From the NYT Editorial Page Editor's blog, the NYT's chief immigration reporter responds to the proposed compromise to increase STEM visas while cutting random diversity visas:
A Bad Start on Immigration Reform
By LAWRENCE DOWNES
Representative Lamar Smith, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, is offering a new version of an old immigration bill that’s due to be voted on this week. It’s being touted by supporters as a signal that the Republican Party understands the election message sent by voters – particular Latinos and Asians – in favor of immigration reform.
Don’t be fooled. The resurrected STEM Jobs Act is a tweaked version of a bad bill that died earlier this year in the House, and it’s bad for the same reasons as before. The bill increases visas for immigrants skilled in STEM fields — science, technology, engineering and math — by eliminating another visa category entirely: the “diversity” visas set aside for people from countries with relatively low immigration rates to the United States.
Here’s the math: add 55,000 new visas for immigrants with advanced STEM degrees. Take away 55,000 diversity visas. A zero-sum game, in pro-immigrant disguise.
... If the Republicans are going to offer real immigration reform, they will have to do better than this.
We, on the winning side, don't have to justify our demands with reasons or evidence or appeals to the common good. You have to provide terms of your final surrender that we deem acceptable.
You can read the whole thing and see that Downes doesn't feel it necessary to offer any defense of the diversity visa lottery. His subtle, carefully reasoned position is
More Immigrants Now.
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41 comments:
Interesting use of "zero-sum." Well, it's true within the universe of all potential immigrants anyway...
Our labor participation rate is already too low.
We don't need any immigration.
This is typical tribal behavior after a battle: metaphorically kill the defeated tribe, and move in "your" people.
Not so much an NYT editorial but a case of rhetorical 'Downes syndrome'.
Apparently no immigration 'horse-trading' is acceptable one is forbidden to claim that an Indian (crammer college, degree mill, there are literally millions just itching...) STEMman is 'worthier' in any way shape or form 'morally', economically or fiscally than the punter who got lucky on his 'diversity' lottery ticket, and managed to fish it out from the dark recesses of his wallet.
You see at heart, the NYT knows that each and everyone of them is just as 'entitled' to the life of American 'privilege' as the Joe Blow Repub/Dem, two-cheeks-of-the-same-@$$ doofuses who by accident of birth happened to be landed on US soil.
This sort of hostile diktat makes me wonder what might happen to Whites in Haiti once they become a minority there.
Actually, this understates how crummy the "STEM bill" is. Here's the most Orwellian thing I've read all month.
"As a way to protect US workers, the STEM Act still requires an alien to be employer-sponsored for a visa."
http://www.hooyou.com/news/news2012/news112312stem.html
In other words, just like with H1-Bs and J-1s, the employer will own the STEM Visa, the foreign worker (they're not "immigrants", those folks get their own paperwork) is in no position to bargain for higher wages or look for another job. If the worker quits (or is fired), they must leave the country immediately.
I don't know, say what you will about Africans coming in on diversity visas, at least their legal status isn't an affront to the job market of a free country. If their boss is a jerk or is underpaying them, they can quit and go work for someone else. STEM visas (like H1-Bs and J-1s) are basically soft-core involuntary servitude.
Frankly the only way to get tighter border security in this environment is to give the liberals a moral victory (their favorite kind). Republicans should agree to support a Democratic bill to nullify Arizona's (and other states') immigration laws (E-verify, arrest status checks, border fencing, etc), if the Democrats quietly agree to tighten federal immigration law (E-verify, arrest status checks, border fencing, etc). Even if the Corps of Engineers fences the entire border and E-verify becomes mandatory for every employee, seeing Sheriff Joe humbled will make it all worthwhile to them. :o)
Does anyone ever ask why "immigration reform" has to mean "more immigrants"? Why do we all think we need immigration "reform" anyway? I thought the reason we needed reform is because it's too complicated and there are too many people overwhelming the system. If that's the case, an obvious solution would start by reducing the number of people coming through the system, so it can catch up and then we can decide what to do from there.
If we were talking about anything else, everyone could see that. Imagine that hunters were doing a lot of poaching because the hunting license system was complicated and bogged down, so they went hunting illegally rather than wait for a license. You can bet the same people would start their solution by cutting back on licenses until the system could handle them, and increase the penalty for poaching. They damn sure wouldn't sympathize with the hunters and insist that they be allowed to poach all they like while we argue about "reform." We wouldn't see sob stories in the media about children starving because they can't hunt for meat, or about the nobility of the hunting tradition in rural American culture.
We could call this "Failure to Worship Mestizos." (I don't do "Hispanic" or "Latino").
My sources tell me that that the Democrats in the Senate were actually inclined to support the Smith bill... Until the White House told them to back off.
Off course, replacing the "diversity" lobby with STEM immigrants makes all the sense in the world. Just dropping the "diversity" lottery would be even better.
Skilled immigrants can potentially help the economy and are likely to stay off welfare. They might be political independents. Obviously the wrong crowd for the New York Times.
Steve, I know a big theme of yours (and all HBD followers) is that blind belief in the virtues of diversity is blinding people to the realities of the ultimate ability of certain populations, and thus what the actual outcomes of various programs will be, as opposed to what they might be if all humans were interchangeable.
