Reform looms

Over the holiday weekend, though busy clinging to my guns, religion, and ethnic identity, I was also mindful of the blessing of employment when so many in the tech industry are out of work.

But as one would suspect, the unemployment rate for electrical engineers, for instance, which stands at 8.6%, and which, as Rob Sanchez points out on VDARE, is more like 25%, does not deter the immigration "reform" traitors from proclaiming the need for more H-1B visas.

We've heard, time and again, that America does not produce enough engineers, programmers, and scientists to fill the need. Then why the unemployment rate? And in any case, the economy provides an mechanism for fixing this problem. When there is a dearth of skilled laborers, wages rise. This, in turn, brings more students to colleges and universities.

But high tech companies do not want to play by the rules. They want to open the U.S. labor market to the entire world. If, because the payoff is not good enough, American students are not majoring in computer science, companies like Microsoft do not want to raise their wages. Instead, they want to get their employees from India and China. To deflect criticism, they claim that these workers are being paid the "going rate". But foreign workers keep wages down.

One only has to ask: Why would Microsoft spend money to lobby Congress for H-1B visas if it did not promise lower labor costs? Of course more visas will keep wages low. Microsoft knows this as well as the legislators that seek corporate support.