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Bush totally against scrapping H1-B visas Ela Dutt (IANS) New York,
September 16
US President George W Bush is reportedly against a critical Bill now in
Congress that would cut down H1-B visas dramatically, affecting skilled
IT and other workers from India. At a private reception attended by
eight Indian Americans in Jackson, Mississippi, Bush vehemently
expressed his opposition to House Resolution 2688, a Bill introduced by
Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo of Colorado, according to those
attending the meeting. Immigration attorney Paresh Shah, who was present
at the meeting, said he specifically questioned the President regarding
his stand on the Bill in which Rep Tancredo has called for terminating
the H1-B visa programm altogether. "Bush spread his hands as wide apart
as possible and stated unequivocally that 'Tancredo and I are at
opposite ends of the pole. I fully do not support Congressman Tancredo's
Bill against H1-Bs'," Shah told IANS.The Tancredo bill has raised
hackles both in India and among Indian Americans and other supporters of
the community.
"In fact in India and the US there is an understanding that President
Bush supports Tancredo's efforts to close the H1-B programm as Tancredo
is a fellow Republican and also because the unemployment figures are so
high and many people feel that it is a result of H1-Bs occupying
American jobs," Shah said. But the President's statements prove the
opposite, he said. Shah is a member of the American Immigration Lawyers
Association (AILA) that presented its counter proposal on the H1-B visa
reduction programm to the President at the gathering. The private
reception was in honour of the Mississippi Republican gubernatorial
candidate Haley Barbour and netted $1.2 million for his campaign.
Besides Bush, other noted luminaries at the reception included former
senate majority leader Trent Lott of Mississippi as well as Karl Rove,
the President's chief campaign advisor. Sampath Shivangi of Mississippi
organized the exclusive Indian American delegation. The California
delegation, besides Shah, included Indo-American Friendship Council
chairman Krishna Reddy.
Currently, there are some estimated 900,000 H1-B employees in the US,
35-45 per cent of whom are from India, according to AILA. "Judging from
the President's strong negative reaction to the Tancredo bill, it's
apparent that he understands that the current unemployment situation in
the US is not due to H1-B visa holders taking American jobs," Shah
contended.
"As soon as I mentioned the visa, he knew what I was talking about, he
knew about the Tancredo bill, he knew what it meant. From his immediate
grasp of the H1-B issue, and his strong support for continuing the
program, he understands also that these foreign specialty workers are
basically a much needed element of our economy," Shah said.
By implication, some observers contend the President is not going to be
against business outsourcing as well.
Beginning October 1, the H1-B visas quota will revert back to the 65,000
per annum level it was before it was raised a few years ago to 195,000.
Shah also submitted AILA's proposal on the L-1 visa program to
counteract the various legislation currently pending in Congress to
limit its usage. "The L-1 Visa program is heavily used by the Indian
community. Last year, Indians comprised 24.4 per cent of the worldwide
L-1 visas issued, making them by far the number one group of users of
this visa program," Shah stated. Congressman Tom Tancredo Home Page
http://www.house.gov/tancredo/
DC Office 1130 Longworth HOB Washington, DC 20515 800-648-3516
877-762-8762
District Office 6099 South Quebec St., Suite 200 Centennial, CO
80111-4547 (720) 283-9772
E-mail: tom.tancredo@mail.house.gov
A bill introduced on July 9, 2003 by Representative Thomas Tancredo (R-CO). This bill seeks to eliminate the H1-B visa program
The Honorable full name:
United States House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515
I am writing to express my support to HR 2688, a bill introduced on July 9, 2003 by Representative Thomas Tancredo (R-CO). This bill seeks to eliminate the H1-B visa program which allows U.S. employers to hire highly educated foreign professionals on a temporary basis. While it is highly unlikely that this bill will gather enough support to become a law, it is cause for concern in immigrant communities. The stated purpose of H.R. 2688 is to prevent 'any skilled worker from overseas to enter the US - so that Americans do not lose their jobs to immigrants'. The U.S. was, is and will continue to remain a nation of immigrants.
The H-1B program benefits the U.S. economy by allowing employers to hire professionals with specialized technical skills or knowledge while protecting the interests of U.S. workers through built-in safeguards. The H-1B program has played an important role for many types of U.S. businesses including biotechnology and healthcare, information technology, and scientific research and development. Examples of H-1B employees include medical researchers, professors, engineers, and computer professionals.
Businesses would not go the extra burdens, costs, and delays of hiring foreign professionals through the H-1B program, if they could fulfill their labor needs with U.S. workers. Employers typically hire employees under the H-1B program because they need the specialized or unique skills that the H-1B professional offers or to relieve temporary work shortages. There are important safeguards built-in to the H-1B program that ensure that employers protect U.S. workers when they hire H-1B professionals; if they fail to comply with the regulations, employers may be subject to investigations and/or hefty monetary penalties. Employers also must pay a fee of $1,000 for each H-1B application, in addition to application fees and other associated costs. Without the H-1B program, it would be impossible for U.S. companies to maintain a competitive edge in the global market. In fact, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has pointed out that the U.S. continues to need the H1-B visa program and that we still have needs to hire skilled workers from overseas. Last year, some 79,000 H1-B visas were granted, showing the need for this visa category.
