Posted on 07/06/2004 10:18:41 AM PDT by Willie Green
For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.
Unemployment rates for high-tech workers are still above the national average. Pay in these fields has gone nowhere for 20 years. As a result, national anxiety about job flight overseas has hit levels not seen since the 1980s.
Yet Congress is considering a bill to make it easier for high-tech companies to bring cheap foreign workers into the United States. Worse, this bill is being sponsored by a Congressman – Texas Republican Lamar Smith – who´s been an immigration control advocate for years. What in blazes is going on here?
Very simply, we´re starting to pay the price for failing to recognize that our immigration and outsourcing problems are closely connected. By treating these policies in isolation, even many champions of urgently needed immigration reduction policies have painted themselves into corners and left themselves – and Americans as a whole – few good choices.
The case for creating and maintaining high-tech jobs and industries in the United States can´t be made often enough. These jobs are critical for our nation´s future prosperity, not to mention national security. High-tech industries pay excellent wages, contribute mightily to U.S. innovation and productivity, and help ensure our global technology leadership. And of course, high-tech jobs are the jobs our leaders have told us to re-train and re-educate ourselves for in the wake of mounting competition for so-called old-line manufacturing jobs from third world countries.
For more than a decade, however, these high-tech jobs and industries have been turned into much lower paying jobs and industries by two developments: First, greatly loosened immigration laws and second, NAFTA-style trade deals whose purpose is really to encourage U.S. multinational companies to supply U.S. markets from low-cost third world countries.
Throughout the 1990s boom, these looser trade and immigration policies gained powerful momentum, as the bubble economy undercut worker opposition, and multinationals literally bought Congress and the Executive Branch with lavish campaign contributions.
Yet critics of these policies sabotaged themselves, too. Trade policy critics tended to ignore immigration issues. Indeed, organized labor in America has recently completed an historic transformation and become a powerful pro-immigration force. Meanwhile, immigration policy critics, like Rep. Smith, tended to ignore trade issues. With the critics divided and incoherent, the outsourcers and globalizers did a pretty good job of conquering. As a result, the globalization cheerleaders were able to create powerful new economic realities on the ground that threw the critics on the defensive and narrowed their room for maneuver.
Rep. Smith´s latest bill, which would permit high-tech companies to import 20,000 more H-1B specialized foreign workers, is a great example. Rep. Smith portrays his legislation as a compromise that has fended off even greater quota increases. And he claims it will ultimately help American workers by reducing many abuses associated with these immigration programs – like the common practice of paying immigrants much lower wages than comparable domestic workers earn.
But the Smith bill is simply rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic at the last minute. Ten years of NAFTA-like outsourcing-focused trade deals have opened the low-wage road to success for American companies and turned this strategy into the way business is done in industry after industry. With so many firms routinely supplying the U.S. market from abroad, their counterparts that have remained at home have felt that much more pressure to cut costs. Hiring cheap immigrants understandably is one very appealing option. In addition, the flight of manufacturing production abroad has encouraged the flight of much high-tech service work associated with manufacturing – research, development, design, engineering. Hence, the cost-cutting heat has been rising in career fields once thought immune.
Immigrants´ numbers, as a result, are growing so fast that the government´s enforcement capabilities are swamped. The abundance of this labor, in turn, has lowered the wages of domestic high-tech workers even though the regulations are supposed to prevent this. Indeed, a reverse Catch-22 situation has been created. Employers are simply obligated to pay H-1B immigrants prevailing wages. Yet Washington´s failure to enforce this requirement has naturally driven the prevailing wages in high-tech industry ever lower.
Surging immigrant flows have also discouraged many young Americans from pursuing high tech schooling and careers. Consequently, continuing credence is lent to claims of high tech labor shortages and more pressure mounts for even looser immigration policies to meet the alleged needs. In other words, the free-immigration interests Rep. Smith forestalled this time will be back again and again.
If Rep. Smith and his colleagues in Washington are serious about bringing U.S. immigration under control and genuinely helping U.S. workers, they´ll realize that a comprehensive strategy is needed. The very idea that multinational companies can pay Chinese or Indian or Mexican wages for the creation of their products, yet charge American prices for the sales, has to be challenged frontally as a dangerous economic fantasy that is sinking our nation deeper and deeper into foreign debt. The need to maintain America´s world technology leadership by developing new innovative capabilities at home and keeping them here has to be championed. And if genuine labor shortages do emerge in high tech industries – as they do from time to time in every industry – U.S. companies have to be told to attract workers the old-fashioned way – by raising wages or developing new labor-saving technologies.
The latter, by the way, historically has been a great engine of progress – as research from the respected Center for Immigration Studies has made clear. But with the crutch of low-wage labor available, many American companies have lacked the requisite kick in the pants.
Rep. Smith and others view his 20,000 H-1B quota increase as American workers´ best hope to get back into the high-tech game. But he and others concerned about immigration need to understand that this isn´t policy and it isn´t tactical brilliance. It´s nothing more than defeatism.
Alan Tonelson is a Research Fellow at the U.S. Business & Industry Educational Foundation and the author of The Race to the Bottom: Why a Worldwide Worker Surplus and Uncontrolled Free Trade are Sinking American Living Standards (Westview Press).
I wonder what could possibly be spurring this? Hmmmm.
I can think of 11,000,000 reasons.
Yeah I know......I was basically referring to the assorted useful idiots in the media, academia, and gov't....you know all those parasitical types that don't know a thing about employees, payrolls, etc. but will lecture those of us (who are struggling mightily to survive in the marketplace)long and hard about the wonders of the global economy. One can only hope that future H1B programs will be expanded to include news reporters, professors and gov't bureaucrats.
A friend of mine who is a male nurse and also teaches nursing told me that he has been approached by a local doctor to teach a crash course for Mexican nurses to enable them to pass American licensure boards. The doctor intends to form an agency to contract these nurses for $9 to $10 per hour thereby undercutting American nurse salaries.
My friend has refused stating this was un American. However, we both agreed that someone else will do it.
Economists including Morgan Stanley's Roach say they fret that continuing increases in overall labor costs, including fringe benefits, may contribute to rising inflation. Over the past three years, falling unit labor costs "have helped check inflation," Roach wrote in a June 1 letter to clients.
Ahh, yes, those evil wage increases. Never mind that almost all of us gain from improvements in wages - whether as wage earners, or as business people whose customers have more money to spend. Wage increases, if we are to believe Roach, are bad.
I do believe this is the same Roach quoted by certain free traitors who will remain unnamed. How telling that a free traitin' hero is opposed to wage increases.
One should beware the roach - a disease carrying pest that flees the light and hides in dank corners.
How many guesses do I get?
(Chuckle) I'll bet you only need one! But take as many as you like.
I have been watching this too and wondering why no one seems concerned.
I don't like to be rude.
Oh, boy! Good one!
One thing I haven't seen addressed is the erosion of after-tax income due to increases in deductible and co-pay obligations of employees.
While businesses have stepped up to the bar a bit on the health-care issue, employees have, too.
This article gives a little insight there..
Scouts Out! Cavalry Ho!
bttt
This is exactly the immigration policy of Singapore. Contrary to popular opinion, they are NOT an overcrowded island like Hong Kong. In fact, two thirds of the land area is sparsely developed. Meanwhile, they are using part of their earnings to buy soil from Indonesia for the purpose of territorial expansion.
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