Amnesty

So Bush has all this talk about immigration reform, about how its not amnesty. Well here is the definition of amnesty (Webster):

Amnesty - a forgetting or overlooking of any past offense

If someone is in this country illegally, they must have broken a law, and at least on paper, there is a punishment. So not only would offenses not be punished, they would be rewarded. So here is a new phrase we should use since amnesty appears to not quite capture the moment:

Platinum Amnesty

You heard it here first.

Its money, money, money, stupid!

A new study from the Center for Immigration Studies shows how, far from the being a source of highly skilled labor, the H-1B program now operates mainly to supply U.S. employers with cheap workers. Analysis of data from the Department of Labor shows that very few H-1B workers are ''highly skilled,'' and that their wages are well below those of comparable U.S. workers.

Why There is No Life After Death

Robert Cringley just had an article about a massive layoff at IBM coming by the end of 2007. I tend to agree with him that this is essentially IBM CEO Sam Palmisano doing nothing but plundering the company for nothing but personal greed.

I really take this as proof that there is no "life after death." For if we were reborn to walk this earth again, then Tom Watson, the founder of IBM, would scream in frustration and releave Sam of his earthly shackles.

Obviously this means there will be no spiritual, divine, or inspired intervention on behalf of the thousands of IBMers who showed the company loyalty and diligence.

VDARE and Paul Craig Roberts

I read a few columnists opportunistically. I browse a few blogs here and there. But I stumbled across Paul Craig Robert's syndicated columns on VDARE about 9 months ago. I have to tell you that no writer has ever gotten my attention like he does. All those thoughts that mill around in my brain are brought together concisely and clearly in his writings. I strongly recomment anyone with a shred of patriotic fiber left in them to check him out. Here are a couple of columns that are absolutely dead on.

Commentary & Analysis: Economists In Denial; Blind To Offshoring's Adverse Impact

Outsourcing—A Greater Threat Than Terrorism?

The Narrow View from Globalists

Here is a Washington Post article on globalism. A relative asked my my opinion on this piece, so I include it next.

As usual, this author, William H Overshot, picks and chooses the things he wants to talk about. He also gets it wrong in many places.

If you look at high tech wages, they are either flat in all areas or have fallen in the past 5 years (Business Week survey). His claims about the workers getting a cut of the profit that the high level managers get is absolutely false for the high-tech industry. What other industries has he been sloppy with?

Its great that prices are better at Wal-Mart. For those who are poor and barely making it, this is a godsend. He claims that this is a 5-10% "effective boost" to everyone's income. What he should say is that its a boost to those who still retain their jobs. In the tech industry, people have lost their jobs due to globalization and have taken subpart jobs with incomes at half (or less) of their old job. If we are going to be thorough, as the author claims, lets be sure to count that %50 loss for these people.

He claims that the assertion that upper managers are getting fat on globalization is "mostly false." Lets put some numbers to that. I believe that the latest figure of the ratio of top CEO pay to worker pay in the US is now at an astronomical 425 or 1. This is unprecedented in history and the closest rival figure is in Great Britain, where its 13:1.

He also makes the favorite globalist claim that globalization is really helping to improve the living standards and conditions in other countries. Well if this is a laudable goal and a primary reason to support globalization, lets go back to that 425:1 figure. Lets scoop off say the top 80% of the CEO salaries and start pumping that into charities that focus on improving the lives of those in third world countries.

The sucking sound you hear isn't jobs be lost this time. Its the sharp intake of breath of The Comfortable who are aghast at anyone threatening the piles of money that they have so rightly earned. It'll be a cold, cold day in hell, when anyone other than the working class fund the improvement of third world living standards.

Outsourcing everything that isn't nailed to the floor...

This is just too funny. Thanks Rob at JobDestruction for pointing this article out. This first line of the article content is

Last month, Lori Danes, 43, called the prayer line of a major television ministry and requested prayer for her mother's persistent ulcers. But her prayer representative, who called himself "Darren," prayed in a strong Indian accent that "all the gods would bless her mightily."

Parsing the Truths About Visas for Tech Workers

THE United States has benefited immensely from its role as a magnet for the best and brightest workers from around the world, especially in innovative fields like high technology. Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, sounded precisely that theme in Senate testimony last month when asked about the visa program for skilled workers, the H-1B. Mr. Gates said that these workers are “uniquely talented” and highly paid — “taking jobs that pay over $100,000 a year” — and that America should “welcome as many of those people as we can get.”

But that is not how the H-1B visa program as a whole is working these days, according to an analysis by Ronil Hira, an assistant professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology. The median salary for new H-1B holders in the information technology industry is actually about $50,000, based on the most recent data filed by companies with the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services agency. That wage level, Mr. Hira says, is the same as starting salaries for graduating computer science majors with bachelor’s degrees.

Yet salaries, according to Mr. Hira, are only part of the story. He says that while Microsoft may be paying its H-1B visa holders well and recruiting people with hard-to-find talents, other companies have a different agenda. The H-1B visa program, Mr. Hira asserts, has become a vehicle for accelerating the pace of offshore outsourcing of computing work, sending more jobs abroad. Holders of H-1B visas, he says, do the on-site work of understanding a client’s needs and specifications — and then most of the software coding is done back in India.

“Information technology offshore outsourcing has just swamped the H-1B program in recent years,” he said. The list of the top 10 companies requesting H-1B visas in fiscal 2006, the most recent government data available, was dominated by Indian-based technology outsourcing companies like Infosys Technologies, Wipro Technologies and Tata Consultancy Services, and a few other companies that offer outsourced services and have sizable operations in India like Cognizant Technology Solutions, Accenture and Deloitte & Touche, according to a paper last month by Mr. Hira, which was published by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group....

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