immigration impact high skills (PhD) area

[Robert Oak]

I just read Borjas working paper and I'll tell ya, it's downright scary.

Now for all of those people going to "express opinion", look, this is an Academic paper from a world leading expert, Harvard,
on labor economics focus.

In the summary he states:

A 10 percent immigration-induced increase in the supply of doctorates lowers the
wage of competing workers by about 3 to 4 percent. About half of this adverse wage effect can be
attributed to the increased prevalence of low-pay postdoctoral appointments in fields that have softer
labor market conditions because of large-scale immigration.

http://ksghome.harvard.edu/~GBorjas/Papers/w12085.pdf

So, beyond the absurd increases in H-1B Visa, which have been shown repeatedly to be labor arbitrage vehicles and used to displace American engineers...

is anyone aware that in the Senate immigration bill any foreign student on the F-4 student visa will get a free green card upon graduation and all they need to do is land a job in the US?

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/03/10/MNGV9HLVAE1.DTL

ut oh...me thinks I smell a big fat labor arbitrage rat.

[Kare]

1. As if it wasn't hard enough

to get a job now they want to bring more people in?

Some day people are going to wake up without there jobs and wonder wtf happneded?

The only reason they want those poeple in here is to drive the cost of wages down.

But hey.. the stock market is great.. so that means the economy is great..

:sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm:

[Robert Oak]

2. call your representative

The conservative Republicans (and isn't this just bizarre as hell) will vote against these, it's the Democrats...
our liberal representatives...who could allow these in...

You know the Republican corrupt, purchased will vote these in.

I for one am for getting the exceptional to immigrate to the US, scientists, engineers and so forth..

but that was absolutely shocking to read the damn PhD program is now creating labor arbitrage! Yoozer

BTW: You have to call them at this point...they are so flooded emails aren't getting read and FAXES are at best being tallying as "yes no"...

versus being able to be heard on specific amendments within the bill.

[Kare]

3. you might change your tune

If your spouse was out of work and had to compete for
a job with the "exceptional" immigrants
Or if you yourself did.

Or if you were going to school
for one of those jobs
only to watch immigrants flood the
market and make going to school
futile.

It would be one thing if they
actually paid these people the going
rate.. but they don't, granted they
are supposed to, but why should they?



http://www.cis.org/articles/2005/back1305.html

If there is any correlation between wages and skills, it is clear the H-1B program is rarely being used to import "highly skilled" workers. While the wage data do suggest a few employers use the H-1B program to import a small number of highly skilled workers, these are clearly exceptional cases.

Overwhelmingly, the H-1B program is used to import workers at the very bottom of the wage scale. The wide gap between wages for U.S. workers and H-1B workers helps explain why industry demand for H-1B workers is so high and why the annual visa quotas are being exhausted.

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=25147

All of the occupations with the largest projected employment growth (in terms of the number of jobs) over the next decade are in nontradable domestic services. The top ten sources of the most jobs in "superpower" America are: retail salespersons, registered nurses, postsecondary teachers, customer service representatives, janitors and cleaners, waiters and waitresses, food preparation (includes fast food), home health aides, nursing aides, orderlies and attendants, general and operations managers. Note than none of this projected employment growth will contribute one nickel toward producing goods and services that could be exported to help close the massive US trade deficit. Note, also, that few of these jobs classifications require a college education.

Atlanta Business Chronicle (2006) 8,000 people applied for 500 jobs at a new Wal-Mart. The Chicago Sun Times (Baldacci, 2006) reported that 24,500 people applied for 325 jobs at a new Wal-Mart near Chicago. The San Francisco Chronicle (Sarkar, 2005) says 11,000 people applied for 400 jobs at a new Oakland Wal-Mart. Elsewhere in California 3,400 people applied for 550 new Wal-Mart jobs in Santa Clarita (Progressive Grocer, 2006). Finally in Glendale, Arizona a Wal-Mart store received 8,000 applicants for 525 jobs (Hassett, 2005).

