5 Good Articles
5 Good Articles
Date: Thursday, June 12, 2003 10:34 AM
JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER
www.ZaZona.com
Article 1:
http://reese.king-online.com/Reese_20030604/index.php
Stop The Foreign Work Program
Article 2:
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/phyllisschlafly/ps20030602.shtml
When white-collar jobs follow the blues
Article 3:
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/phyllisschlafly/ps20030610.shtml
U.S. tech workers feeling pinch of new world economy
Article 4:
http://www.vdare.com/guzzardi/unemployment.htm
Unemployment: Time To Talk About The Immigration Dimension
Article 5:
http://www.vdare.com/roberts/jobless.htm
Jobless Recovery Means Lurch To Left
http://reese.king-online.com/Reese_20030604/index.php
For Wednesday, June 4, 2003
Stop The Foreign Work Program
As they once said in the before-we-got-here years, it is time to take
pen in hand and write your congressional representative and senators.
Tell them to kill the foreign employment visa programs (H-1B and L-1).
These programs allow foreigners to take American jobs while millions of
Americans are unemployed. The whole idea was a fraud to begin with. Big
business claimed there was such a shortage back in 1990 that it needed
to recruit foreign workers (these are skilled laborers, not stoop
labor).
No such shortage ever existed, but Congress passed it anyway.
Initially, it allowed 65,000 temporary visas good for six years, and
then it was expanded to 115,000 in 1999 and to 195,000 foreign workers
admitted annually through this year.
Outrageous. Even more outrageous is that local, state and federal
governments are hiring foreigners, too. Perhaps you have wondered why
you run into so many people with foreign names and accents when you
deal with government these days. This is the reason.
I suspect the motivation in both private and public sectors is the
same. Foreign workers under this program are docile. They don't cause
trouble. They work for less pay. After all, if they lose their jobs,
it's back to the old country.
In the meantime, millions of freshly laid-off Americans are in
unemployment lines. How stupid can Congress be? It has a big argument
about tax cuts and extending unemployment insurance when it can create
hundreds of thousands of vacant jobs overnight. Kill the damned
program. Send the guest workers back home.
I have nothing against foreigners. In fact, I've been called an ethnic
junkie because I hang out with so many immigrants. The guest workers,
however, are not immigrants. They are foreigners here on temporary
visas to fill jobs that tens of thousands of Americans are qualified to
fill. It is utterly inexcusable to keep this fraudulent program alive.
It is a fraud because there are plenty of qualified Americans,
including immigrants, who could handle these jobs. There is not now
and there never was a shortage of Americans willing and able to work.
For more information you can check out www.zazona.com,
www.thesocialcontract.com, www.fairus.org and www.numbersusa.com.
Sometimes, I swear, you can easily get the idea that the government
deliberately works against the interests of the American people. Do you
think the government can really keep terrorists out of the United
States with our open-borders policy?
Look at these numbers: On a typical day, according to government
statistics, U.S. customs processes more than 1.1 million passengers,
more than 57,000 trucks/containers, 580 vessels, 2,459 aircraft and
more than 323,000 vehicles. There are 301 ports of entry, and the
officials who are expected to detain, medically examine or
conditionally release people or animals suspected of carrying
infectious diseases consist of 43 people in an Atlanta office and 39 in
the field. A little understaffed, don't you think? Another question:
How do you suspect someone or some critter is carrying an infectious
disease if there are no visible symptoms?
The U.S. government, with its open-borders policy, is going to turn the
United States into a Third World country, with a few rich people at the
top and lots of poor people at the bottom. But not just poor people
poor people of quite different ethnic and racial backgrounds who will
be scrambling and clawing to get at the few crumbs that get brushed off
the tables at the top. It won't be a pleasant place to live. It's a
formula for conflict and social upheaval.
