirement Board, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Office of Personnel Management, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Education Department   The militarization of federal agencies, under little-known statues that permit deputization of security officials, comes as the White House has launched verbal attacks on private citizens' ownership of firearms despite the fact that most gun owners are law-abiding citizens."
directive signed by then-deputy-defense-secretary William J. Lynn (pdf)

2014-05-28 (5774 Ayyr 28)
Jennifer Harper _Jewish World Review_
the race-obsessed anti-Semitic anti-Christian crony-socialist oath-breaker Barack Hussein Obummer regime picking conflicts based on politics

2014-05-28 (5774 Ayyr 28)
Douglas Ernst _Jewish World Review_
no standing ovation for the race-obsessed anti-Semitic anti-Christian crony-socialist oath-breaker Barack Hussein Obummer at West Point

2014-05-28 (5774 Ayyr 28)
Bill Straub _PJMedia_
Ken Cuccinelli: Tea Party well-positioned to make major gains this election season
"Cuccinelli said the public remains revolted by [ObummerDoesntCare] but success at the polls may hinge on 'how they handle it'   Congressional Republicans could still stymie success by taking dubious actions like passing immigration [law perversions like S744]."

2014-05-28 (5774 Ayyr 28)
David J. Rusin _PJMedia_
portrait of disgraced defense contractor Rahim Sabadia: Islamists and their sympathizers must be kept away from the sensitive technologies and institutions that protect USA

2014-05-28 (5774 Ayyr 28)
Bridget Johnson _PJMedia_
the race-obsessed anti-Semitic anti-Christian crony-socialist oath-breaker Barack Hussein Obummer insanely says wider al-Qaeda network "lessens the possibility of large-scale 2001/09/11-style attacks"

2014-05-28 (5774 Ayyr 28)
Anthony Watts
color perceptions of the national temperature

2014-05-28 (5774 Ayyr 28)
Charles Battig
Freedom From Information Act (FFIA)

2014-05-28 (5774 Ayyr 28)
Anthony Watts
6K years ago: "invasive species" moving over land-bridges... or just business as usual for nature?

2014-05-28 (5774 Ayyr 28)
Anthony Watts
newest target of copper theives: wind turbines

2014-05-28 (5774 Ayyr 28)
Larry Hamlin
UN IPCC findings dispute ABC, CBS, NBC and BBC alarmist and flawed Antarctica sea level rise claims

2014-05-28 (5774 Ayyr 28)
Mike Pendrith _Evan Carmichael_
12 reasons why new businesses fail
"According to Dun & Bradstreet and INC. magazine, 33% of all new businesses fail within the first 6 months. 50% of new businesses fail within their first 2 years of operation and 75% fail within the first 3 years."

2014-05-28 (5774 Ayyr 28)
OAS
Operation American Spring continues today: kick out the oath-breakers who are trying to destroy the USA
Cheryl K. Chumley: Washington DC Times
Talking Points Memo
Resistance United advocates prayer
fire Andrea Mitchell
Liberty Beacon
Tea Party News Network
Freedom Outpost
Before It's News
Truth and Action
Debate Politics
Ron Paul Forums
Free Republic
Shoebat
Vol Nation
OAS FAQ
 
Proposed Bills 2014
 
 

2014-05-29

2014-05-29 (5774 Ayyr 29)
Norm Matloff _H-1B/ L-1/ Off-Shoring News-Letter_
more on senator Jeff Sessions's briefing on H-1B, green cards and the claimed STEM labor shortage
 
Earlier I reported on the media briefing held by senator Sessions's office on H-1B, green cards and the claimed STEM labor shortage.
 
I cited a Breitbart article, and since that time 2 more articles, more main-stream in nature, have appeared:
Computerworld and Science Careers.
 
These new articles cover largely the same ground as Breitbart, but there are some new points that I wish to comment on.
 
First, on the Computerworld article:
 
Ron Hira made a correct point about the legal wage requirements of H-1B and green cards (note that it is both!):
 
"The wage floors set in the H-1B program are far below market wages for American workers, and there is no requirement to recruit or look for U.S. citizens first, said Hira. 'You bring them in to under-cut Americans,' he said."
 