It is my fervent hope that you will not only support this measure, but that you will introduce and support even more reasonable bills on that restrict immigration. As a voting member in your constituency I appreciate and applaud your anti-immigrant position and thank you for your help in fighting such just bills as HR 2688. I am confident that you will act in the interest of our businesses; education, research and immigration needs and support such a bill to become law. I also oppose the initiative of the United States Indian American Political Action Committee (USINPAC) together with the various other pro-immigration and pro-business coalitions that have come together to fight this just bill.
Sincerely yours,
Your name and address
To view the entire article, visit
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=33894
Sunday, August 3, 2003
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'Cult of multiculturalism' vs. U.S. sovereignty
By Paula R. Kaufman
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Posted: August 3, 2003
1:00 a.m. Eastern
Editor's note: WorldNetDaily is pleased to have a content-sharing agreement with Insight magazine, the bold Washington publication not afraid to ruffle establishment feathers. Subscribe to Insight at WorldNetDaily's online store and save 71 percent off the cover price.
Thomas Tancredo is a third-term Republican congressman from Colorado. As chairman of the 65-member Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus he deals regularly with such facts as these:
More than 33.1 million immigrants live in the United States, a number unprecedented in U.S. history. Poverty rates for immigrants and their U.S.-born children are two-thirds higher than for native-born Americans and their children and account for approximately 25 percent of those now living in poverty in this country. Twenty-four of the southernmost U.S. states have accrued almost $1 billion in unpaid medical care all attributed to illegal immigration.
Tancredo worries about the innumerable U.S. jobs he says have been wiped out by immigration. He outspokenly faults the Bush administration for its open-border policy, which Tancredo believes not only has put Americans out of work but also suppressed their wages.
 Rep. Thomas Tancredo R-Colo. |
''I speak to people who lose their jobs to immigration: electricians, carpenters, high-tech workers. They call my office all the time. Hundreds of thousands of Americans are losing their jobs to immigrants, both legal and illegal,'' Tancredo tells Insight.
Tancredo also blames the immigration crisis on the ''liberal agenda," which he sees as encouraging immigrants to retain their language and their political allegiance to a foreign government while seeing themselves as separate and distinct from other Americans. It's a situation, he says, created by the liberal ''cult of multiculturalism.''
He's also concerned about the number of people between 6 million and 10 million in the United States with dual citizenship. What does this mean for America's sovereignty and the future of the country?
Tancredo is not alone in his concern: Polls show that 75 percent of Americans support immigration reform.
Tancredo warns about what he sees as the continuing encroachment of Mexico in the affairs of the United States. He regards the controversial matricula consular, an identification card issued by Mexico, as an effort to regularize illegal immigration into the United States.
He points out that the suspected murderer of Los Angeles County Deputy Sheriff David March, arrested and deported not once but three times, lives openly in Mexico and has not been arrested by Mexican officials. The Colorado congressman seeks changes in the U.S. extradition treaty with Mexico and is considering calling for congressional-oversight hearings on the influence of Mexican cartels on U.S. politics.
What guides Tancredo's attitude toward immigration, he says, is a principle as old as the republic itself that ''we are a nation bonded by a common language, culture, manners and customs.''
Question from Insight: The U.S. economy is in a slump and Americans by the millions are out of work, yet the wholesale replacement of our workers by immigrants is under way. What gives?
Rep. Thomas Tancredo: We have a cheap-labor policy. This government has determined that part of its economic policy is to undermine the value of American jobs. We have record-high unemployment rates. We have a stagnating economy. Yet this administration refuses to take any action to reduce the number of immigrants who are coming into the country [illegally], removing Americans from their jobs and replacing them with cheap labor.
Q: What is the H-1B visa program?
A: This program was designed to bring into our country people who had sets of esoteric skills, primarily in the high-tech areas such as computer analysts, computer programmers.
At the program's inception, the government allocated about 65,000 H-1B visas per year. It has climbed to 195,000 per year. What we found is that the program is severely abused. Through loopholes and fraud the number of visas has risen well above the quota cap to over 350,000 in the years 2001 and 2002.
The law dictates that H-1B visa holders must return home upon losing or leaving their jobs. The INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service] doesn't have the foggiest idea of the number of people who are breaking the law and, even worse, they don't even pretend to care about violations. Not a single soul has been prosecuted.