You bet we need those people... There are too many jobs to go around as it is. :sarcasm:

[Robert Oak]

5. look at our site

We are moving anyone/anyway we can to stop the H-1B Visa program.

It is truly a vehicle for cheap labor and they do not even attempt to hide this fact anymore.

It is not used to bring in talent that cannot be found in America....

My comment is talking about the real genius, the true innovators of the world. Tesla, Einstein, there were many Germans who
started the space program brought in after WWII...and so on...truly these people were one of a kind and really did not exist
in the US, added to the scientific community and most certainly were not used to displace Americans or lower their salaries.

There is no way one could have labor arbitrage with these people for they are gifts and extremely rare talent.

There has to be a way to encourage them to immigrate into the US without turning everything into labor arbitrage.

That is why this paper shocked me...one would not expect labor arbitrage in the highest Academic degree in the land...
but clearly from Borjas results there is something funky going on there.

Anyway, I am seriously on your side, working every day on your side.

[2Design]

4. they get their education on scholarships - they are truly getting the

american dream while the rest of us don't get the scholarships - if they don't work while in school - they qualify financially - while those of us who do work - don't qualify - it is amazing - I have observed a friend who houses foreigners, while they go to school on scholarship money -

they are the ones who get the teaching jobs in universities and they are the reason most of us have no interest in taking their classes because we can not understand them -

[Robert Oak]

6. do you have a reference?

I'm looking for references on economic advantage over American university students through either government support
or simply the lack of fellowships/scholarships for American exclusively and so on.

[2Design]

7. no link - just know of about student because they live with someone

I know - they come over on high school exchange and attend local hs and then get scholarships to local colleges ODU by using the internet and since they are living rent free - when they apply for scholarships - their income is nonexistent - they also got into the accelerated master program and now are studying for the phd with a fellowship from the same college - they are a ta at the school - they come can come from rural schools in other countries or come from advantaged families

[old_techie]

8. A website dedicated to H-1B issues

with a newsletter. (sample below)

http://www.zazona.com/

------------------------<<<>>>------------------------
JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER
by Rob Sanchez
March 29, 2006 No. 1448
------------------------<<<>>>------------------------

Tomorrow the 29th there will be a hearing in the House Judiciary to discuss
whether the H-1B cap should be raised.

This hearing is critical because the stakes are so high. The H-1B increase
seems to be a done deal in the Senate, and there seems to be almost no
opposition to the emerging immigration bill that contains the H-1B
increase. Passage of the H-1B and F-4 increases may hinge on the House. Our
last hope of stopping the increase will probably be in the House where
opposition to amnesty is strong.

[ramapo]

9. Where's the outrage?

I wasn't aware of the zazona site. Just checked it out and printed the petition. They've had many visitors but not all that many signatures.

In general, this is just another issue where most Americans are simply asleep in front of the TV while the corporations fly in the replacement workers. The excuse given is America is the shining light of opportunity and we should welcome everyone just like our parents or grandparents were welcomed.

Sounds nice but I'm not sure how many Americans in 1900 were losing jobs to immigrants and offshoring.

[Robert Oak]

10. labor economics

Even educating people is a disaster...

even when you present them study after study and fact after fact they will just call it "racist" and ignore the data.

On top of it, how many people take econ 101/102 in college...they do not seem to connect $$/labor/supply/demand.

It's very frustrating.

[Quequeg]

11. I think in-sourcing has long been a problem

In 1921, the founder of the American Federation of Labor (Samuel Gompers) wrote the following:
http://www.thesocialcontract.com/cgi-bin/showarticle.pl?articleID=837&terms=%0DGompers

Those who favor unrestricted immigration care nothing for the people. They are simply desirous of flooding the country with unskilled as well as skilled labor of other lands for the purpose of breaking down American standards.... Those who believe in unrestricted immigration want this country China-ized. But I firmly believe there are too many right-thinking people in our country to permit such an evil.

