Ample Evidence (Unreported) That the U.S. Has Plenty of Skilled American Workers

By Joe Guzzardi
December 8, 2011

On one issue, the Republican candidates and Democratic president Barack Obama agree: the United States needs more foreign-born skilled workers, as they like to call them. To that end, they propose that Congress eliminate the cap which restricts the numbers of non-immigrant visas that can be issued in a single year. In January during his State of the Union address, Obama urged increasing the numbers of H-1B visas and also backed the idea of employment-based green cards.

In the course of defending this indefensible policy, some amusing but telling ideas have surfaced. Last week, for example, Newt Gingrich suggested that the private sector take over the supervision of the visa process. Gingrich called caps on H-1B visas, currently around 65,000, “wrong and economically misguided.” Most tech workers come to the United States on H-1B visas.

But Gingrich also took aim at the H-2A guest worker visa. Saying he has no confidence that the government can run an efficient guest worker program “without massive fraud and counterfeiting,” Gingrich suggested turning the program’s management over to the private sector, specifically American Express. Gingrich noted that “American Express rate of fraud is less than one tenth of one percent.” To match American Express’ fraud detection success, Gingrich proposed a biometric visa.

Reading between the lines, Gingrich’s speech openly admits that the government does not and cannot run an efficient non-immigrant worker program and also that fraud is the common denominator in most federal immigration programs.

Gingrich’s idea of putting American Express in charge of monitoring visas is a good headline grabber but will never happen. That in turn means that the status quo, including fraud, will go on indefinitely.

The subject candidates should be discussing is not how to overhaul the visa programs but why we keep issuing them in the face of continued high unemployment.

Influential forces are aligned to push for more foreign-born workers in spite of ample evidence that none are needed. Included among the power brokers are high tech industry lobbyists and spokesmen like Microsoft’s Bill Gates, the members of Congress whose campaigns they support, as well as the mainstream media which purposely suppresses the multiple persuasive arguments against unlimited visas.

Here, for example, are two studies done by respected non-partisan think tanks that expose the flawed arguments that America needs to import more of the “best and brightest.” In its report titled “Into the Eye of the Storm, Assessing the Evidence on Science and Engineering Education, Quality and Workforce Demand,” the Washington, D.C.-based Urban Institute concluded that “ the United States’ education system produces a supply of qualified [science and engineering] graduates in much greater numbers than jobs available.” Similarly, the Rand Corporation found that the crisis is not a shortage but a worker surplus.

What also goes unreported is that some major universities like the University of California receive a $5,000 government subsidy every time it admits a high-tech graduate student from overseas as opposed to one from the United States. The government makes the payment after the university puts the student on a federal grant payroll. This practice further discriminates against American students and future workers.

Meanwhile, although at last count more than 300,000 U.S. engineers were unemployed, the call for more work-based visas continues unabated.

Joe Guzzardi is a Senior Writing Fellow at Californians for Population Stabilization and a syndicated columnist. Contact him at [email protected].