The L-1 visa program is replacing the H-1B and is yet another method for bringing more foreign workers into the U.S. Unlike the H-1B, the L-1 is not capped. Last year, about 200,000 to 300,000 L-1s entered the U.S. In fact, corporations will use H-1B and L-1 visa categories to train foreign workers with the intention of moving these jobs overseas.
Q: So, in the end, U.S. citizens are fired?
A: Yes. Foreign workers are trained here; in fact, they are trained by Americans whose jobs are then exported overseas.
Q: Doesn't this weaken the position of American workers?
A: Oh, it most certainly does! Years ago, foreign workers came across the border to perform agricultural labor. That continues. Today, however, illegal aliens in very large numbers are taking jobs in construction, meatpacking and technology - jobs that Americans not only can do but want to do.
It is becoming a pervasive problem for the American economy. Hundreds of thousands of Americans are losing their jobs to illegal aliens.
Q: Will immigration fill the coffers of the Social Security trust fund, as some argue?
A: It is a fiction that immigration is necessary to support old-age workers. We all know that the demographic profile is getting older. But it is inaccurate to say that immigrants will provide the worker base to sustain a large population of retirees.
Right now we bring in about one-and-a-half million legal immigrants each year through the regular immigration process (excluding visa programs) and another 1 million illegals. The vast majority of immigrants are low-skill, low-wage earners, and are a drain on this nation due to their level of poverty.
Rather than functioning as a support base for the elderly, these immigrants make very little money, depress the wage rate and should not be looked upon as a salvation for the Social Security trust fund.
At this pace, immigration will devastate the Social Security system. We are reducing the standard of living for millions of Americans. We are creating linguistic ghettos where millions of immigrants speak no English while replicating living standards such as those found in Haiti, Calcutta and poor nations.
Immigration produces what in economic jargon is known as ''junk growth.'' Virginia Abernathy of Vanderbilt University has written a great deal on this topic and points out how massive immigration of low-scale/low-wage people creates profits for the few and costs for the many.
Q: How can Congress ignore American workers hit hard by immigration?
A: I try my best to get voters to demand that their congressmen do more to support immigration reform. Most of my colleagues, certainly those on the Republican side, tell me privately, ''You are right about this issue, but I simply cannot support it.''
There is no greater gap between what the people of this country want and what the Congress is going to give them than there is on the issue of immigration. The dynamics are as follows: The Democrats support a massive flow of immigrants as a potential source of new voters; the Republicans view immigration as a way to make inroads into the Hispanic community, which is growing fast due to open borders. Another faction of the Republican Party looks at immigrants as a good source of cheap labor.
However, there is evidence to suggest that Hispanics, on average, do not vote Republican. Yet you have the president of the United States trying to use immigration as a wedge issue in the next election.
Now it is [senior adviser] Karl Rove's job to get President [George W.] Bush re-elected. However, Rove doesn't consider how crucial issues such as immigration influence the nation. He views the Hispanic bloc as a source of voters, so the president will do nothing to rile the pro-immigration establishment.
Q: Is it true that special interests have contributed $22 million during the last 10 years to lobby Congress on immigration?
A: That's exactly right. High-tech industries, major corporations, restaurant and home-builder associations come in here all the time. These groups support Republicans, and those Republicans are absolutely opposed to any sort of immigration reduction or border controls.
Q: What about the recent attempts that have been made to grant amnesty to the 3 million illegal Mexicans in the United States?
A: About two years ago the administration was pushing to legalize 3 million Mexican immigrants. It was called Extension 245i. Members of Congress were able to block it by the skin of their teeth. I was able to rally enough Republicans to come within one vote of stopping it in the House.
It went to the Senate where Sen. [Robert] Byrd [D-W.Va.] pocketed it. But the effect was debilitating, stirring up a rancorous debate in the Republican Conference.
Q: Isn't Mexico responsible for providing jobs for its own people? Why are Americans burdened with providing jobs for Mexicans who don't have them?
A: That's a good question! It should not be a burden the American people have to bear. I'll never forget a conversation I had two years ago in Mexico with Juan Hernandez, who headed up the newly created Ministry of Mexicans Living in the United States.
Hernandez is a very interesting fellow, a dual citizen of the United States and Mexico, and a good friend of presidents Bush and [Vicente] Fox [of Mexico]. I asked about the purpose of the government agency he heads, since I had never heard of such a thing.
He said its purpose is to increase the flow of Mexican nationals to the United States. I asked, "Why?"
''It serves Mexico's needs,'' he said, and ticked off a list of such things as remittances to Mexico of $10 billion a year, which is 30 percent of the Mexican GDP [gross domestic product]. It provides employment for an exploding population, it alleviates social instability due to rising unemployment and it provides training for Mexicans, ultimately repatriating those skills back to Mexico.
I responded to his final aim repatriation of trained and skilled Mexicans back into Mexico and asked, ''Then your government would oppose amnesty for the illegal Mexicans in the United States?''
He cried, ''Oh no! We support amnesty totally.''
