Do they know no shame? In a post titled "Tech flips the script on immigration foes", The Hill newspaper's "Hillicon Valley" blog, which bills itself as Capitol Hill's online technology information resource, reports:
A group representing major U.S. tech companies is renewing the industry's calls for immigration reform by keeping track of the number of jobs that it says are not created under the current system.
"Every few seconds of every business day, America loses another job that would have been created by a high-skilled immigrant who couldn't get a work visa", Scott Corley, executive director of Compete America, said in a statement. (Emphasis added.)
The group in reference includes an elitist mix of individuals such as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, whose technical ideas, in the parlance of the day, went viral, making them billionaires in the process. Zuckerberg's unseemly, and quite possibly self-serving, willingness to push for amnesty and a wider pipeline of access to cheap foreign labor has been well-documented by many organizations, including the Center for Immigration Studies. (See, for instance, here, here, and here.
And even as these American oligarchs publicly lament the loss of jobs for "high-skilled immigrants", three Princeton professors have just released a shockingly dismal report through the Brookings Institution saying that just 11 percent of Americans who have been unemployed for more than six months will ever regain steady full-time work.
The report, "Are the Long-Term Unemployed on the Margins of the Labor Market?", was co-authored by Alan B. Krueger, one-time chief economic advisor to President Barack Obama, so administration officials cannot readily dismiss it as political mischief even as they tout their jobs creation record and continue to urge that millions of illegal aliens be granted amnesty and permitted to lawfully enter the job market.
Two other points worth noting:
- Most of the jobs created during Obama's tenure pay low wages, with few if any benefits for the workers. Thus, many of the middle-income wage earners who lost their jobs were only able to work their way back into the labor market at entry-level salaries. This is significant because a substantial portion of those people also have families to support. Thus, the percentage of the working poor continues to grow, even as jobs are created.
- There is ample evidence to doubt the proposition that many of the aliens who take the positions are in fact "high-skilled".
Go figure. As our nation struggles to maintain its technological edge in the modern age by encouraging more Americans to graduate from college with STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) degrees, what university students see and hear from the industry itself is that even if they do choose such careers, they will be obliged to compete head-to-head with foreign applicants willing to work for substantially less simply for the opportunity to immigrate. The math just doesn't add up.