IF OBAMA ISN'T MAKING EXECUTIVE DECISIONS TO BUILD STRUCTURES TO END SOCIAL SECURITY----myRA, MEDICARE AND MEDICAID----THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT-----HE IS BUILDING THE STRUCTURES FOR IMMIGRATION NEEDED TO MOVE TRANS PACIFIC TRADE PACT FORWARD.......THE HIGH-SKILLED GREEN CARD POLICY AND GENERAL LIFTING OF IMMIGRATION NUMBERS EACH YEAR.
WE LOVE IMMIGRANTS BUT NOT POLICY THAT SEEKS TO LEAVE ALL WORKERS EXPLOITED AND IMPOVERISHED.
Do you hear your labor unions shouting and fighting this?
As republicans pretend to fight this high-skilled immigration reform policy now fast-tracked by Obama remember again-----the immigration policy that allows high-skilled immigrants only is a republican policy so it is not the democratic party moving these bad policies forward----it is neo-liberals and republicans.
As we see below, NPR's favorite 'good billionaire' Bill Gates is now being exposed as really, really bad. When he isn't off pushing the Trans Pacific Trade Pact that seeks to end public health and health care subsidy so his PHARMA can maximize profits----ending public education so his education tech industries and selling of computers for online lessons can maximize profits---and while at it let's garner a majority share of militarized food with the Monsanto/Blackwater corporate merger.
WHAT A GUY.
He just keeps on taking and killing democratic societies all for market share. Below you see he and his tech buddies are now building an immigration policy that kills not only US workers, but Hispanic workers already in the US and even the foreign grads indentured to jobs that exploit them.
Obama just used Executive privilege yet again to move immigration reform to only high-skilled immigrants and their spouses. So, he is single-handedly putting into place the structures for Trans Pacific Trade Pact while your neo-liberal incumbents are silent. Remember, TPP allows global corporations to bring people from developing nations to work in the US under the conditions of that third world nation....say India or China. This is especially true for low-wage immigrant workers but it affects high-skilled workers as well. The path to citizenship never comes for 99% as buying your citizenship is now the policy and the cost is prohibitive.
These are not democratic policies----they are neo-liberal and neo-con policies meant only to maximize profit at the expense of further impoverishing workers.
Remember as well each time the President uses Executive privilege.....we move away from having a legislative branch. Clinton started using this once rarely used executive practice, Bush increased the use, and now Obama is moving the most controversial polices through this practice. If your pol is not shouting loudly about how bad this is for US democracy no matter what party does it----they are not working for you and me.
THOSE HISPANICS WHO THINK NEO-LIBERALS ARE WORKING FOR THEM----THINK AGAIN. ALL MARYLAND POLS ARE NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS.
The foreign grads falling into these high-skill jobs become indentured into often the most menial of jobs.
__________________
STEM labor shortages?: Microsoft report distorts reality ...www.epi.org/publication/pm195-stem-labor-shortages...
__________________
We had a glut of nursing staff last decade as college students were told nursing would always be a strong field for hiring. Then, neo-liberals and neo-cons starting bringing immigrant labor over to the US to take those health care jobs. Now we have high unemployment for nursing and professional health positions.
The American people and especially progressive labor and justice love immigrants and work to protect their rights as workers just as all workers. Immigrants already in the US must see that flooding the labor market now while unemployment is at 36% and hirer for Hispanic workers already in the US-----that this kind of immigration policy means to hurt all workers.
So, when we hear the mantra of STEM in K-12 and we see a steady stream of health care and tech industry layoffs and grads with no jobs-----we are not getting accurate data.
This article does a good job showing that media is deliberately misinforming the American people and research data is being skewed by corporate universities and a corporate run government.
Columnist Diane Ravitch: Why Are So Many STEM Graduates Unemployed?
By Wired Academic on July 24, 2012
By Diane Ravitch, Guest Columnist
How many times have we heard the President, the Secretary of Education, and leaders of corporate America tell us that we must produce more scientists? That there are thousands of jobs unfilled because we don’t have qualified college graduates to fill them? That our future depends on pumping billions into STEM education?
I always believe them. Science, engineering, technology and mathematics are fields critical for the future.
But why then, according to an article in the Washington Post, are well-educated scientists unable to find jobs?
Three years ago, USA Today reported high unemployment among scientists and engineers.
Some experts in science say there is no shortage of scientists, but there is a shortage of good jobs for scientists.
Some say that the pool of qualified graduates in science and engineering is “several times larger” than the pool of jobs available for them. And here is a shocker: The quality of STEM education has NOT declined:
Despite this nearly universal support for upgrading science and math education, our review of the data leads us to conclude that, while the educational pipeline would benefit from improvements, it is not as dysfunctional as believed. Today’s American high school students actually test as well or better than students two decades ago. Further, today’s students take more science and math classes, and a large number of students with strong science and math backgrounds graduate from U.S. high schools and start college in S&E fields of study.