Heifer dust about diversity notwithstanding, the most stable countries
in the world are those with homogenous or nearly homogenous
populations. Diversity breeds conflict. Ask American blacks and Native
Americans, and while you're at it, ask Native Americans to remind you
what unlimited immigration can do to a resident population.
Those statistics about customs and disease control, by the way, I
gleaned from the latest issue of The Social Contract. This is an
excellent quarterly and is always chock-full of useful information you
won't find in the daily news. I've already given you its Web address.
Try it.
) 2003 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/phyllisschlafly/ps20030602.shtml
When white-collar jobs follow the blues
Phyllis Schlafly
June 2, 2003
The big argument for the 2003 tax cut passed by Congress is that it
will create much-needed jobs. But one important question remains: Will
those jobs be created for Americans, or will corporations simply hire
more job-seekers from India and China?
It is time for Congress to call a halt to the scandal of the way big
corporations are hiring foreigner workers at the same time they are
laying off their American employees.
The hiring of hundreds of thousands of foreigners is why The New York
Times proclaimed on Page One that this year's "Graduates Are Lowering
Their Sights in Today's Stagnant Job Market."
Remember how, when U.S. corporations built hundreds of plants in Third
World countries, we were told not to worry about losing blue-collar
manufacturing jobs because we were keeping service jobs? Well, now the
high-paying white-collar service jobs are going overseas, too,
particularly jobs for engineers and computer specialists.
Follow the money. The big corporations hire Indians and Chinese for
less than half what they pay their U.S. employees, work them long hours
without overtime pay and treat them like indentured servants unable to
quit for a better job. The corporations partner with the U.S.
government by making political contributions to assure the passage of
legislation that legalizes the importation of cheap foreign labor.
This racket started when Section 1706 was slipped into the Tax Reform
Act of 1986. This uniquely discriminatory section required anyone who
is an "engineer, designer, computer programmer, systems analyst or
other similarly skilled worker" to be classified by the Internal
Revenue Service as an employee rather than as an independent
contractor, which hundreds of thousands of tech workers were at that
time.
This change in the law plus aggressive IRS enforcement resulted in the
creation of large consulting or contracting firms that hire tech
workers as employees and then contract to sell computer services to big
corporations. These "gatekeeper" firms and computer corporations soon
began to exploit H-1B and L-1 visas by employing foreigners while at
the same time dumping their American engineers and programmers.
H-1B visas were created in 1990 to allow corporations to import up to
65,000 foreign skilled workers to fill alleged labor shortages, a claim
that was always a fiction and now is nonsense. L-1 visas were created
to allow inter-office transfers of key managers, executives or persons
with specialized knowledge, but there are no numerical limits and no
safeguards against abuse.
The corporations had such clout with politicians that in 2000 they got
the number of allowable H-1B visas tripled to 195,000 - even while the
industry was hiring only 2 percent of software applicants. In a
striking example of stealth politics, on Oct. 3, 2000, the House
leadership announced there would be no more votes that evening. Then,
after most members had departed, passed the H-1B increase by a voice
vote with only about 40 out of 435 members present.
Rep. Thomas M. Davis, R-Va., the chairman of the Republican
Congressional Campaign Committee, candidly commented, "This is not a
popular bill with the public. ... This is a very important issue for
the high-tech executives who give the money."
U.S. Sen. Robert F. Bennett, R-Utah, admitted, "There were, in fact, a
whole lot of folks against it, but because they are tapping the
high-tech community for campaign contributions, they don't want to
admit that in public."
By 2001, corporations and contracting firms were employing at least
384,191 workers with H-1B visas without any demonstration of a labor
shortage, plus at least 328,480 workers with L-1 visas masquerading as
"intra-company transferees." In a bitter postscript to the careers of
laid-off Americans, they were often required to train their foreign
cheap-labor substitutes.
The NBC television affiliate in West Hartford reported why Connecticut
has 20,000 unemployed white-collar tech workers but 70,253 employed
aliens. Insurance giant Cigna Corp. fired its Connecticut workers and
turned its tech jobs over to the Indian firm, Satyam, under a
"closed-loop process providing Satyam with the right of first refusal
for all consultants requests."