However, in saying that the H-1Bs are hired as cheap labor, Ron's quotes elsewhere in the article might be misread as meaning that the under-payment of H-1Bs mainly occurs with the IT out-sourcing firms. This is not the case -- the household name "main-stream" tech firms are plenty culpable too. My Migration Letters paper shows that those firms hire many foreign workers at the same below-market wage floors that Ron cites above.
 
Now consider this quote:
 
"H-1B visa holders earn 5% to 10% less than U.S. citizens with comparable skills, and the H-1B program shifts hiring to younger workers, displacing older professionals, said Salzman. It also weakens the bargaining position of older workers, he said."
 
I don't think Hal quite said everything in the quote.
 
First of all, I believe that his 5-10% figure is NOT for comparable skills, but rather for comparable age, education, occupation and region. All these are important variables, but so is skill sets, e.g. Android programming, that typically command wage premiums of around 20% in the open market. Remember, the employers say they hire H-1Bs because they have special skill sets that are rare among Americans in the field. So, IOW, the under-payment is more like 20%.
 
I don't think Hal talked about the bargaining position of older workers either. The sad fact is that older workers in this field typically DON'T EVEN GET A PHONE CALL WHEN THEY APPLY FOR A JOB. They are simply summarily rejected, with NO chance to bargain.
 
Hal's points about H-1Bs currently holding a large portion of IT (mainly software development [but not necessarily software product development]) jobs is very important. Keep this in mind next time you hear a firm like MSFT say something like, "Only 10% of our workers are H-1Bs" -- technically true, but they're including all the clerks, accountants, marketers, custodians etc. in the denominator there, an unfair fraction since H-1Bs generally don't become clerks etc.
 
One thing that the 2 sides of the H-1B debate do agree on is the supreme importance of STEM jobs to our economy, world competitiveness etc. So the proper analysis is to see what percentage of STEM jobs, especially the computer-related ones, that the H-1Bs are taking, not accounting jobs.
 
Now let's look at the Science Careers article. (As I often do, I'll point out that Science Careers is associated with Science Magazine, one of the most prestigious STEM publications in the nation.)
 
I had to laugh when I saw myself described as a "self-taught expert on high-skill immigration" -- as if Hira, Salzman and Teitelbaum have formal training in that field, which of course they don't. I think the author is alluding to the fact that these other 3 have degrees in social sciences. But I ought to point out that actually my own formal training was in statistics; I do have a "license" for this kind of analysis. Plus, I know what these workers actually do, e.g. what Android programming entails, as opposed to treating them as widgets.
 
OTOH, the issue of self-training is an important point. The author mentions that I am a computer science professor, but he is probably unaware of the fact that I have NO background in CS. I'm entirely self-taught in that field, and I'm not alone: The large majority of those who work as software developers are self-taught too. In fact, some of you may be surprised to know that many of the H-1Bs in the computer field don't have CS degrees either, though they typically have some course-work in the field.
 
The author makes a big point of the fact that Sessions, a conservative, is coming to the defense of American workers while the putatively pro-labor Democrats are gung-ho for policies that bring the Americans harm. Indeed!
 
As the article points out, the politics here are that the Democrats want to leverage the H-1B issue to get amnesty for the [illegal aliens], whom Jay Leno cleverly described as viewed by the Democrats as "undocumented Democrats." :-)
 
But there is more to be said on this. Though amnesty is viewed as a Latino issue, and indeed various entities have talked Latino-Americans into making it such an issue, the fact is that immigration harms low-skilled Latino workers. Ask any (legal) blue collar worker on Soto Street in East LA (my old neighborhood -- yay!) if he wants more people brought in to compete with him. Guess what his answer will be; need you ask?
 