Well, it's common knowledge that somebody acting irrationally means and opportunity for somebody else to make money. Like, if people are pumping money into a stock or asset that has no fundamental reason to be so expensive, you can take advantage of that by short-selling that asset.
So for large-scale immigration (the point of this particular blog post), you claim that the country is acting irrationally. That people believe that importing many unskilled immigrants (mostly to certain areas) will be good, and it will actually be bad.
Same thing for building "magnet" schools in black neighborhoods in L.A., or affirmative action, or Section 8 housing, or all the other examples of irrationality that you post about.
Why not focus on how you can make money from this irrationality? Then you wouldn't have to ask your readers for donations to keep the blog running. What would be some examples of how to make money from this foolishness?
Or is it that the foolishness and irrationality is confined to the government (public sector), and you can't, say, short-sell stocks in the California state government? Is nobody in the private sector or in their personal lives following the irrational worship of "diversity"?
I like Entarro's question: how can one make money by investing in a way informed by biodiversity and immigration realism?
Shorting afflicted US states may not work if, e.g., the future costs of the affliction are already priced in, or the feds will bail them out, or... ? (Also, not sure how you short a state, anyway?)
But let's think more broadly than states. What other investment implications might there be?
This blog is fringey enough that we don't need to worry that if any good ideas emerge here, the big money will instantly flow into those ideas.
From chutzpah to shutzpah.
One never hears anything about how other countries feel about the brain drain whereby they lose their brighter, younger citizens to the US. The only question seems to be that of do we want them and, if so, how many do we want. They would be an asset to their own country. Unlike illiterate laborers, the well educated of those countries can live fairly well as part of the upper classes. Since they are not under the duress of war, politics, famine or extreme poverty then they are just economic migrants who have turned their backs on their native countries. They are not patriotic people and will not be so to the US, their new residence. They'll mostly try to recreate the old environment they left behind, try to get as many co-ethnics into the US as possible. Importing an upper class with no cultural or ethnic ties to the majority of citizens might not be as wonderful as some seem to believe.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/sorry-vegans-eating-meat-and-cooking-food-is-how-humans-got-their-big-brains/2012/11/26/3d4d36de-326d-11e2-bb9b-288a310849ee_story.html?wprss=rss_health-science
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy.html
Even the Jews.
Whites aren't losers. God doesn't make losers. BUT...
If whites are "middle-men." Then play the role or get out of the business.
We don't need any more "skilled" immigrants. Many American STEM workers already have poor job security. Is even worse job security and lower wages going to be their reward for going into study-intensive fields that were growing according to "experts"?
We don't need an imported overclass any more than an imported underclass. Particularly in a recession.
@beowulf
The visas that the STEM Bill addresses are immigrant visas (like EB-1,2, and 3) which already need to be sponsored by an employer, not non-immigrant J-1s and H1Bs. Once an employer gets one of those visas, they have a green card and can quit to go wherever they want.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/11/26/the_stories_you_missed_in_2012?page=0,3&wpisrc=obnetwork
Evil white guys never get any credit.
an affront to the job market of a free country
What free country would that be? Chile? Hong Kong?
Please.
But don't be fooled! They're still bigots!
Makes it seem like this isn't about immigrants so much as it is about the hearts and minds of white people. Immigration policy has become part of the culture war.
It’s being touted by supporters as a signal that the Republican Party understands the election message sent by voters – particular Latinos and Asians – in favor of immigration reform.
Any evidence that the key factor n Asian/latino voting was immigration policy?
So some guy from the Bay Area whose family came from Japan in the 1920s or China in the 1880s or India in the 1980s said to himself -
"What we need is more immigration from Mexico!!
I'm voting Democrat!"
Well, it's common knowledge that somebody acting irrationally means and opportunity for somebody else to make money.
"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." -- John Maynard Keynes
I agree with him. Both stem visas and the diversity visa should be done away with.
The STEM "shortage" is itself a giant lie. With real unemployment at the 15% plus range or higher, with some 50 million or whatever it is on EBT, allowing even ONE immigrant in is a grossly immoral act.
The only immigration "reform" that makes the slightest sense is setting the quota to zero.
Those in the STEM fields who continue to blindly vote Republican are fools.
What's most irritating about ALL of the "commentary" and "analysis" and "debate" from the mainstream media and politicians is that it sounds like something from a gathering of hospitalized mental patients.
They sound like mentally-ill people who are imitating reasonable, intelligent intellectuals engaged in logical analysis and debate, but this bunch is in total denial of reality, is completely illogical and self-destructive in the extreme.
The purest example of this is over at American Conservative where the vast majority of the writers are now on the side of their own lively, vibrant, diverse dispossession.
They couch this madness and treason and cowardice in terms that seem reasonable and self-interested, but are really just rationalizations for cowardly surrender.
They seem to have the kind of massive fear load that cannot be faced, and so it has to be redefined as bold, transcendent courage.
It's disgusting and pathetic. Even Patrick Buchanan has greatly softened his tone especially as it relates to the third-world savage invasion.