This Cigna agreement denies U.S. citizens even the chance to compete.
Where are the conservatives who argued for years against closed union
shop?
Siemens Corp. contracted to have its U.S. employees in Florida replaced
by foreigners brought in by Tata Consultancy Services, one of India's
largest consulting firms. When Tata used L-1 visas to bring in Indians
at one-third the salary of the laid-off Americans, a Siemens
representative shrugged off questions by saying, "They don't work for
us. They work for Tata."
What to do?
Congress should reject all attempts to extend the current number of
H-1B visas and allow the limit to revert to 65,000; require employers
to show a good-faith effort to hire U.S. citizens before applying for
visas; require employers to lay off non-citizens before laying off U.S.
citizens; restrict L-1 visas to jobs paying $100,000 a year and
prohibit transfers between companies; and forbid U.S. government
agencies from hiring non-citizens or from contracting with outside
firms that hire non-citizens.
)2003 Copley News Service
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/phyllisschlafly/ps20030610.shtml
U.S. tech workers feeling pinch of new world economy
Phyllis Schlafly
June 10, 2003
The Boston Globe revealed why tens of thousands of information
technology jobs have been outsourced overseas in the past couple of
years, and why major U.S. banks, brokerage houses and insurance
companies plan to ship 500,000 more jobs abroad in the next five years.
A graduate of the Indian Institutes of Technology with a master's in
business administration can be hired for $12,000. Compare that to the
average starting salary or $102,338 for a Harvard Business School
graduate.
The figure of a half-million jobs was reported by business consulting
firm A.T. Kearney Inc., which surveyed 100 major companies. It is all a
matter of money; the big banks are following the trail to Asia blazed
by Microsoft Corp. and IBM.
A study by Forrester Research of Cambridge, Mass., estimates that the
rush to export U.S. jobs will accelerate, and that U.S. corporations
will send 3.3 million jobs overseas by 2015. India is expected to get
70 percent because many Indians speak English.
The future is now. U.S. companies already employ Indians to do research
and development, prepare tax returns, evaluate health insurance claims,
transcribe doctors' medical notes, analyze financial data, dun for
overdue bills, read CAT scans, create presentations for investment
banks, and more.
J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. is planning to set up an equity research
department in Bombay, India, and build up its Technopolis, India,
office to 1,100 employees by the end of this year. Delta Air Lines has
contracted with two Indian companies to handle some reservations.
Morgan Stanley plans to experiment with hiring stock analysts in India,
and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Citigroup are studying the benefits of
shipping research jobs to India. Industry observers say that every bank
on Wall Street will soon reap the cost benefits of the inexhaustible
supply of business graduates in India eager to work for as little as 10
percent of the market rate in New York or London.
General Electric Co. shifted software development and back-office jobs
to India under Chief Executive Officer Jack Welch. Today, GE's Indian
engineers are contracted for tasks as sophisticated as analyzing the
materials for and the design of engines for new jet airplanes.
Not only U.S. steelworkers and blue-collar manufacturing workers are
getting shafted by the global economy. So are smart college graduates.
As one executive, who has no shame about replacing U.S. citizens with
foreigners, said, "If it can be done by sitting at a desk in front of a
computer, then it can be done abroad."
Some U.S. companies, such as American Express Co., are using Indians to
service U.S. customers by telephone. The Indians adopt Western names
(Sanjeep becomes Sam, Radhika turns into Ruth), learn how to avoid
British colloquialisms and take speech therapy so that they sound like
American.
Many U.S. companies subcontract with Indian software-serving companies,
especially with the three largest: The Tata Group of Companies, Infosys
Technologies Ltd. and Wipro Technologies. These companies transfer
their employees to the United States on L-1 visas, which are supposed
to be issued only to key employees.