Why don’t our leaders tell us the truth? Why don’t they tell us that many of our highly trained young people will not find good jobs in research labs or universities or anywhere else?
I have said before on this blog that the economy is changing in ways that no one understands, least of all me.
Over the past century, whenever reformers told the schools to prepare students for this career or that vocation, the policymakers and school leaders were woefully inadequate at predicting which jobs would be available ten years later. When the automobile was first invented, there were still plenty of students taking courses to prepare them to be blacksmiths. The same story could be repeated over the years. We are not good at prognosticating.
My own predilection is to believe that all young people should get a full and rounded general education, which will teach them to think and evaluate new information. I prefer an education that includes the usual range of disciplines, not because of tradition but because each of them is valuable for our lives.
We don’t know what the future will bring, but we all need to learn the skills of reading, writing, and mathematics. We don’t know what jobs will be available in ten or twenty years, but we all need to study history, so that we possess knowledge of our society and others; we need an understanding of science so we know how the world works; we need to be involved in the arts, because it is an expression of the human spirit and enables us to think deeply about ourselves and our world. I could make the same claims for other disciplines. The claim must be based on enduring needs, not the needs of the job market, because the only certainty is that the job market will be different in the future.
Ravitch is a historian of education and Research Professor of Education at New York University. This post first appeared on DianeRavitch.net
________________________________________
This is a long article but a good one. You see Mikulski's office is targeted as Johns Hopkins is the worst for exploiting foreign green card professionals. I have a friend here in Baltimore working at Hopkins from India left with the mind-numbing tasks of repetitive lab tests garnering only a grad assistant wage and after years in this position------no hope in site for citizenship or a better job. Hopkins is of course now a corporation so is using this Indian immigrant purely to maximize profit. Meanwhile------unemployment across America and in Maryland is 36% and as you see US STEM grads are the largest group.
Remember, this immigration reform was never about giving justice to Hispanic workers already in the US.....neo-liberals are trying to create a third world system of deeply impoverished professional workers-----even doctors, lawyers, and Indian Chiefs are impoverished in the third world. There is more to these policies. When heading for the third world status those in power always surround themselves with administrative professional that are not citizens----they have no rights as US citizens and are kept in an indentured state with fear of deportation to maintain loyalty as conditions worsen in the US. This is why you always see an exodus of immigrant workers fleeing a collapsing dictatorship.
AUTOCRATIC SOCIETIES NEED LOTS OF PEOPLE WORKING KEY JOBS HAVING NO RIGHTS AS CITIZENS.
Meanwhile, the Hispanic workers fighting for REAL immigration reform are left with no hope for the pathway to citizenship or enforcement of labor laws to their benefit-----because abuse of labor is the goal of neo-liberals and republicans.
AS LONG AS WE HAVE NEO-LIBERALS AND NOT PROGRESSIVE LABOR AND JUSTICE RUNNING IN DEMOCRATIC PRIMARIES! STOP ALLOWING A NEO-LIBERAL DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL PARTY CHOOSE YOUR CANDIDATES----LET'S REBUILD THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE!
'But many leading STEM-labor-force experts agree that the great majority of stem workers entering the country contribute less to innovative breakthroughs or job growth for Americans than to the bottom lines of the companies and universities that hire them'.
12:00 AM - May 1, 2013
It doesn’t add up A science writer questions the conventional wisdom of US-born STEM workers
By Beryl Lieff Benderly Columbia Journalism Review
Homegrown President Obama, seen here visiting at technical college in North Carolina, supports bringing more foreign STEM workers to the US, despite high unemployment among US workers. (Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty Images)
In late February, Christine Miller and Sona Shah went to the Capitol Hill office of Miller’s senator, Barbara Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat, to talk about immigration reform and the job market for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workers. Miller, an American-born MIT grad with a PhD in biochemistry, had 20 years of research experience when Johns Hopkins University laid her off in 2009 because of funding cuts. Shah, an Indian-born US citizen with degrees in physics and engineering, had been laid off earlier by a computer company that was simultaneously hiring foreign workers on temporary visas. Proposals to increase admission of foreign stem workers to the US, Miller and Shah told Erin Neill, a member of Mikulski’s staff, would worsen the already glutted stem labor market.
According to Miller, Neill told them this is not the argument “she normally encounters on this issue.” The conventional wisdom is that tech companies and universities can’t find enough homegrown scientists to hire, so they need to import them from China and India. Neill suggested to Miller and Shah that “we would have more impact if we represented a large, organized group.”
Miller and Shah are, in fact, part of a large group. Figures from the National Institutes of Health, the National Academies, the National Science Foundation, and other sources indicate that hundreds of thousands of STEM workers in the US are unemployed or underemployed. But they are not organized, and their story is being largely ignored in the debate over immigration reform.