From 1880 to 1924, we had a period of high globalization.
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item_sidebar.jhtml?id=4961 - Waves of Globalization - graph
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item.jhtml?id=4961&t=bizhistory - Waves of Globalization - article

Then, from 1924 till 1965, there was a slowdown in immigration and trade. During this period, immigration was less than 200,000 per year. Now, immigration is over 1.5 million per year and the Senate wants to double this to 3 million per year.

It looks like we're on a 40 year globalization cycle. The last 40 years have been high globalization, which were preceded by 40 years of low globalization, which were preceded by 40 years of high globalization.

From 1940 to 1970, we had a fair economy, with the wages of the poor going up 3% per year, the middle class up 3% per year, and the rich up 3% pear year. Since 1970, wages have flat for 90% of the workforce after adjusting for inflation.

Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle":
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/sinclair.htm

As a writer Sinclair gained fame in 1906 with the novel The Jungle, a report on the dirty conditions in the Chicago meat-packing industry. Jurgis Rudkus, the protagonist, is a young Lithuanian immigrant. He arrives in America dreaming of wealth, freedom, and opportunity. Gradually Jurgis' optimistic world vision fade in the hopeless "wage-slavery" and in the chaos of urban life."

http://www.sweatshops-retail.org/nrf%20website/history.htm

In 1907, a California socialist named Upton Sinclair published a novel called The Jungle... The novel described, in harrowing detail, the lives of a family of Lithuanian immigrants in Chicago at the beginning of the century... In sometimes overwrought prose, the book described the various indignities and atrocities inflicted upon immigrants: child labor, long hours, low wages, unpaid work, firings with no notice and no severance pay... What struck the deepest chord in the public, though, was probably the description of the working conditions: cold, filthy, smelly, loud, and unsafe:

There were the men in the pickle rooms, for instance, where old Antanas had gotten his death; scarce a one of these that had not some spot of horror on his person. Let a man so much as scrape his finger pushing a truck in the pickle rooms, and he might have a sore that would put him out of the world; all the joints in his fingers might be eaten by the acid, one by one. Worst of any, however, were the fertilizer men, and those who served in the cooking rooms. These people could not be shown to the visitor, - for the odor of a fertilizer man would scare any ordinary visitor at a hundred yards, and as for the other men, who worked in tank rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting, - sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard!

So, what are the meatpacking plants like today?
http://www.numbersusa.com/hottopic/bush_guestworkerplan.htm

We might see more and more occupations suffer the fate of meatpacking. A few decades ago, meat packing jobs were some of the highest paying blue collar jobs around. I think we can all remember Sylvester Stallone working in a Philadelphia meat packing plant as he trained to take on Apollo Creed. But today, meat packing jobs are not only low-paying, but they are also some of the most dangerous jobs in America. Not coincidentally, this has been accompanied by a large inflow of immigrant workers.

March 24, 2004
Statement of the Honorable John N. Hostettler (R-IN),
Chair of the Subcommittee on Immigration,
Border Security and Claims
(John Hostettler is a Republican who represents the 8th District of Indiana, which includes Evansville and Terre Haute.)

www.StopGlobalism.com       www.VOIDnow.org

[old_techie]

12. The media is a huge problem here

In the last Presidential campaign H-1B (or immigration in general) not mentioned at all, outsourcing just a passing mention with the Bush crowd calling it "good for America", and Kerry trivializing it as a tax loophole thing, social security was a big deal with the trade deficit ignored altogether. I remember in one of the debates that the moderator (I think it was Bob Shiefer) mentioned that he got more emails on the topic of immigration than ANY other topic. But then, aside from the war, all the media spent weeks and weeks on was a bunch of crap like gay marriage and who did what in the Vietnam era. Are the media telling US what we are supposed to care about? The factors that could take down the entire economy are NOT what we are supposed to care about?