Business Week reported that L-1 visas were the ticket of entry to take
a U.S. job for half of Tata's 5,000 workers, for one-third of Infosys'
3,000 U.S.-based workers, and for 32 percent of Wipro's U.S. employees.
L-1 visas enable Indian workers to replace U.S. workers. Many of these
Indian workers bring their spouses and children to the United States on
L-2 visas.
New Jersey residents were shocked to learn that state officials had
hired contractors who in turn arranged for operators working in Bombay
to handle calls from the state's welfare recipients. New Mexico
residents were shocked when KOAT-TV reported that the state hired
aliens as computer programmers in the Taxation and Revenue Department
and paid private attorneys to process their work visas.
The large amount of taxpayer-paid computer work performed by
non-citizens for at least 12 state governments and nine federal
agencies is a scandal crying out for investigation.
Age discrimination is a significant factor in the layoffs of U.S.
citizens. The termination rate for those over age 40 is generally 10
times higher than for those under 40, and even those as young as 35 are
at risk.
Sun Microsystems Inc. is defending itself against a lawsuit alleging
that it laid off 2,500 older U.S. workers and replaced them with young,
lower-paid workers from India. The lawsuit alleges that Sun
discriminated on race, national origin and age, and that Sun manifested
an "institutional bias" in favor of Indian workers because they are
"more compliant" and "less willing to make waves."
Not only is the claim made by many tech companies that the United
States suffers a shortage of computer programmers and engineers a
fraud, but so is the claim that the aliens they import have specialized
knowledge that is needed to retain the tech industry's competitive
edge. In fact, most foreigners coming in on H-1B or L-1 visas are
ordinary workers making ordinary salaries.
http://www.vdare.com/guzzardi/unemployment.htm
Unemployment: Time To Talk About The Immigration Dimension
By Joe Guzzardi
On May 5th, Roy Beck, Executive Director of NumbersUSA.com, read the
lead editorial in the Washington Post, Jobs and the Jobless
Roy pondered all the dreary statistics so familiar to us: 8.8 million
unemployed, 2 million out of work for 47 weeks or more, 4.4 million
Americans out of the work force because they cant find jobs and 4.8
million employed part time because they cannot find full time work.
Then Roy picked up and pencil and, after some quick addition and
division, calculated that the number of people who cannot find full
time jobs in America averages 41,000 per Congressional District!
Roys formula: "the overall total of 8.8 million unemployed," plus
"an additional 4.4 million Americans [who] have dropped out of the
labor force," plus "4.8 million [who] are employed part time-- not by
choice" totals 18 million.
By dividing 18 million unemployed/underemployed by 435 Congressional
districts, Roy got 41,000.
With those kinds of staggering numbers starring every American in the
face, the issue for 2004 is clear: jobs.
But while the Post had such a clear understanding of Americas
greatest problem on May 5th, by last Sunday, June 1, its editorial
Dangerous Crossing showed that it had forgotten everything it knew only
three weeks earlier.
Dangerous Crossing called for a guest worker program to create visas so
that Mexicans can work temporarily and legally in the US.
Lets repeat that more slowly: On May 5th, the Post is wringing its
hands over the 9 million unemployed - but on June 1st, its promoting
a guest worker program!
The recent deaths of 19 migrants in Texas prompted the Posts
editorial. And the Post further observed that nearly 2,000 border
crossers have died in the last five years following their dreams.
This, Mexican President Vicente Fox told Post reporters Mary Jordan and
Kevin Sullivan is very sad.
Oh yeah? Lets get something clear.
Mexico and Mexico alone is to blame for the death of each of those lost
souls.
Mexico and only Mexico--is responsible for the fate of its citizens.
If Fox thinks it sad that Mexican migrants die fleeing economic duress,
then his first priority is to provide for his people--not lean on the
U.S. for guest-worker programs and amnesty.
According to a Copley News Service story appearing the same day,
[Analysts say Mexico falls short in resolving illegal immigration, By
Jerry Kammer, June 1, 2003] even a prominent Mexican political analyst
agrees with me!