The two main STEM-related proposals currently part of that debate in Congress would increase the number of temporary high-skill worker visas (also called guestworker visas), and give green cards to every foreign graduate of an American college with a master’s or PhD in a STEM field. Media coverage of these proposals has generally hewed, uncritically, to the unfounded notion that America isn’t producing enough native talent in the science and engineering fields to satisfy the demands of businesses and universities—and that foreign-born workers tend to be more entrepreneurial and innovative than their American-born counterparts. Allowing more stem immigrants, the story goes, is key to adding jobs to the beleaguered US economy.
It is a narrative that has been skillfully packaged and promoted by well-funded advocacy groups as essential to the national interest, but in reality it reflects the economic interests of tech companies and universities.
High-tech titans like Bill Gates, Steve Case, and Mark Zuckerberg are repeatedly quoted proclaiming a dearth of talent that imperils the nation’s future. Politicians, advocates, and articles and op-eds published by media outlets—including The New York Times, Forbes, CNN, Slate, and others—invoke such foreign-born entrepreneurs as Google’s Sergey Brin or Yahoo’s Jerry Yang, as if arrival from abroad (Brin and Yang came to the US as children) explains the success of the companies they founded . . . with partners who are US natives. Journalists endorse studies that trumpet the job-creating skills of these entrepreneurs from abroad, while ignoring the weaknesses that other scholars find in the research.
Meanwhile, The National Science Board’s biennial book, Science and Engineering Indicators, consistently finds that the US produces several times the number of STEM graduates than can get jobs in their fields. Recent reports from the National Institutes of Health, the National Academies, and the American Chemical Society warn that overproduction of STEM PhDs is damaging America’s ability to recruit native-born talent, and advise universities to limit the number of doctorates they produce, especially in the severely glutted life sciences. In June 2012, for instance, the American Chemical Society’s annual survey found record unemployment among its members, with only 38 percent of new PhDs, 50 percent of new master’s graduates, and 33 percent of new bachelor’s graduates in fulltime jobs. Overall, STEM unemployment in the US is more than twice its pre-recession level, according to congressional testimony by Ron Hira, a science-labor-force expert at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
And yet, a bill introduced in Congress last year that would have heeded the NIH recommendation by limiting visas for biomedical scientists was attacked in a Forbes article that suggested it could delay progress on the search for a cure for cancer by keeping out able researchers.
* * * Foreign-born scientists and engineers have, of course, contributed significantly to American society as innovators and entrepreneurs—and the nation’s immigration policy certainly needs repair. But many leading STEM-labor-force experts agree that the great majority of stem workers entering the country contribute less to innovative breakthroughs or job growth for Americans than to the bottom lines of the companies and universities that hire them.
Temporary visas allow employers to pay skilled workers below-market wages, and these visas are valid only for specific jobs. Workers are unable to take another job, making them akin to indentured servants. Universities also use temporary visas to recruit international graduate students and postdoctoral scientists, mainly from China, to do the gruntwork for professors’ grants. “When the companies say they can’t hire anyone, they mean that they can’t hire anyone at the wage they want to pay,” said Jennifer Hunt, a Rutgers University labor economist, at last year’s Mortimer Caplin Conference on the World Economy.
Research by Hira, Norman Matloff of the University of California-Davis, Richard Freeman of Harvard, and numerous others has shown how temporary visas have allowed employers to flood STEM labor markets and hold down the cost of tech workers and scientists doing grant-supported university research. Wages in the IT industry rose rapidly throughout the 1990s, but have been essentially flat or declining in the past decade, which coincides with the rising number of guestworkers on temporary visas.
In his new book, Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs, Peter Cappelli, a human-resources specialist at the Wharton School, concludes that companies’ reported hiring difficulties don’t arise from a shortage of qualified workers, but from rigid recruitment practices that use narrow categories and definitions and don’t take advantage of the applicants’ full range of abilities. Companies so routinely evade protections in the visa system designed to prevent displacement of American citizens that immigration lawyers have produced videos about how it is done. For instance, tech companies that import temporary workers, mainly recent graduates from India, commonly discard more expensive, experienced employees in their late 30s or early 40s, often forcing them, as Ron Hira and other labor-force researchers note, to train their replacements as they exit. Age discrimination, Hira says, is “an open secret” in the tech world.
The temporary-visa system also facilitates the offshoring of STEM work, particularly in the IT field, to low-wage countries. Outsourcing companies use the temporary visas to bring workers to the US to learn the jobs that the client company is planning to move to temp workers’ home country. The 10 firms with the largest number of H-1B visas, the most common visa for high-skill workers, are all in the business of shipping work overseas, and former Indian commerce minister Kamil Nath famously labeled the H-1B “the outsourcing visa.”
These practices have helped to reduce incomes and career prospects in STEM fields drastically enough to produce what UC Davis’s Norman Matloff calls “an internal brain drain” of talented Americans to other, more promising career opportunities such as Wall Street, healthcare, or patent law.
