There is a certain nostalgia in the bourgeois Boomer mind for the era when great statesmen, like Bob Dole and Ted Kennedy, could vociferously debate critical issues on the Senate floor, then make backroom deals to pass legislation before going out to a nice—lobbyist-funded—steak dinner together. This immature understanding of our nation’s second “era of good feelings,” coinciding with American global hegemony at the end of the last millennium, forgets who was typically present in the backroom when these titans of American political history forged some of the most corrosive legislative deals that have led to our current national predicament: an unholy alliance of the nation’s worst lobbies.
Unsurprisingly, the steak dinners provided by business, immigration, and tech lobbies paid off for their clients when Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1990, the most successful major immigration reform bill of its generation, creating the H-1B visa. This legislation, sponsored by Sen. Ted Kennedy (who famously and wrongly predicted that the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965 would “not flood our cities with immigrants” or “cause American workers to lose their jobs”), fulfilled the wish list of not only the mass immigration lobby but also America’s burgeoning tech industry. It codified a rotten tree of corporate-friendly immigration reform that created extremely rotten fruit—the U.S. immigration crisis.
Tech corporations began booming in the two decades before the bill’s enactment in 1990. Silicon Valley alone experienced roughly 130% growth in high-tech jobs, the IT industry grew dramatically, and fears began to abound that there would soon be a worker shortage in this rapidly growing sector of the American economy.
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