Antonia Hernandez, then president of MALDEF, one of the most strident Latino organizations in the country, once said publicly,
 
"...migration, legal and undocumented, does have an impact on our economy...(in) competition within the Latino community... There is an issue of wage depression, as in the garment industry, which is predominantly immigrant, of keeping wages down because of the flow of traffic of people."
 
Various academic studies have confirmed it.
 
I recently happened to be talking to a very active member of an Asian-American political organization. Over the years, the driving issue in immigration for such organizations has been retention of the Fourth Preference, which allows (usually naturalized) U.S. citizens to sponsor their adult siblings for immigration. Since Chinese and Korean immigrants make heavy use of this immigration avenue, their lobbyists have fought fiercly against proposals to repeal this part of the law. This has been their focus all along, during the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. Indeed, the current senate bill [S744] contains a provision to repeal Fourth Preference, and it was immediately attacked by these groups when the bill was introduced.
 
So, I said to the above activist "I assume your organization is lobbying to keep the Fourth Preference, right?"   He floored me with his answer: "No, were pushing to enact STEM visas."   When I pointed out that a large portion of under-graduate CS majors are Asian-American, and thus STEM visas would bring them harm, he was shocked, and said he would need to rethink the issue.
 
So much for the putatively pro-labor, and pro-minority, Democrats.
 
I was recently told that all Democratic politicians take their marching orders on the H-1B issue from the very top, and I've seen lots of evidence confirming it. For instance, all the letters I've seen from Democratic senators and representives to their constituents about H-1B use identical language, showing that it comes from one central source.
 
I've reported before on a DC conference I attended that consisted not only of academics but also about 2 dozen of the most influential policy-makers in DC.
 
I wrote,
 
"One of the policy-makers, one in especially highly-placed position in the Executive Branch, did point out very frankly that they take orders from the top (Obama or whoever is president at the time), and must act accordingly, whether they think the policies are proper or not. This policy-maker's comment was in response to a barrage of comments from other panelists along the lines of, 'Why do we have these destructive policies?'"
 
(I urge everyone who asks that last question to read my report on that conference, at the above [link]. It was a real eye opener for me, even though I was hardly naive when I went in.)
 
I know of no Democrat willing to speak out in the manner Sessions has. (No, I don't count senator Durbin, sorry to say.)   For example, senator Sherrod Brown, who is passionate about the impact on American workers of shipping WORK abroad, has been totally silent about bringing workERS here from abroad with the same impact.
 
The H-1B/green cards issue is an excellent case study of the loss of our democracy -- and the loss of our Democrats.
 
Norm
---30---

2014-05-29 (5774 Ayyr 29)
Victor Davis Hanson _Jewish World Review_
*** what was D-Day? ***

2014-05-29 (5774 Ayyr 29)
judge Andrew P. Napolitano _Jewish World Review_
No Place To Hide

2014-05-29 (5774 Ayyr 29)
George Will _Jewish World Review_
Obummernomics

2014-05-29 (5774 Ayyr 29)
Cal Thomas _Jewish World Review_
Tea Partiers kindred spirits making in-roads in UK, EU...

2014-05-29 (5774 Ayyr 29)
Paul Greenberg _Jewish World Review_
...but Europe remains Europe, more's the pity

2014-05-29 (5774 Ayyr 29)
Michael Reagan _Jewish World Review_
mass murderers and knee-jerks

2014-05-29 (5774 Ayyr 29)
Larry Elder _Jewish World Review_
will missed lessons be mastered by knee-jerks?

2014-05-29 (5774 Ayyr 29)
Ann Coulter _Jewish World Review_
don't stigmatize murderers!?!
"This is not a good case for liberals: The killer was an immigrant, a person of color, and the majority of his casualties resulted from attacks with a car or knife..   what we have is yet another mass murder committed by a schizophrenic..."

2014-05-29 (5774 Ayyr 29)
Robert Emmett Tyrrell ii _Jewish World Review_
academic waste-lands

2014-05-29 (5774 Ayyr 29)
Lenore Skenazy _Jewish World Review_
the real reason some children are fat

2014-05-29 (5774 Ayyr 29)
John Engle _Heartland Institute_
the continually worsening government violations of the 4th amendment

2014-05-29 (5774 Ayyr 29)
Jeffrey Lord _American Spectator_
reparations and the great unmentionable Dem/Red/leftist party

2014-05-29 (5774 Ayyr 29)
Anthony Watts
then, they came for the airplanes...