The proposal before Congress to automatically grant green cards to all STEM students with graduate degrees—regardless of field, origin, or quality—would exacerbate the problem of already overcrowded markets, according to new research by Hal Salzman of Rutgers University, Daniel Keuhn of American University, and B. Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown University. It also would benefit universities facing tough financial times by dramatically increasing the allure of American graduate schools, and thus the income potential to universities. And, as Republican Senator Chuck Grassley said at a 2011 hearing, it would “further erode the opportunities of American students. Universities would in essence become visa mills.”
Academic departments generally determine how many graduate students they admit, or postdocs they hire, based on the teaching and research workforce they need, not on the career opportunities awaiting young scientists. Unlike companies, universities have access to unlimited temporary-worker visas. This allows universities to hire skilled lab workers and pay them very low, “trainee” wages. Postdocs are an especially good deal for professors running labs because they don’t require tuition, which must be paid out of the professors’ grants, notes Paula Stephan, a labor economist at Georgia State University, in her book How Economics Shapes Science.
* * * Immigrants constitute the nation’s “only shot at getting a growing economy,” because they “start more jobs than natives,” declared New York Times columnist David Brooks on Meet the Press in February. “Every additional 100 foreign-born workers in science and technology fields is associated with 262 additional jobs for US natives,” he had written in the Times, adding that “a quarter of new high-tech companies with more than $1 million in sales were also founded by the foreign-born.”
These claims, cited by Brooks and many others, arise from a body of research that has been the subject of scholarly dispute—though you’d never know it from the media coverage of this issue. The overwhelming majority of coverage presents the conclusions reached in studies like the one conducted by Duke University’s Vivek Wadhwa, who publishes widely in popular media and speaks frequently on immigration issues. About a quarter of the 2,054 engineering and technology companies that responded to Wadhwa’s telephone survey said they had a “key founder”—defined as a chief technology officer or a CEO—who was foreign-born. Extrapolating from that figure, the study credits immigrant-founded companies with employing 450,000 people nationally in 2005.
But a nationwide survey by political scientist David Hart and economist Zoltan Acs of George Mason University reached a different conclusion. In a 2011 piece in Economic Development Quarterly, Hart and Acs note that between 40 and 75 percent of new jobs are created by no more than 10 percent of new businesses—the so-called high-impact firms that have rapidly expanding sales and employment. In their survey of high-impact technology firms, only 16 percent had at least one foreign-born founder, and immigrants constituted about 13 percent of total founders—a figure close to the immigrant share of the general population. But the more fundamental problem with Wadhwa’s study, Hart and Acs suggest, is that it does not report the total number of founders at a given company, making conclusions about immigrants’ overall contribution impossible to quantify.
Evaluating the issues of statistics and sample selection that divide the academic researchers is beyond the purview of most general media, but informing readers that reputable researchers reached different conclusions is not. Though real, the immigrant role in high-tech entrepreneurship could be considerably less dramatic than many writers claim. Research on Silicon Valley entrepreneurs in 1999 by AnnaLee Saxenian, for example, found that 36 percent of high-tech companies owned by Chinese immigrants were doing nothing more groundbreaking than putting together computers for sale from components.
* * * As Erin Neill, of Senator Mikulski’s staff, pointed out, no one in the immigration debate speaks effectively for US-born STEM workers. The IT world’s libertarian ethos, the relative poverty among young scientists and their unemployed and underemployed peers, and a fear of antagonizing present or potential employers all hamper efforts to organize these workers. National scientific associations and advocacy groups sponsored by industry and universities, meanwhile, represent the interests of those who benefit from the system—tenured faculty, university administrators, and company executives, including those at companies whose donations support scholarly conferences and other association activities. These organizations and their lobbyists frame their policy arguments with feel-good abstractions about the inherent value of science and research and innovation, suggesting they are a panacea for America’s economic ills.
Which brings us to the story of Xianmin Shane Zhang, a software engineer in Minnesota. According to his LinkedIn page, Zhang earned his BS in engineering in his native China, one MS in physics at Southern Illinois University, and another in computer science at the University of Houston. His profile next lists a series of IT jobs at US companies. In 2005, 43-year-old Zhang was one of a group of workers over 40 who sued their former employer, Best Buy, for age discrimination, when the company laid them off after outsourcing their jobs. The suit ended in an undisclosed settlement.
After being laid off by Best Buy, Zhang eventually fulfilled the rosy forecast of those advocating increased STEM-worker immigration by becoming an entrepreneur, though hardly following the innovation and jobs-for-Americans script. His Z&Z Information Services in St. Paul helps US companies outsource their IT and programming needs to China. “Giving green cards to foreign students can lead to offshoring as well,” notes Norman Matloff, who uncovered this tale. That’s because young scientists and engineers from abroad get older, and wind up facing the same age discrimination and glutted market as their native-born colleagues. Why isn’t that reported, too?
______________________________________
Below you see Pritzker-----Hyatt heiress as Obama's Commerce Secretary. She is of course the face of impoverishment and workplace abuse of many immigrant workers coming through her hotel chain.
