America has a problem, a big problem. We have a Congress who will only act when powerful lobbyists throw enough money at them. Such is the result of the new Comprehensive Immigration Reform bill. This bill will be an unmitigated disaster for working America. The bill increases the U.S. legal labor supply by at least 14 million by giving not just those here illegally legal status but also those who were previously deported who still have family members in the U.S. the legal status to work. Yet the massive increase in the U.S. labor supply caused by legalizing those here unauthorized isn't even half of the labor disaster story this bill will bring....
Hit particularly hard will be American Scientists, Technologists, Engineers and Mathematicians (STEM). Not only will the bill increase H-1B Visas from 85,000 to 135,000, they are allowing the limit to go to 180,000 per year. That is basically all of the jobs created each year in these occupations. That means every single STEM job would end up beingforeigners preferred, forcing U.S. workers out of their careers as the faux pas worker protections are clearly written to be vague and loophole ridden. Just as lobbyists wrote this turkey in actuality, big business will also make sure any U.S. workers protections will be removed before actual legislation passage.
We have shown many times, there is no labor shortage at any skill level in the United States. In particular there is no labor shortage in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics occupational areas. Yet in this bill there would be no limits [f]or instant green cards for the below occupational categories....The Economic Populist
Comprehensive Immigration Bill is a Disaster for American Workers
Robert Oak
More wage repression and a further attack on labor bargaining power in order to increase profit share.
2 comments:
There is no reason we can't accommodate academia's fetish for foreign students. Last I looked at the statistics four or five years ago, at the graduate level in science in engineering, > 70% of students are foreign. For whatever reason public universities made a political decision to exclude domestic students from the highest levels. Regardless of what motivated their decision, our country provides huge public subsidies in science and engineering research to give industry a competitive advantage against global competition and to help subsidize the good middle class jobs that government favors for citizens. Keeping the product of public investment in research and institutions makes sense regardless of where the people were born. The only way to do that is to liberalize the immigration system otherwise we are taking the highest value knowledge produced in our society and exporting it to our trading adversaries. It is idiotic -- it provides our competitors with a subsidy for their economy. Since we have almost no real resource constraints in this country besides water in the western states, The government can spend enough to employee everyone including immigrants without causing inflation.
Human comprehension of our own economics is a disaster.
Meanwhile, we're exporting our most insidiously overstudied mistakes - PhDs in Orthodox Economics.
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