Luis Rubio, president of Mexico Citys Center for Research
Development was quoted as saying:
"Mexico has been totally incapable of resolving its own problems and is
finding a convenient scapegoat in the United States,"
And Professor George Grayson, a specialist in Mexican affairs at the
College of William and Mary, said the Fox domestic agenda has been a
complete bust:
So he (Fox) is hoping the skies will open and there will be sunshine
beaming from the United States in the form of an immigration accord.
In a telephone interview, Professor Grayson reiterated that Mexico has
ample resources to solve its own problems:
Mexico is an enormously wealthy country: oil, gold, silver, natural
gas, fishing, to name but a few. But the elites are just not interested
in the plight of the common man.
Even the most casual observer of Mexican-American relations can
recognize two glaring flaws in a guest worker program without even
mentioning the impact on American wages.
In the first place, before a guest worker program could be implemented,
all illegal aliens currently in the US would have to be deported.
Otherwise we would have the existing 10 million illegal aliens plus
those who would come (but never leave.)
And secondly, the U.S. has shown no ability to administrate any type of
immigration policy. How do you think we got to 10 million illegal
aliens?
Let Mexico worry about Mexico. Instead of day dreaming about migratory
accords with Mexico, U.S. leaders must immediately focus on getting
jobs back to America.
A guest worker program would open the floodgates. And not just for
agriculture workers but all types of blue-collar jobs in manufacturing,
trade and retail.
Alan Tonelson is a research fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based U.S.
Business and Industrial Council Education Foundation and author of
Race to the Bottom, essential reading for Americans concerned about
wage erosion.
Tonelson has strong opinions about guest worker programs. He told me:
All guest worker programs drive down wages. There is no such thing as a
chronic worker shortage. Everything is related to wages.
To compound Americas job problem, guest worker legislation, if
enacted, would come at a time when white-collar jobs are being sent
abroad.
The U.S. has been sold a bogus bill of goods called globalization. And
now the chit is due.
In his June 2 U.S. News and World Report column titled Save the
Workers, CNN financial guru Lou Dobbs confessed to having second
thoughts about free trade.
Wrote Dobbs:
According to the Economic Policy Institute, our rising trade deficits
cost 3 million actual and potential jobs in the United States between
1994 and 2000. And the jobs being lost include high-tech,
knowledge jobs. A report by Forrester Research predicts that
nearly 500,000 information-technology jobs will be moved overseas in
the next 13 years.
Attention George W. Bush and Congressional sell-outs: Americans are
disgusted!
While opposition to lost jobs has mostly been expressed in Internet
chat rooms and in irate e-mails to Congress from the unemployed, the
battle is moving to the streets.
On June 26th in New York, The Organization for the Rights of American
Workers () is planning a massive demonstration.
TORAWs mission is to:
challenge the current law with all its flaws and loopholes and work to
promote new legislation that will protect the American worker. We will
bring those employers to task that either outsource work to other
countries or hire non-immigrant foreign workers to take our jobs here
at home. We will be visible and vocal, and we will succeed!
An angry American electorate is the first step toward keeping jobs at
home.
Joe Guzzardi [email him], an instructor in English at the Lodi Adult
School, has been writing a weekly newspaper column since 1988. This
column is exclusive to VDARE.COM.
http://www.vdare.com/roberts/jobless.htm
June 09, 2003
Jobless Recovery Means Lurch To Left
By Paul Craig Roberts
The U.S. continues to lose jobs. Since President Bush has been in
office, 2.5 million manufacturing jobs and nearly 600,000 service jobs
have been lost for a total decline in private sector employment of 3.1
million. The unemployment rate has risen to 6.1 percent. If this is
recovery, what is going on?
Pundits call it the jobless recovery. The economy is growing, but
jobs are not. Why? One economist recently blamed the absence of job
growth on high U.S. productivity. Those who are working are so
productive, he said, that their output meets demand, making additional
jobs superfluous. His solution, apparently, is to make people less
productive.