This Senate Immigration bill was never about a pathway to citizenship or even Hispanic immigrants....it was always about a market-based immigration policy that seeks only to lower US global corporation's labor costs using immigrant labor mostly from Asian nations and mostly at the high-skilled level. So, the millions of Hispanic immigrants who are always made the face of these immigration reforms are being relegated to the same underserved and underfunded schools as US children having little opportunity to access the higher education paths needed to land anything other than poverty jobs.
The foreign graduates that are allowed to stay are trapped in an indentured state with low wages never truly advancing from the most menial of jobs in the high-skilled areas. At the article above made clear------there are fewer than 20% of foreign grads that go on to building viable corporations that contribute to the US economy.
The other side of this is that these foreign grads now allowed to work in US corporations are hired to work on overseas expansions of global corporations giving little value to the US economy------and in fact contributing to the stagnation of the economy by displacing thousands of US citizens graduating with STEM degrees.
OBAMA AND NEO-LIBERALS ARE DELIBERATELY CREATING THE CONDITIONS TO KEEP UNEMPLOYMENT HIGH FOR US WORKERS AND GRADUATES LEFT WITH TONS OF STUDENT LOAN DEBT AND WITH A WALL STREET STUDENT LOAN COLLECTION PROCESS-----STUDENTS ARE NOT ONLY UNEMPLOYED----THEY ARE PREY TO WALL STREET FEES, FINES, AND HARASSMENT.
Obama to ease rules for foreign high-skilled workers
Alan Gomez, USA TODAY 5:48 p.m. EDT May 6, 2014(Photo: Mandel Ngan, AFP/Getty Images)
The Obama administration wants to let nearly 100,000 spouses of foreigners working in high-tech fields to work here as well in a move critics say is harmful to nearly 10 million jobless Americans.
The administration also hopes to ease the process for foreign professors and researchers who are trying to extend their stays in America.
The proposed changes, announced Tuesday by Department of Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, come as high-tech companies and university officials continue pressing Congress and the Obama administration to ease restrictions that they say make it difficult to import highly skilled foreign workers.
Groups like FWD.us, created by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and other tech organizations are lobbying Congress for expanded visa programs they use to hire foreign workers.
Mayorkas said the proposed rule changes keep America competitive as more countries offer incentives to attract the workers.
"The proposed rules announced today provide important support to U.S. businesses while also supporting economic growth here in the U.S.," he said. "This enhances our country's competitiveness to attract skilled workers from other countries."
But critics accuse the pro-visa groups of wanting cheap labor, and say Obama should be helping U.S. citizens get jobs rather than making it easier for foreigners to expand their employment opportunities in the United States.
"The U.S. already provides businesses with 700,000 temporary guest workers every year to compete against unemployed Americans, in addition to the annual flow of 1 million permanent legal immigrants," said Stephen Miller, a spokesman for Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., who has opposed efforts to import more foreign workers.
"The administration's unilateral decision to increase that number will hurt already-struggling American workers."
The proposed changes will be published in the Federal Register this week and then be open to 60 days of public comment before the administration can implement them.
The first proposed change affects holders of H-1B visas, which are granted to foreigners trained in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Current rules allow their spouses to move to the U.S. with them, but restricts them from working.
The new rule would allow the spouses of those H-1B holders who are in the process of applying for a green card to find work.
Mayorkas estimated that 97,000 people could benefit from that rule change in the first year, and 30,000 each year after.
The second proposed change focuses on a series of visa holders who come from Chile, Singapore, Australia and the Northern Mariana Islands. Current rules allow workers from those countries who have at least a bachelor's degree in a specialized field to extend their stay, but they must produce certain evidence of the success they've had. The proposed change would extend the time those workers could stay in the U.S. and allow them to use new forms of evidence to win their stay in the U.S.
Microsoft vice president of government affairs Fred Humphries said they remain committed to getting a broader immigration fix through Congress. But in the mean time, he said the two "thoughtful, commonsense changes" would help them recruit abroad.
"These changes will improve American competitiveness for the best talent in the world," Humphries said.
Critics say the changes are not being implemented for economic reasons.
"The administration's political motivation in announcing this change now is to throw a bone to the tech firms to keep them in the (comprehensive immigration reform) camp and not try to cut a separate deal with Republicans," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for lower levels of immigration.
Mayorkas and Pritzker said the changes will help U.S. business and universities retain the workers they need, but they stressed that Congress needs to find a broader immigration solution to address all the deficiencies in the system.
"As the president said in his State of the Union Address, we are committed to achieving a lasting solution," Pritzker said. "Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle can make this happen."
WE LOVE IMMIGRANTS BUT NOT POLICY THAT SEEKS TO LEAVE ALL WORKERS EXPLOITED AND IMPOVERISHED.
Do you hear your labor unions shouting and fighting this?
As republicans pretend to fight this high-skilled immigration reform policy now fast-tracked by Obama remember again-----the immigration policy that allows high-skilled immigrants only is a republican policy so it is not the democratic party moving these bad policies forward----it is neo-liberals and republicans.