2014-05-29 (5774 Ayyr 29)
William McClenney
Glacial Inception
"I used to think there was only one known substitute for intelligence -- stupidity   I have since realized that left out evil (see Hitler et al.).   I have also come to the conclusion that the difference between confidence and arrogance is competence..."

2014-05-29 (5774 Ayyr 29)
OAS
Operation American Spring continues today: kick out the oath-breakers who are trying to destroy the USA
Cheryl K. Chumley: Washington DC Times
Talking Points Memo
Resistance United advocates prayer
fire Andrea Mitchell
Liberty Beacon
Tea Party News Network
Freedom Outpost
Before It's News
Truth and Action
Debate Politics
Ron Paul Forums
Free Republic
Shoebat
Vol Nation
OAS FAQ
 
Proposed Bills 2014
 
 

2014-05-30

2014-05-30 (5774 Sivan 01)
_Conservative HQ_
Chris McDaniel, Sam Clovis & Sheri Few: 3 key candidates

2014-05-30 (5774 Sivan 01)
George Rasley _Conservative HQ_
Obummer regime + GOP losershp opened the illegal alien flood-gates
"It is a basic law of economics and human behavior that people respond positively to incentives.   So if you want a lot of response, offer a big incentive.   And right now there is no better proof that incentives work than the flood of juvenile illegal aliens flooding our southern border -- all in response to the incentive offered by Virginia Republican Congressman Eric Cantor and other supporters of amnesty for these youthful violators of American sovereignty.   As Michael Board of News Radio 1200 WOAI in San Antonio, Texas reported, 'The Border Patrol says more than a thousand unaccompanied minors were arrested trying to sneak into Texas from Mexico, overwhelming the Border Patrol's holding facilities in the Rio Grande Valley.   Some of the children have been shipped to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio for temporary housing...   More than 60K unaccompanied children are expected to cross into Texas in 2014.'   The Border Patrol says illegal alien apprehensions in Fiscal Year 2014 in the Rio Grande Valley are already up 69% over last year; that translates into 148K apprehensions from 2013 Octber 1 through 2014 May 17, or about 1,100 arrests [per] day and the situation is expected to get worse...   The Virginia Republican primary is June 10.   If you want to put a stop to policies that offer incentives to illegal immigration vote Dave Brat..."

2014-05-30 (5774 Sivan 01)
Kendall Breitman _Politico_
Phil Robertson: "You can't be right for America if you're wrong with God"

2014-05-30 (5774 Sivan 01)
J. Randy Forbes _National Review_
the cross should remain at site of World Trade Center

2014-05-30 (5774 Sivan 01)
David Skolnick _Youngstown OH Vindicator_
Youngstown mayor, Mahoning county auditor, attorney pled "not guilty" to corrupt activity, conspiracy, bribery, money laundering and tampering with records
"being among 23 people involved in a criminal enterprise that traded money and other financial benefits for political favors, lying under oath to protect business interests, and an agreement to fix legal cases."

2014-05-30 (5774 Sivan 01)
Dave Weinbaum _Jewish World Review_
curb your entitlements

2014-05-30 (5774 Sivan 01)
David Limbaugh _Jewish World Review_
"trigger warning" warning
"Have you heard about 'trigger warnings', the latest thought control lunacy that has found its way onto college campuses?   I weep for our children as they try to navigate the insanity in our society fronting as being protective of their interests..."