I think that the jobless recovery is an illusion and that the U.S.
economy is creating jobs - but not for Americans. Those 2.5 million
manufacturing jobs have not been lost. They have been moved offshore
and given to foreigners who work for less.
The service economy was supposed to take the place of the lost
manufacturing economy. Alas, those jobs, too, are being created for
foreigners. It turns out that it is even easier to move service jobs
abroad. For example, 170,000 computer system design jobs -13 percent of
the total - have recently been shifted abroad. Keeping knowledge-based
jobs in the U.S. is proving as difficult as keeping manufacturing jobs.
Outsourcing, offshore production, work visas and the Internet make it
easy for U.S. companies to substitute cheaper foreign employees for
U.S. employees. Entrepreneurs in India have created firms that
specialize in supplying skilled labor to U.S. corporations. The growth
in the U.S. economy thus brings about a growth in foreign employment,
not in U.S. employment.
If this analysis is correct, U.S. job seekers will no longer be able to
tell the difference between recovery and recession. In the old economy,
people lost jobs when the Federal Reserve caused a recession by
curtailing the growth of money and credit. In the new economy, they
lose their jobs because foreigners work for less.
This development has produced a disconnect between economic policy and
employment. The Feds low interest rates and President Bushs tax
cuts cannot bridge the difference between wages and salaries in the
U.S. versus those in China and India.
When U.S. companies move their production for U.S. markets offshore,
U.S. incomes and GDP decline and foreign income rises. When the
offshore production is shipped to the U.S. to meet consumer demand, it
becomes imports.
A country that produces offshore for its home market is going to have a
big import bill, as those goods come on top of goods that foreign
companies export. In 2002 the U.S. had a trade deficit in goods of $484
billion and a current account deficit of $503 billion.
With production and employment moving out of the U.S., the ability of
the U.S. to pay for its imports with exports declines. In the end there
is nothing to bring about a balance between U.S. imports and exports
except a collapse in the value of the dollar. When that happens, cheap
goods from abroad become expensive, and the living standard of an
import-dependent population drops.
During the short period of time that President Bush has been in office
(Jan. 19, 2001-June 5, 2003), the dollar has lost 27 percent of its
value in relation to the new European currency, the Euro. Considering
that European economies are not doing well and that the Euro is an
untested currency, the dollars decline is not a good sign.
When we import $500 billion more than we export, foreigners must
finance our deficit. They do this by using the dollars we pay them to
purchase our assets, or they lend the money back to us by purchasing
government or corporate bonds.
Either way, Americans lose to foreigners the future income streams from
stocks, real estate, and bonds, and this worsens our current account
deficit in subsequent years.
In the past two years, foreigners willingness to finance our current
account deficit with their direct investment in the U.S. has declined
from $335.6 billion in 2000 to $52.6 billion in 2002, a decline of 84
percent. This dramatic drop in the willingness of foreigners to hold
U.S. dollar assets is the likely explanation for the drop in the
dollars value.
If U.S. companies cannot profitably employ costly U.S. labor to produce
for U.S. consumers, it is unlikely that U.S. companies will be able to
export a lot of goods made with U.S. labor. As our manufacturing sector
moves abroad, our ability to trade declines as we produce fewer
products to offer in exchange for our imports.
The dollar is the worlds reserve currency, which gives us the
ability to finance trade deficits that no other country could afford.
When an alternative reserve currency appears, the U.S. will undergo
wrenching economic, social and political adjustments.
Meanwhile, a rising stock market is consistent with jobless recovery
as the lower labor costs of foreign employees drive profits.
The growing gap between average incomes and executive compensation will
politically handicap the Republican Party and weaken its resistance to
a leftward turn in American politics.
Paul Craig Roberts is the author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The
Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are
Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for Peter
Brimelows Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the recent
epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.
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