As we see below, NPR's favorite 'good billionaire' Bill Gates is now being exposed as really, really bad. When he isn't off pushing the Trans Pacific Trade Pact that seeks to end public health and health care subsidy so his PHARMA can maximize profits----ending public education so his education tech industries and selling of computers for online lessons can maximize profits---and while at it let's garner a majority share of militarized food with the Monsanto/Blackwater corporate merger.
WHAT A GUY.
He just keeps on taking and killing democratic societies all for market share. Below you see he and his tech buddies are now building an immigration policy that kills not only US workers, but Hispanic workers already in the US and even the foreign grads indentured to jobs that exploit them.
Obama just used Executive privilege yet again to move immigration reform to only high-skilled immigrants and their spouses. So, he is single-handedly putting into place the structures for Trans Pacific Trade Pact while your neo-liberal incumbents are silent. Remember, TPP allows global corporations to bring people from developing nations to work in the US under the conditions of that third world nation....say India or China. This is especially true for low-wage immigrant workers but it affects high-skilled workers as well. The path to citizenship never comes for 99% as buying your citizenship is now the policy and the cost is prohibitive.
These are not democratic policies----they are neo-liberal and neo-con policies meant only to maximize profit at the expense of further impoverishing workers.
Remember as well each time the President uses Executive privilege.....we move away from having a legislative branch. Clinton started using this once rarely used executive practice, Bush increased the use, and now Obama is moving the most controversial polices through this practice. If your pol is not shouting loudly about how bad this is for US democracy no matter what party does it----they are not working for you and me.
THOSE HISPANICS WHO THINK NEO-LIBERALS ARE WORKING FOR THEM----THINK AGAIN. ALL MARYLAND POLS ARE NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS.
The foreign grads falling into these high-skill jobs become indentured into often the most menial of jobs.
__________________
STEM labor shortages?: Microsoft report distorts reality ...www.epi.org/publication/pm195-stem-labor-shortages...
__________________
We had a glut of nursing staff last decade as college students were told nursing would always be a strong field for hiring. Then, neo-liberals and neo-cons starting bringing immigrant labor over to the US to take those health care jobs. Now we have high unemployment for nursing and professional health positions.
The American people and especially progressive labor and justice love immigrants and work to protect their rights as workers just as all workers. Immigrants already in the US must see that flooding the labor market now while unemployment is at 36% and hirer for Hispanic workers already in the US-----that this kind of immigration policy means to hurt all workers.
So, when we hear the mantra of STEM in K-12 and we see a steady stream of health care and tech industry layoffs and grads with no jobs-----we are not getting accurate data.
This article does a good job showing that media is deliberately misinforming the American people and research data is being skewed by corporate universities and a corporate run government.
Columnist Diane Ravitch: Why Are So Many STEM Graduates Unemployed?
By Wired Academic on July 24, 2012
By Diane Ravitch, Guest Columnist
How many times have we heard the President, the Secretary of Education, and leaders of corporate America tell us that we must produce more scientists? That there are thousands of jobs unfilled because we don’t have qualified college graduates to fill them? That our future depends on pumping billions into STEM education?
I always believe them. Science, engineering, technology and mathematics are fields critical for the future.
But why then, according to an article in the Washington Post, are well-educated scientists unable to find jobs?
Three years ago, USA Today reported high unemployment among scientists and engineers.
Some experts in science say there is no shortage of scientists, but there is a shortage of good jobs for scientists.
Some say that the pool of qualified graduates in science and engineering is “several times larger” than the pool of jobs available for them. And here is a shocker: The quality of STEM education has NOT declined:
Despite this nearly universal support for upgrading science and math education, our review of the data leads us to conclude that, while the educational pipeline would benefit from improvements, it is not as dysfunctional as believed. Today’s American high school students actually test as well or better than students two decades ago. Further, today’s students take more science and math classes, and a large number of students with strong science and math backgrounds graduate from U.S. high schools and start college in S&E fields of study.
Why don’t our leaders tell us the truth? Why don’t they tell us that many of our highly trained young people will not find good jobs in research labs or universities or anywhere else?
I have said before on this blog that the economy is changing in ways that no one understands, least of all me.
Over the past century, whenever reformers told the schools to prepare students for this career or that vocation, the policymakers and school leaders were woefully inadequate at predicting which jobs would be available ten years later. When the automobile was first invented, there were still plenty of students taking courses to prepare them to be blacksmiths. The same story could be repeated over the years. We are not good at prognosticating.
My own predilection is to believe that all young people should get a full and rounded general education, which will teach them to think and evaluate new information. I prefer an education that includes the usual range of disciplines, not because of tradition but because each of them is valuable for our lives.
We don’t know what the future will bring, but we all need to learn the skills of reading, writing, and mathematics. We don’t know what jobs will be available in ten or twenty years, but we all need to study history, so that we possess knowledge of our society and others; we need an understanding of science so we know how the world works; we need to be involved in the arts, because it is an expression of the human spirit and enables us to think deeply about ourselves and our world. I could make the same claims for other disciplines. The claim must be based on enduring needs, not the needs of the job market, because the only certainty is that the job market will be different in the future.