I replied, ''I don't understand.'' I assured him that if amnesty were in effect in the United States, then Mexicans would never return. He then said something riveting: ''By populating the United States with millions of Hispanics who are tied economically, politically and linguistically to Mexico, we are able to exert enormous influence and pressure on U.S. policy and its dealings with Mexico.''
Q: That sounds very much like a Fifth Column.
A: Yes! Just by having the numbers here! President Vicente Fox believes the U.S. border is a figment of the imagination. In fact, Fox and/or members of his government stated at one point that the borders of Mexico extend much farther north than currently drawn on the map.
Q: Isn't that encroaching on U.S. sovereignty?
A: Oh, you're kidding! Well, what about the matricula card? The president of Mexico can't get amnesty for Mexicans in the United States, so he is pushing the matricula card.
It is amnesty! Illegal aliens in the United States are issued identification cards by a foreign government Mexico to obtain all the services afforded U.S. citizens or legal resident aliens.
Mexico instructs Mexican consular officers stationed here in the United States to lobby U.S. states and localities to accept these cards and, in effect, break the laws of the United States. It is an egregious violation of protocol.
Mexican officials have stated, quite candidly, that their end goal is to regularize illegal immigration. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. If the United States did what the Mexican government is doing in this country, there would be hell to pay.
Even worse, the Mexican government is breaking our laws in full complicity with U.S. authorities. I believe that the White House supports this, recognizing it as a way to get amnesty which they couldn't get through Congress.
I surreptitiously received a State Department memo from the U.S. Embassy in Managua [Nicaragua] that stated they required assistance in aiding Nicaragua in advancing a matricula-card program. This is an outrage!
It is also incredible that our southern neighbor, Mexico, who is supposed to be our friend, allows Guatemalans entry into Mexico for the purpose of facilitating the transfer of drugs into the United States. For the most part, various and sundry generals on the Mexican border are dirty. They are being paid off by the drug cartels. In fact, they provide security for the drug cartels.
The Mexican military on more than several occasions has crossed the U.S. border and exchanged gunfire with U.S. security forces. Americans should ask themselves: How can these dangerous dealings take place and why are we so accommodating to Mexico? What's the purpose?
[The answer is] because it works. Mr. Hernandez's policy has come to pass.
Q: What does the word ''Aztlan'' mean? It's frequently heard when questions of Mexican immigration into the U.S. Southwest are raised.
A: It's a rallying cry. Aztlan is a name given to the area of the United States ceded by Mexico at the conclusion of the Mexican-American War in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848.
Certain Mexican nationalists strongly believe a separate country called Aztlan will be carved out of the United States and ''reconquered.'' Mexicans refer to it as ''la reconquista.''
Q: The U.S.-Mexican border remains a danger point as far as international terrorism is concerned, does it not?
A: That's undeniably true. There are terror cells in Mexico. We have identified terrorists who have come into the United States through Mexico.
In Arizona, there's a road just north of the city of Douglas called the ''Arab road.'' They charge $30,000 to smuggle Arabs or Middle Easterners into the United States and $1,150 to $1,500 for a Mexican peasant.
Q: What is the government doing to stop this problem?
A: Little that I am aware of. We certainly are not doing everything possible to protect us. As long as the president and the Democrats stay silent on this issue, who's going to bring it up?
Related special offers:
'Invasion!': Michelle Malkin reveals feds still welcoming terrorists, criminals to America
Borders like sieves: Video exposes radical movement in Mexico to retake southwestern U.S.
| From the
Office of Congressman Tom Tancredo FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE FEBRUARY 27, 2003 |
WASHINGTON, D.C.
U.S.
Representative Tom Tancredo (R-CO), Chairman of the Congressional Immigration
Reform Caucus, introduced the Mass Immigration Reduction Act of 2003 or H.R.
946, legislation to limit the number and category of immigrants permitted
to enter the country each year. Specifically,
the bill establishes a "timeout" that will allow the federal
government to control both mass immigration and border security.
The
U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, commonly known as the Jordan Commission,
for Representative Barbara Jordan, recommended a substantial reduction in annual
legal immigration flows into the country. The
commission recommended an immediate reduction in the amount of people permitted
to enter the country each year. Unfortunately,
the Congress did not pay heed to the recommendations of the late civil-rights
hero, and the nation is beginning to see the consequences.
Current co-sponsors of H.R. 946 include Rep. Sam Johnson (R-TX), Rep. Steve King (R-IA), Rep. Charlie Norwood (R-GA), Rep. Nathan Deal (R-GA), Rep. Jim Duncan (R-TN), and Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA).
| Bumper Stickers, Video and Audio Tapes, Other Stickers |  |
| BUMPER STICKERS - $2 each Order now from California Coalition for Immigration Reform Check out many other items, video and audio tapes and stickers, all of which should be in your library. |
US Con. Tancredo's Position on H1B Visa Immigration Square Off
February 2002 Do We Still Need As Many H-1B Visas?: No
The H-1B program is not necessary and actually is harmful to
our nation's interests. The sooner Congress scales it back, the better.
