Constrast this reality with Tom Friedman’s illusions. Friedman stated:

I think any foreign student who gets a Ph.D. in our country – in any subject – should be offered citizenship. I want them. The idea that we actually make it difficult for them to stay is crazy.

He says that, as per the wishes of an interest group briefly mentioned in his article, America should provide paths to citizenship for every “highly skilled” person wanting to come here. I’m reminded of a story from my time at a small, dysfunctional start-up. Its small size enabled it to hire as many non-citizens as it wanted. I was the only citizen engineer. Towards the end of my time there, only two of us original employees remained, and he and I were both planning to leave within a month or two. Since we were soon to part, he told me how he was hired. He was hired sight-unseen from his country of origin. And before he started, his offer was increased from the offer he’d originally agreed to. He was told that the company owners felt he was worth even more than what they had originally planned to offer him. Great, right? Later he learned the truth: The offer was increased because the original offer was below the minimum required wage for an H1-B visa holder of his expertise. The minimum.

Although this may be a mere anecdote, it seems to me that unrestricted immigration of highly skilled workers (assuming the current system of path-to-citizenship in which H1-Bs are treated like indentured servants) would be this multiplied by millions. Few companies would pay a huge premium for domestic talent over foreign (in fact, as the video indicates, many prefer the indentured servitude of the H1-B) so engineering salaries would fall accordingly. Should I put up with an increased supply of engineers lowering my salary for the sake of “keeping America competitive”? If America couldn’t compete, my salary would already be low due to globalization, but it’s not. So clearly something’s faulty about an argument that unrestricted immigration of “the best and brightest” would be best for the U.S., a country that already takes in far more immigrants than any other.

Maybe it’s greedy to want to make want the market says I’m worth. But should I support a change that will mean that I make much, much less in the future than I would otherwise? Of course not. “Compete America, a coalition of technology companies” mentioned in Friedman’s article, is the public face of the companies that hire lawyers like C&G. They all may want me to earn less, but it’s no coincidence that employers, those who stand to pay less for workers, are the ones calling for easing restrictions on H1-Bs. Even if you’re for greater immigration, or even amnesty, you shouldn’t take the pleas of a corporate special interest group at face value.

The conclusion to Friedman’s article – the non sequitur that we need to get out of Iraq so that the H1-B issue gets back on the front page and to the Congressional agenda – is utterly ridiculous. Especially at the start of a month-long period during which immigration and Iraq WERE what Congress was talking about.

By the way, in case anyone still thinks the “need skilled workers” canard is true, let’s take a trip back a 1994 Newsweek article entitled, “No Ph.D.’s need apply.”

[T]hey call it “The Myth.” It’s the idea, which started to make the rounds around 1987, that the nation faced a shortage of scientists. A wave of retirements in academia, plus burgeoning demand for scientists and engineers in high-tech industry, would create a short-fall of 675,000 scientists and engineers, crippling industrial competitiveness and threatening national security. Heeding the nation’s call (and lured by a vision of recruiters beating down their dormitory doors) students labored through organic chemistry and differential equations to earn a bachelor’s degree in science and in many cases, pushed on to graduate school. Now “The Myth” has met reality, and reality bites.

calbear on June 22, 2007 at 11:55 AM