Ravitch is a historian of education and Research Professor of Education at New York University. This post first appeared on DianeRavitch.net
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This is a long article but a good one. You see Mikulski's office is targeted as Johns Hopkins is the worst for exploiting foreign green card professionals. I have a friend here in Baltimore working at Hopkins from India left with the mind-numbing tasks of repetitive lab tests garnering only a grad assistant wage and after years in this position------no hope in site for citizenship or a better job. Hopkins is of course now a corporation so is using this Indian immigrant purely to maximize profit. Meanwhile------unemployment across America and in Maryland is 36% and as you see US STEM grads are the largest group.
Remember, this immigration reform was never about giving justice to Hispanic workers already in the US.....neo-liberals are trying to create a third world system of deeply impoverished professional workers-----even doctors, lawyers, and Indian Chiefs are impoverished in the third world. There is more to these policies. When heading for the third world status those in power always surround themselves with administrative professional that are not citizens----they have no rights as US citizens and are kept in an indentured state with fear of deportation to maintain loyalty as conditions worsen in the US. This is why you always see an exodus of immigrant workers fleeing a collapsing dictatorship.
AUTOCRATIC SOCIETIES NEED LOTS OF PEOPLE WORKING KEY JOBS HAVING NO RIGHTS AS CITIZENS.
Meanwhile, the Hispanic workers fighting for REAL immigration reform are left with no hope for the pathway to citizenship or enforcement of labor laws to their benefit-----because abuse of labor is the goal of neo-liberals and republicans.
AS LONG AS WE HAVE NEO-LIBERALS AND NOT PROGRESSIVE LABOR AND JUSTICE RUNNING IN DEMOCRATIC PRIMARIES! STOP ALLOWING A NEO-LIBERAL DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL PARTY CHOOSE YOUR CANDIDATES----LET'S REBUILD THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE!
'But many leading STEM-labor-force experts agree that the great majority of stem workers entering the country contribute less to innovative breakthroughs or job growth for Americans than to the bottom lines of the companies and universities that hire them'.
12:00 AM - May 1, 2013
It doesn’t add up A science writer questions the conventional wisdom of US-born STEM workers
By Beryl Lieff Benderly Columbia Journalism Review
Homegrown President Obama, seen here visiting at technical college in North Carolina, supports bringing more foreign STEM workers to the US, despite high unemployment among US workers. (Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty Images)
In late February, Christine Miller and Sona Shah went to the Capitol Hill office of Miller’s senator, Barbara Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat, to talk about immigration reform and the job market for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workers. Miller, an American-born MIT grad with a PhD in biochemistry, had 20 years of research experience when Johns Hopkins University laid her off in 2009 because of funding cuts. Shah, an Indian-born US citizen with degrees in physics and engineering, had been laid off earlier by a computer company that was simultaneously hiring foreign workers on temporary visas. Proposals to increase admission of foreign stem workers to the US, Miller and Shah told Erin Neill, a member of Mikulski’s staff, would worsen the already glutted stem labor market.
According to Miller, Neill told them this is not the argument “she normally encounters on this issue.” The conventional wisdom is that tech companies and universities can’t find enough homegrown scientists to hire, so they need to import them from China and India. Neill suggested to Miller and Shah that “we would have more impact if we represented a large, organized group.”
Miller and Shah are, in fact, part of a large group. Figures from the National Institutes of Health, the National Academies, the National Science Foundation, and other sources indicate that hundreds of thousands of STEM workers in the US are unemployed or underemployed. But they are not organized, and their story is being largely ignored in the debate over immigration reform.
The two main STEM-related proposals currently part of that debate in Congress would increase the number of temporary high-skill worker visas (also called guestworker visas), and give green cards to every foreign graduate of an American college with a master’s or PhD in a STEM field. Media coverage of these proposals has generally hewed, uncritically, to the unfounded notion that America isn’t producing enough native talent in the science and engineering fields to satisfy the demands of businesses and universities—and that foreign-born workers tend to be more entrepreneurial and innovative than their American-born counterparts. Allowing more stem immigrants, the story goes, is key to adding jobs to the beleaguered US economy.
It is a narrative that has been skillfully packaged and promoted by well-funded advocacy groups as essential to the national interest, but in reality it reflects the economic interests of tech companies and universities.
High-tech titans like Bill Gates, Steve Case, and Mark Zuckerberg are repeatedly quoted proclaiming a dearth of talent that imperils the nation’s future. Politicians, advocates, and articles and op-eds published by media outlets—including The New York Times, Forbes, CNN, Slate, and others—invoke such foreign-born entrepreneurs as Google’s Sergey Brin or Yahoo’s Jerry Yang, as if arrival from abroad (Brin and Yang came to the US as children) explains the success of the companies they founded . . . with partners who are US natives. Journalists endorse studies that trumpet the job-creating skills of these entrepreneurs from abroad, while ignoring the weaknesses that other scholars find in the research.