Under heavy pressure from industry, Congress in 1998 raised the cap on H-1B worker visas--issued mainly by technology companies seeking to import computer programmers--to nearly double the previous limit. Two years later, the cap was increased again, to 195,000 per year. But now that the tech boom has cooled off, this "temporary" worker program needs to be scaled back to its original size.
(Note: This is when Con Newt Ginerich went to Silicon Valley asking for support. Here he was blackmailed on the issue of his girl friend on the side while going after Clinton. This was used by Sun, MicroSoft, Cisco, Oracle...to get Congress to increase the quoto)
My proposal, the High-Tech Work Fairness and Economic Stimulus Act of 2001 (H.R. 3222), would return us to the pre-1998 cap of 65,000 H-1B visas per year. This bill would allow further cap reductions pegged to the overall U.S. unemployment rate as determined by the Department of Commerce. Each year, the cap would be reduced by 10,000 visas for each quarter of a point above an unemployment rate of 6%.
Technology-company representatives claim soft demand is already reducing usage of these visas. This can only be described as a lie. In fiscal-year 2001, a record number of H-1B visas were issued, at least 70% more than in the prior year. So at a time when the IT job market is drying up, with well over a half-million layoffs, employers have gone on a foreign-worker hiring binge. The tech industry appears to be using the economic downturn as an opportunity to replace American and legal immigrant workers with H-1B visa holders at an even faster pace.
Industry lobbyists base their claim of declining demand for H-1Bs on the fact that last year was apparently the first time the hiring cap was not reached before the year ended. The Immigration and Naturalization Service reported that 163,000 H-1B visas were issued, well short of the new 195,000 cap, though 40% higher than the number issued the previous year. But the 2000 law that increased the cap cleverly exempted H-1B visas issued to universities and other nonprofit organizations. The INS has concealed how many of these visas were issued, but the number was almost certainly large enough to push the total number of visas above the ostensible cap. In addition, the INS included 29,000 pending applications in the count for the following fiscal year. Says B. Lindsay Lowell, former director of research at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University, "The numbers of H-1Bs are up, and strongly so."
Importing hundreds of thousands of foreign workers at a time of growing unemployment in America is obviously absurd. But the mass issuance of H-1B visas would be a problem regardless of the state of the job market.
Tech-industry officials have long claimed that H-1B visas were a stopgap measure until the high-tech labor shortage could be resolved through improved education and training for Americans. This has been the refrain since at least 1995, when the industry told Congress that H-1Bs would be needed only until laid-off defense-industry programmers and engineers could be retrained. Congress did provide funding for this education and retraining five years later, but the funding was attached to the 2000 bill that authorized the increase in H-1Bs. This "temporary stopgap while we retrain workers" line is a ruse, an attempt to dupe Congress and the public into continuing to allow the industry to draw on cheap and docile foreign labor.
In fact, there isn't and hasn't been any pervasive, desperate software labor shortage. The only studies that assert the existence of such a shortage are sponsored by the tech industry and its allies; none of the governmental or academic explorations of this issue has ever found a shortage.
One indication that there is no shortage is the relatively low growth rate of programmer wages. A survey of average wages conducted by Deloitte & Touche Consulting during the tech boom, found annual increases of only 7% to 8% for programmers, hardly evidence of job demand drastically outpacing the supply of workers. Other occupations, by contrast, saw much larger salary increases. In the late 1990s, geographic surveyors, for example, saw their real wages increase at an annual rate of 20%, while dietitians' pay increased 17%.
Should we import foreign surveyors and dietitians, too? Obviously not; market economies operate by increasing the price of something in high demand until the supply increases sufficiently. We don't need the federal government to fine-tune such things as though this were the Soviet Union implementing a five-year plan.
What's more, high-tech employers hire only about 2% of applicants for software programming jobs, notes Norman Matloff, a computer-science professor at the University of California at Davis and a leading critic of the H-1B program. If employers were genuinely desperate for programmers, they couldn't afford to be so selective.
Of course, employers are free to hire anyone they want, with whatever set of skills they think best. But a capitalist labor market is a dialogue, not a monologue. Employers offer certain wages and benefits, employees counter with different demands, and they arrive at some mutually agreeable settlement. Importing large numbers of new workers into the American market changes the terms of that dialogue--with some disturbing results.
First of all, H-1B workers have obviously been a source of cheap labor. University studies have shown that H-1B programmers and engineers are paid 15% to 33% below the U.S. average, and the Wall Street Journal has reported that holders of H-1Bs are paid $20,000 to $25,000 less annually than comparably skilled Americans. Similar findings were issued in a 2000 report from the National Research Council.