FAO Entarro:
You can short muni-bond insurer equity or muni etfs if you think CA is going to go bust and default on it's obligations or you can buy CDS on ca muni bonds.
good luck.
"Or is it that the foolishness and irrationality is confined to the government (public sector), and you can't, say, short-sell stocks in the California state government?"
I've actually looked into this -- and from some not very extensive research, it doesn't appear possible. The best I've come up with is a defensive position -- selling off bonds you might already have.
Indirectly, it might be possible to find companies that are dependent on disfunctional municipalities for their revenues, and short them.
For Entero - Race realists and other sceptics about your great multicultural experiment generally "short sell" the system by investing in gold and hard assets, and through "white flight" to the safest available residential areas.
Tim Howells
The irrationality is built into the economic and political system.
You can short California state bonds, but you lose if the federal government bails out California with sovereign debt tapped into the printing presses of the global reserve currency.
Same with a private company. Even if the company is not bailed out like like AIG or GM, the stock is traded in a stock market dominated by a) institutions fed money from the central banks, b) automated algorithm trading, c) insider trading.
If political correctness reduces a company's profitability by 15%, they may instead have favorable treatment with government contracts, "stimulus", Fed pumping, etc.
There are no safe plays, because the failures are propped up in an unlevel playing field; the bubble economy has bubbled into sovereign debt, central bank printing, government policy, and good feelings. The safer plays are the disasters that get bailed out or you can't recover from.
Great idea, Entarro. We should bet against the diversity strategy by investing in businesses that only hire native white STEM graduates and build private schools that cater exclusively to whites. If we can just figure out how to lower the transaction costs associated with pursuing illegal and unconstitutional investment strategies, we'll be sitting on a home run.
The election message from Asians and Latinos is that they vote Democratic. So why would letting more of them immigrate here be good for Republicans?
One thing I like about Sailer is that he doesn't feel like he's above appearing in other people's comment sections. Though it doesn't really help his case when he spells "know" N-O.
Here’s the math: add 55,000 new visas for immigrants with advanced STEM degrees. Take away 55,000 diversity visas. A zero-sum game ..
That's only a zero-sum game if you start with the assumption that the object of the "game" is to let in more immigrants, regardless of anything else. If you have some notion that the object of the game is the betterment of America, then the "game" described is not zero-sum at all.
"One thing I like about Sailer is that he doesn't feel like he's above appearing in other people's comment sections."
Lucky you, to no how Sailer feels. I don't but I do like the fact that he comments on others' sites.
"Though it doesn't really help his case when he spells 'know' N-O."
Doesn't hurt it, either.
Those in the no no there is know way Sailer is not going to misspell certain words. He's one of those extremely bright people who either misspells words or mistakes one word for another. Either way, I have know problem with it.
"Skilled immigrants can potentially help the economy and are likely to stay off welfare. They might be political independents. Obviously the wrong crowd for the New York Times."
We know now the the "skilled" immigrants we have been letting come to America over the last twenty years overwhelmingly vote for the Democrats. You see how the Indian vote went?
I propose a new phrase for the iSteve Lexicon: someone who insists, against all economic reason, that the country needs MOAR unskilled immigrants from various and sundtry places can be said to have Downes Syndrome.
"Skeptical Economist said...
Skilled immigrants can potentially help the economy and are likely to stay off welfare. They might be political independents."
They might take to donning white hoods, attending cross burnings, and talking like Daniel Day Lewis in "The Gangs of New York" as well.
But I wouldn't count on that.
"Of course, replacing the "diversity" lobby with STEM immigrants makes all the sense in the world."
Yes, by all means, let us replace not-so-bright immigrants from the third-world, who will quickly disappear into the ranks of our own lumpen-proletariat, with smarter, more socially connected immigrants, who will eventually become citizens, organize politically to advocate their own group interests, lobby our politicians and shower them with money, and practice ethnic nepotism. What could possibly go wrong with that?
I'm a software developer. That's what the bulk of the STEM H-1Bs are going to be doing (a number of them have been my co-workers). So I should be the one objecting to them driving down my wages. No, I say JUMP ON THIS DEAL. The random "diversity" lottery is ridiculous, hence Downes complete lack of defense. I'd rather than immigrant compete with me than pay less taxes than they'll receive in social services and cause social dysfunction.
"I'm a software developer. That's what the bulk of the STEM H-1Bs are going to be doing (a number of them have been my co-workers)."
And the guy who picks up my trash is a sanitation engineer -- a field in which not a single American college offers a degree, or even vocational training. Yet somehow we still manage to find and train Americans to do that unpleasant job -- by paying well with good benefits. Funny how that works.
Calling these guys software developers is like calling a guy who muds drywall an architect. If you need a room full of people to code Java, you could hire a bunch of high school graduates with some mild math/science aptitude, give them a six-week Java programming course, and turn them loose. But they wouldn't be as cheap as H1-B's, and they wouldn't be trapped in indentured servitude. Those are the only reasons these companies go overseas rather than hire Americans.
Daniel in Wonderland-WSJ journalist laments racializing of American politics
Henninger: The Racializing of American Politics
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324205404578147360260072602.html
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