2014-05-30 (5774 Sivan 01)
Ron Hart _Jewish World Review_
Obummer's moral inferiority posing as superiority

2014-05-30 (5774 Sivan 01)
Greg Crosby _Jewish World Review_
dust

2014-05-30 (5774 Sivan 01)
Wesley Pruden _Jewish World Review_
European politicians get boots in their back-sides from the populace
"More than 90% of those who admit to racial prejudice are eager to see immigration ended, at least long enough to give the nation time to catch its breath.   But this was the statistic that really rattled the ruling classes: 72% of those who profess no racial prejudice want to see immigration curbed, too.   (But only 15% say there's anything wrong with inter-racial marriage.)...   A one-time speech-writer for Tony Blair concedes now that the scheme was to banish the old white England and usher in a new, vibrant multi-cultural country.   The elites would be protected by wealth and position from what David Cameron would call 'deeply unpleasant' effects.   Anyone who thought all this scheming was a bad idea, that the culture wrought over centuries of British history should be preserved, that keeping intact the culture that attracted immigration in the first place, was dismissed as a retrograde racist.   Immigration was something nice people didn't talk about..."

2014-05-30 (5774 Sivan 01)
Mona Charen _Jewish World Review_
why service in the Veterans Administration won't improve

2014-05-30 (5774 Sivan 01)
Michelle Malkin _Jewish World Review_
the nosy, intrusive, big-data privacy violating busy-bodies in schools
please help find Marizela

2014-05-30 (5774 Sivan 01)
Jonathan Tobin _Jewish World Review_
the dangerous divided-Jerusalem fantasy
"47 years ago this week Israeli forces ended the division of Jerusalem.   The city had been split during the Arab siege of the capital in 1948 and it remained cut in half by an ugly wall as well as by dangerous no-man's-land zones.   The victory in the Six-Day War ended an illegal occupation of the eastern portion of the city as well as the walled Old City by Jordan that had lasted for 19 years but was not recognized by the world.   In breaking down the barriers, the Israelis not only re-united the city but opened access to its religious shrines..."

2014-05-30 (5774 Sivan 01)
Steve Doughty _London Daily Mail_
100K foreign students go missing every year in UK: college leavers from Asia thought to be living in British Isles illegally
"Government tracking system cannot find evidence students ever left UK.   Tens of thousands may now be living here illegally after completing studies.   Majority of students under suspicion are from the Indian sub-continent.   Records show they originally came to UK to attend universities and colleges.   Some 177K people moved to Britain for long-term study last year, down from 246K in 2011...   In The National Audit Office is to investigate claims that private universities are giving taxpayer-funded loans to thousands of students who don't go to class..."

2014-05-30 (5774 Sivan 01)
Kate Bahn _Chronicle of Higher Education_
biological clocks running out during grad school

2014-05-30 (5774 Sivan 01)
Bill McBride _Calculated Risk_
UMich consumer sentiment index down from 84.1 in late April to 81.9 in late May
Federal Reserve Board St. Louis
Federal Reserve Board St. Louis

2014-05-30 (5774 Sivan 01)
R' Abraham J. Twerski _Jewish World Review_
the quest for spirituality

2014-05-30 (5774 Sivan 01)
Eric Worrall
large volcano has erupted in Indonesia

2014-05-30 (5774 Sivan 01)
Christopher Monckton
who will rid us of this totalitarian prince?

2014-05-30 (5774 Sivan 01)
OAS
Operation American Spring continues today: kick out the oath-breakers who are trying to destroy the USA
Cheryl K. Chumley: Washington DC Times
Talking Points Memo
Resistance United advocates prayer
fire Andrea Mitchell
Liberty Beacon
Tea Party News Network
Freedom Outpost
Before It's News
Truth and Action
Debate Politics
Ron Paul Forums
Free Republic
Shoebat
Vol Nation
OAS FAQ
 
Proposed Bills 2014
 
 

2014-05-31

2014-05-31 (5774 Sivan 02)
Anthony Watts
in House testimony, Botkin dismantled the UN IPCC 2014 report
 
Proposed Bills 13
 
 

 
Proposed Bills 2014

USA Over-Population Clock
World + USA Over-Population Clocks
Jimbo Wales's WikiPedia on World Over-Population
population density
countries by population density
USA states and counties by population density
World Atlas: states by population density