Why are H-1B visa holders willing to work cheap? Here lies the genius of the program from the industry's point of view. H-1B workers aren't immigrants but temporary workers who remain in the United States only at the pleasure of their employers. The workers submit to this situation because the real payoff for them is not the salary they earn, but the chance to be sponsored by their employers for a green card, which would let them live permanently in the United States.
The immigration process takes several years, during which time the worker isn't likely to jeopardize his or her chances for a green card by demanding better pay or threatening to quit. This is, in effect, indentured servitude and it creates a strong incentive to accept lower pay.
A related consequence of the H-1B program's short-circuiting of the American labor market is the disposal of older workers. With a large pool of young H-1B workers unwilling to make too many demands of their employers, older American programmers face enormous obstacles. The evidence of age discrimination is undeniable, resulting in careers cut unnaturally short. It's very difficult for most programmers to get programming work after they pass the age of 40.
According to an analysis by professor Matloff published by the Center for Immigration Studies, the percentage of computer-science graduates working in software development drops sharply over time. Five years after finishing college, about 60% of computer-science graduates are working as programmers. Twenty years after college, when most are in their early 40s, the number falls to 19%.
This rapid attrition is in sharp contrast to other fields that employ fewer foreign workers: 52% of people who majored in civil engineering, for instance, are in the same field 20 years later--more than double the rate for computer-science majors. The perverse result is that a programmer is considered "senior" with just five years or so of experience--in other words, before the age of 30!
Thus, older programmers, who have the potential for more productive years of work, are forced into other work, in a kind of domestic "brain drain" that wastes the talents of American workers. This brain drain is both caused by and compensated for by a brain drain from overseas, especially India and China, that fosters dependence on foreign resources. Given the importance of technology not only to our economy but also to our nation's security, is it wise to promote dependence on the flow of programmers from abroad?
Today's H-1B program is not necessary for American technology companies to succeed, and is actually harmful to our national interests. The sooner it is scaled back, the better it will be for all of us
Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) is the sponsor of H.R. 3222, a bill to reduce the number of H-1B visas. He is a member of the House Education and Workforce Committee and the House Committee on International Relations.
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The profitable racket of smuggling illegals into the United States in sealed trucks has been going on for years, and only death makes it newsworthy. Trucks ought to be inspected when they cross the border, for the illegal aliens' protection as well as for American sovereignty. Smugglers reap millions of dollars in profits. They collect their fees up front ($800 to $2,500 per person), then often abandon their clients in desert areas without food or water, or hold them hostage in "drop houses" for ransom from relatives. Last year, 145 illegals died horrible and painful deaths in the Arizona desert. Smuggling is accompanied by a huge increase in violent crimes, including murder, rape, robbery and kidnapping. Yet, only 140 new federal agents were assigned to the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona this year. That's a pitiful response compared to the tens of thousands who invade our territory every year. Congress and the Administration are toying with plans to use state-of-the-art technology to monitor the activities of law-abiding Americans, and are now using camera-equipped, unmanned spy planes in Afghanistan to hunt for terrorists. When are we going to use advanced technology on our border, including surveillance planes, electric fences, and, yes, U.S. troops to protect the states against "invasion" as required by Article IV of the U.S. Constitution? The leader of a ring that smuggled about 900 illegal aliens during the 1990s was convicted in April after two of his passengers died in a sweltering tractor-trailer near Dallas. Each week, the smuggler would bring up to five loads of aliens to safe houses in El Paso where they would be picked up to be hauled to eager U.S. employers nationwide. A Florida farm labor contractor was sentenced in April for luring illegal aliens into a smuggling operation that left 14 dead and 11 others to suffer in the Arizona desert after they were abandoned by their smugglers, called coyotes. Last year, 94 people were prosecuted in Colorado for smuggling illegal aliens. A Tijuana restaurant owner pled guilty to running a smuggling ring that brought illegal aliens, mostly from Lebanon, through Mexico into San Diego. People-smugglers are bringing people from Pakistan and the Middle East into the United States for as much as $30,000 a person. The leader of a ring that smuggled over a thousand Ukrainians into the United States through Mexico was sentenced in March to 17 years in prison. The smuggling operation began in Kiev, Ukraine, where people (referred to as "merchandise") paid fees of $5,000 to $7,000 each, were provided with Mexican tourist visas, coached to say "United States citizen" without a Russian accent, flown to Mexico and escorted to Los Angeles. Accidents are a common occurrence, even on highways far from the border, when vans carrying illegal aliens crash because of high speeds, incompetent drivers going the wrong way, or inability to read English signs. The injured have to be cared for in local hospitals at U.S. taxpayers' expense. In San Diego in December, 6 illegals were killed and 16 injured in a wrong-way lights-off head-on crash on the interstate, and two were killed and 20 injured in another crash in March. In Bowie, Kansas, in February, a van rolled over killing 3 and hospitalizing 15. Near Fort Smith, Arkansas in March, 5 aliens were hospitalized after a head-on crash. A tractor-trailer driven by an illegal alien jackknifed and crashed in the new Boston Big Dig tunnel in May, and the cost to the taxpayers will be $500,000. In populated areas of California and Arizona, the illegal traffic often moves through tunnels, of which U.S. officials say there may be "at least 100, if not several hundreds." A truck will park over the U.S. end of the tunnel, and bundles of drugs are handed up through a hole in the trailer's floor. On April 4 in a parking lot near San Diego, U.S. authorities found a sophisticated tunnel with electricity, ventilation and a million-dollar pulley system. It was the fifth secret passageway discovered along that county's border in the past 14 months. The federal government has appropriated $695,000 to clean up the trash and waste in southeast Arizona to cope with the environmental damage caused by this human traffic. Arizonans say they need $62.9 million and 93 more employees to repair the damage and to protect against the threat of wildfires from mountains of trash. We certainly can't depend on Mexico to stop this invasion of illegals. U.S. authorities estimate that smugglers will pay $500 million this year in bribes and payoffs to Mexican military and police to protect this illicit traffic.
