If President Obama Can’t Get You a Job, Who Can?

By Joe Guzzardi
April 9, 2012

Depending on whether you live in the real world or in Capitol Hill’s fantasy land, the unemployment data released last week can be interpreted in two different ways.

If you’re actively looking for a job or one of the millions who have abandoned the search, the grim statistic that only 120,000 new jobs were created last month is the latest in an unending series of discouraging blows. Getting incentivized to send out resumes becomes increasingly difficult when the bleak news continues month after month.

But on Capitol Hill where job security is higher than anywhere in America and where no one has been able to figure out how to outsource Congress or hire illegal aliens to officially represent Americans, the prevailing sentiment is that without more foreign-born labor, the United States will collapse. The incumbent re-election rate has been 80 percent or higher since 1964.

According to a report published in the Indian press, two of the Senate’s most powerful legislators, Majority Leader Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer, met more or less secretly last week in a Manhattan hotel room with influential Indian hotelier and the chairman of Indian-American Democrats Sant Singh Chatwal. Indian American Democrats is a major contributor to Democratic campaigns; Chatwal owns the Bombay Palace Restaurant chain and the Hampshire Hotels and Resorts.

During the hour-long meeting the three discussed, under the guise of improved India-U.S. bilateral relations, ways in which Indian IT firms could obtain greater numbers of non-immigrant H-1B and L-1 work visas for their employees.

Reid and Schumer assured Chatwal that Congress is working tirelessly to address what the Senators referred to as the high skilled worker shortage. Reid managed to insult American workers by saying that if it weren’t for the “brilliance of Indians,” then “Silicon Valley probably perhaps would not exist” since they do “the scientific things that only very bright people can do.”

As usual with Reid’s outrageous anti-American statements, even the most cursory factual analysis proves him dead wrong. A 2012 Center for Immigration Studies report authored by Dr. Steven A. Camarota and based on the federal government’s 2010 American Community Survey found the following. There are: 1) 101,000 U.S.-born individuals with an engineering degree who are unemployed, 2) an additional 244,000 U.S.-born individuals under age 65 have an engineering degree but aren’t in the labor market—meaning that they are neither working nor looking for work and are therefore not counted as unemployed, 3) about 1.47 million U.S.-born individuals have an engineering degree and a job but not as engineers and 4) 25,000 unemployed U.S.-born individuals with Master’s or Ph.D. engineering degrees and another 68,000 with advanced degrees are not in the labor force. The report, titled “Is President Obama Right about Engineers?” is available online.

Two months ago during a Google Plus interview with Jennifer Wedel, the president promised to help her long-time unemployed engineer husband Darin find a job. As per the president’s request, Ms. Wedel forwarded Obama her husband’s resume. But to date no job has been offered to the former Texas Instruments employee despite his years of experience and earlier calls from, the White House, personnel recruiters and the Texas Work Commission.

When the United States president can’t help an unemployed American get a job but the Senate Majority leader is lobbying for more overseas workers, it’s little wonder that so many have stopped their job searches.

Joe Guzzardi is a Californians for Population Stabilization Senior Writing Fellow whose columns have been syndicated since 1986. Contact him at [email protected]