I See A Market Opportunity For A Political Party That Isn't Owned by Big Corporations

From the September 11, 2013 Washington Examiner:

On Tuesday, the chief human resources officers of more than 100 large corporations sent a letter to House Speaker John Boehner and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi urging quick passage of a comprehensive immigration reform bill.

The officials represent companies with a vast array of business interests: General Electric, The Walt Disney Company, Marriott International, Hilton Worldwide, Hyatt Hotels Corporation, McDonald's Corporation, The Wendy's Company, Coca-Cola, The Cheesecake Factory, Johnson & Johnson, Verizon Communications, Hewlett-Packard, General Mills, and many more. All want to see increases in immigration levels for low-skill as well as high-skill workers, in addition to a path to citizenship for the millions of immigrants currently in the U.S. illegally.

A new immigration law, the corporate officers say, "would be a long overdue step toward aligning our nation's immigration policies with its workforce needs at all skill levels to ensure U.S. global competitiveness." The officials cite a publication of their trade group, the HR Policy Association, which calls for immigration reform to "address the reality that there is a global war for talent." The way for the United States to win that war for talent, they say, is more immigration.

Yeah, there are certainly no unemployed high-skill people already legally in the U.S., are there?

PBS On "The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage"

I was actually rather surprised to see PBS taking the side of Americans:

Currently, U.S. colleges graduate far more scientists and engineers than find employment in those fields every year -- about 200,000 more -- while the IT industry fills about two-thirds of its entry-level positions with guest workers.

At the same time, IT wages have stagnated for over a decade. We cannot expect to build a strong STEM workforce and encourage domestic innovation by developing policies that undermine the quality of STEM jobs. Before asking government to intervene in labor markets by handing out more guest worker visas and green cards to STEM graduates, we should ask for audits of shortage claims and workforce impacts as a first step toward developing evidence-based policy on this issue, an issue critical to the nation's future.

Asking domestic graduates, both native-born and immigrant, to compete with guest workers on wages is not a winning strategy for strengthening U.S. science, technology and innovation.

The article points out that many of the H-1B visas are for people who are not doing cutting edge work:

There may be highly innovative guest workers, but most are in jobs far away from the innovation frontier. The Economic Policy Institute's Ron Hira found that few of the largest H-1B employers could be considered technology innovators, with most generating very low levels of patents.

Theoretically, H-1B visas are supposed to be for workers with specialized job skills that could not be hired from the pool of U.S. citizens or permanent residents.  I've seen quite few examples of employers advertising for H-1Bs with very generic job skills: five years of object-oriented programming, and I have worked with a few who were grossly incompetent.

The Severe Labor Shortage Is The Reason For Immigration Reform

Mickey Kaus reports on a recent event in which he participated:

New Ricochet Podcast on Immigration: It’s 2 against 1, with me and Mark Krikorian discussing the current state of play with Clint Bolick of the Goldwater Institute. (Bolick and Jeb Bush coauthored Immigration Wars, which proposed a non-citizenship legalization for current illegal immigrants–an idea that seemed out of synch when the book was published but whose time seems to have come again).  The podcase is only 45 minutes. It’s civil. Weeds are gotten into, downs are drilled. Bolick holds up his end (he’s slick!). But his argument rests mainly on the notion that nothing could be worse than not passing a bill, because of the horrible labor shortage crisis currently afflicting the economy. Does that resonate with you? Do Americans get up in the morning and say to themselves, “Damn, this labor shortage!” Or does it seem like we have more workers than jobs? …
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/07/20/americans-cant-find-jobs-due-to-labor-shortage/#ixzz2Zn6j4gTW

Yeah, that's it!  There are severe, economy damaging shortages of workers.  That's why we need to pass comprehensive immigration reform!

There have been times in the past when that was possibly the case.  Not right now.

What Happens When You Write Too Complex of a Law

It appears that the immigration bill that passed the Senate, like Obamacare, was too complex for the Senate to fully understand.  Multiple news organizations, not all on the right, have pointed out that because the "registered provisional immigrants" (today's illegal aliens) are not eligible for Obamacare, it creates a really perverse incentive.  As John B. Judis at New Republic points out:

It creates an incentive for employers to hire the new immigrants over citizens or green-card holders and to provide neither with health insurance. Under the Affordable Care Act, employers with fewer than 50 workers do not have to buy health insurance for their employees, but businesses with 50 or more workers—which employ about three-quarters of American workers—either have to provide insurance or pay a fine for those workers who buy insurance through the exchanges the act creates. The fine is ordinarily $2,000 but can run as high as $3,000.

Businesses with 50 or more employees that choose to pay a fine rather than provide insurance will not have to pay fines for the RPIs or blue-card holders because they are not eligible for the exchanges. So employers will be able to save from $2,000 to $3,000 a year by hiring a new immigrant over an American citizen. For salaries that hover between $15,000 and $25,000, as they do in many immigrant-heavy industries, that’s no small savings. Even an advocate for low-income immigrants sees the language as a potential problem: “We don’t want them to hire immigrants over citizens because of that loophole,” says Sonal Ambegaokar, who analyzes health policy for the National Immigration Law Center. “We want a level playing field.”

I really think this is just incompetence, not an intentional effort by the Democrats to make sure that today's illegal aliens get jobs so that people who obey laws don't.  But then again, I don't think the Democrats are all that smart.