In May, an illegal alien criminal and documented gang member, with four previous felony convictions and who had been deported several times, sneaked back into the United States and committed a cold-blooded crime. When Oceanside (Calif.) police officer Tony Zeppetella stopped Adrian Camacho for a traffic violation, the alien pulled out a gun and killed the policeman with three shots. Saul Morales-Garcia alias Javier Duarte Chavez shot Las Vegas police officer Enrique Hernandez six times in December. The alien had previously been deported, but he illegally re-entered the United States. Zeppetella had served six years in the Navy and Hernandez eight years in the Marines. Both had a wife and infant child, and friends of both officers said their childhood ambition was to be a policeman. In June, Enrique Sosa Alvarez was arrested in San Jose and charged with dragging a nine-year-old girl from her home and raping her repeatedly for three days before releasing her. A fingerprint check identified him as David Montiel Cruz who had previously been convicted of auto theft. Police don't know for sure who he is, but we do know for sure he should have been deported after his earlier crime. The ease with which criminals change their names and come back across the border shows the folly of accepting Mexico's matricula consular as a valid I.D. Illegal alien Walter Alexander Sorto was repeatedly picked up for driver's license violations and for not having insurance, but Houston police were barred from reporting his illegal status to federal authorities. In March he and a companion abducted, raped and killed three Houston women. Maximiliano Esparza, who raped and killed a Bellevue, Washington, nun last year, had earlier been in a California prison and the court had ordered him deported. But our government didn't deport him; it merely asked him to sign an I-210, a simple promise to depart, widely known as a "catch-and-release" document. Before the 9/11 attack, ringleader Mohamed Atta was ticketed in Florida for driving without a license, and his accomplice Ziad Samir Jarrah was ticketed for speeding in Maryland, and both were on expired visas. Chalk that up to missed opportunities to prevent 9/11. Currently under a final order of deportation are 314,000 absconders, illegal aliens whom our government can't deport because we can't find them, including 4,800 from nations where Al Qaeda terrorists are active. Only a fraction of them have been entered on the National Crime Information Center database, the Department of Justice's listing of outstanding warrants and fugitives. Only the brutal gang rape of a Queens, New York, woman in December by four illegal aliens has produced a governmental response. Three of those four criminals already had long rap sheets from previous arrests and should have been deported. The House Judiciary subcommittee on immigration was spurred to hold a hearing in February to question New York and Houston officials about their so-called "sanctuary" ordinances that deter or even prohibit local police from reporting illegal aliens to federal authorities. New York was under such an executive order issued in 1989 by then-Mayor Edward Koch. On May 30, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg signed Executive Order 34 permitting city employees to ask people seeking government services about their immigration status if that is relevant to their eligibility. Bloomberg said his order was necessary to put the city into compliance with federal law, and even Koch came out in support of the Bloomberg order. Bloomberg's order, however, has limitations. He said in a written statement that he will never let police or city agencies become an arm of the INS "under my administration." But why not? State and local police, of whom we have at least 670,000, are our first line of defense against criminals (not the minuscule 2,000 federal investigators assigned to immigration enforcement). But local police are being shackled by city officials. Twenty cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Miami, Denver, Seattle and Portland, Maine, have adopted "sanctuary" ordinances banning police from asking people about their immigration status unless they are suspected of committing a felony, are a threat to national security, or have been previously deported. But how are the police going to know if they have previously been deported unless they first ascertain who they are? What happens when alien criminals complete their prison terms? The Justice Department's inspector general admitted that our government released 35,318 criminal aliens into the general population in 2000, and nobody knows how many then committed other serious crimes. The famous case of the sniper who terrorized the Washington, D.C. area for weeks last year is a good example both of the importance of the role of the local police and of the irresponsible way that federal immigration authorities release aliens instead of deporting them. Lee Malvo was picked up and fingerprinted the previous year by a Bellingham, Washington, police detective and west coast Border Patrol agent. They turned Malvo over to federal immigration officials, who had the duty under our laws to deport him immediately because he came to the United States as a Jamaican stowaway on a ship that docked in Miami. But Seattle district immigration officials released Malvo, who subsequently went across the country on a killing spree with John Muhammad, who was financed by the $60,000 he made selling forged U.S. driver's licenses and birth certificates. In fairness to our local police, they repeatedly complain that they get no cooperation from federal immigration officials when reporting illegal aliens -- unless a major felony is involved. Attorney General John Ashcroft should make sure that all police know about his October 8 speech to the International Association of Chiefs of Police wherein he promised that federal agents will respond when local officers notify them of immigration violators. If the United States can wage a preemptive war against Iraq, local police should be allowed to preempt vicious crimes by checking the citizenship status of persons arrested for minor as well as major crimes, and then reporting illegals to federal authorities. All sanctuary ordinances should be rescinded.
A driver's license is the pass to board a plane as well as the license to drive car. It confers a sort of quasi-citizenship and, as described by one illegal alien in Texas, "The driver's license ends up becoming our pass to be in this country." Yet, 20 states do not require applicants to prove they are legally in the United States. Since 9/11, 21 states have enacted new legislation to make it harder to get driver's licenses, and legislation has been introduced in another 22 states. Peter Gadiel, whose 23-year-old son James died in the World Trade Center attack, traveled from Connecticut to Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina and Tennessee to support beefed-up identification laws. A Tennessee legislative committee heard testimony about the need to tighten driver's license rules from April Gallop, a survivor of the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon. Even in Idaho, State Senator Cecil Ingram told a public hearing, "This has turned out to be a bigger problem than I thought." The states embarrassed by the 9/11 hijackers have gotten the message. Virginia passed a bill to stop issuing driver's licenses to illegal aliens, and Florida and New Jersey passed legislation to coordinate driver's licenses with immigration visas. New Jersey, where driver's licenses have been made of paper and do not require a photo, has long been the target of document fraud and counterfeiters. The state is now converting to state-of-the-art digitized driver's licenses with a dozen covert and overt security features, including a mandatory photo, bar code, hologram, and digital signature. Arizona and Mississippi also killed bills to make it easier for illegal aliens to get a driver's license. Tennessee, a state known to be casual about issuing driver's licenses to illegal aliens, considered but postponed action on requiring driver's license applicants to present a document showing they are legally in this country. Minnesota is trying to address the controversy through rulemaking by the Department of Public Safety. The proposed rule would require visitors to present documents to prove they are in the country legally, and the license would expire when their visas expire. Georgia would seem an unlikely state for immigration controversies, but an estimated 435,000 Hispanics live in Georgia, a 300% increase over 1990, according to the U.S. Census. A lively big group showed up at a hearing in Gainesville from the county of Hall, where at least 19% of the population is Hispanic and 85% of those are not citizens. For weeks, Georgia wrangled over a bill to allow driver's licenses to be obtained by illegal aliens who come from the "Free Trade Area of the Americas," i.e., from Canada, Latin America, and some Caribbean islands. The bill was finally defeated in April. Among those who spoke against the proposed legislation was retired Col. A.R. "Mac" MacCahan (whose Army unit lost 206 of 212 men fighting in the Korean War). He asked, "What part of illegal don't you understand?" Others ask, why reward people who have committed at least three felonies: illegal entry into the U.S., purchasing fraudulent documents to get a job, and misrepresenting the legality of those documents at the workplace? Kentucky was once one of the easiest states for illegal aliens to get a driver's license. That changed after a 1998 incident in which the Immigration and Naturalization Service arrested a van load of illegals from Russia who had traveled from New York to Louisville to get driver's licenses. After that, Kentucky reinstituted a policy of requiring that noncitizens applying for licenses take a written test. County Circuit Clerk Tony Miller said, "We try to be helpful. We offer that test in 21 languages." But Miller didn't explain how it promotes safety to license drivers who can't read the road signs. INS public affairs officer Garrison Courtney identified one of the biggest problems: "If they were illegal when they came here, it's very difficult to determine who they really are because they've created illegal I.D.s for themselves." The Seattle Times reported that one U.S. Department of Justice raid discovered piles of cash totaling $95,262 plus $10,000 worth of computer equipment and specialty papers that had been used to print 800 fake driver's licenses, green cards, work permits, Mexican birth certificates, and Social Security cards. Many are concerned about the danger from issuing licenses to terrorists who might use trucks loaded with gasoline or other hazardous materials in the same way that hijackers used commercial airliners on 9/11. The U.S. Transportation Department reported last year that we lack sufficient safeguards, particularly from the many states that do not require applicants to prove they are legally in the country. |
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