Meanwhile, The National Science Board’s biennial book, Science and Engineering Indicators, consistently finds that the US produces several times the number of STEM graduates than can get jobs in their fields. Recent reports from the National Institutes of Health, the National Academies, and the American Chemical Society warn that overproduction of STEM PhDs is damaging America’s ability to recruit native-born talent, and advise universities to limit the number of doctorates they produce, especially in the severely glutted life sciences. In June 2012, for instance, the American Chemical Society’s annual survey found record unemployment among its members, with only 38 percent of new PhDs, 50 percent of new master’s graduates, and 33 percent of new bachelor’s graduates in fulltime jobs. Overall, STEM unemployment in the US is more than twice its pre-recession level, according to congressional testimony by Ron Hira, a science-labor-force expert at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
And yet, a bill introduced in Congress last year that would have heeded the NIH recommendation by limiting visas for biomedical scientists was attacked in a Forbes article that suggested it could delay progress on the search for a cure for cancer by keeping out able researchers.
* * * Foreign-born scientists and engineers have, of course, contributed significantly to American society as innovators and entrepreneurs—and the nation’s immigration policy certainly needs repair. But many leading STEM-labor-force experts agree that the great majority of stem workers entering the country contribute less to innovative breakthroughs or job growth for Americans than to the bottom lines of the companies and universities that hire them.
Temporary visas allow employers to pay skilled workers below-market wages, and these visas are valid only for specific jobs. Workers are unable to take another job, making them akin to indentured servants. Universities also use temporary visas to recruit international graduate students and postdoctoral scientists, mainly from China, to do the gruntwork for professors’ grants. “When the companies say they can’t hire anyone, they mean that they can’t hire anyone at the wage they want to pay,” said Jennifer Hunt, a Rutgers University labor economist, at last year’s Mortimer Caplin Conference on the World Economy.
Research by Hira, Norman Matloff of the University of California-Davis, Richard Freeman of Harvard, and numerous others has shown how temporary visas have allowed employers to flood STEM labor markets and hold down the cost of tech workers and scientists doing grant-supported university research. Wages in the IT industry rose rapidly throughout the 1990s, but have been essentially flat or declining in the past decade, which coincides with the rising number of guestworkers on temporary visas.
In his new book, Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs, Peter Cappelli, a human-resources specialist at the Wharton School, concludes that companies’ reported hiring difficulties don’t arise from a shortage of qualified workers, but from rigid recruitment practices that use narrow categories and definitions and don’t take advantage of the applicants’ full range of abilities. Companies so routinely evade protections in the visa system designed to prevent displacement of American citizens that immigration lawyers have produced videos about how it is done. For instance, tech companies that import temporary workers, mainly recent graduates from India, commonly discard more expensive, experienced employees in their late 30s or early 40s, often forcing them, as Ron Hira and other labor-force researchers note, to train their replacements as they exit. Age discrimination, Hira says, is “an open secret” in the tech world.
The temporary-visa system also facilitates the offshoring of STEM work, particularly in the IT field, to low-wage countries. Outsourcing companies use the temporary visas to bring workers to the US to learn the jobs that the client company is planning to move to temp workers’ home country. The 10 firms with the largest number of H-1B visas, the most common visa for high-skill workers, are all in the business of shipping work overseas, and former Indian commerce minister Kamil Nath famously labeled the H-1B “the outsourcing visa.”
These practices have helped to reduce incomes and career prospects in STEM fields drastically enough to produce what UC Davis’s Norman Matloff calls “an internal brain drain” of talented Americans to other, more promising career opportunities such as Wall Street, healthcare, or patent law.
The proposal before Congress to automatically grant green cards to all STEM students with graduate degrees—regardless of field, origin, or quality—would exacerbate the problem of already overcrowded markets, according to new research by Hal Salzman of Rutgers University, Daniel Keuhn of American University, and B. Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown University. It also would benefit universities facing tough financial times by dramatically increasing the allure of American graduate schools, and thus the income potential to universities. And, as Republican Senator Chuck Grassley said at a 2011 hearing, it would “further erode the opportunities of American students. Universities would in essence become visa mills.”
Academic departments generally determine how many graduate students they admit, or postdocs they hire, based on the teaching and research workforce they need, not on the career opportunities awaiting young scientists. Unlike companies, universities have access to unlimited temporary-worker visas. This allows universities to hire skilled lab workers and pay them very low, “trainee” wages. Postdocs are an especially good deal for professors running labs because they don’t require tuition, which must be paid out of the professors’ grants, notes Paula Stephan, a labor economist at Georgia State University, in her book How Economics Shapes Science.
* * * Immigrants constitute the nation’s “only shot at getting a growing economy,” because they “start more jobs than natives,” declared New York Times columnist David Brooks on Meet the Press in February. “Every additional 100 foreign-born workers in science and technology fields is associated with 262 additional jobs for US natives,” he had written in the Times, adding that “a quarter of new high-tech companies with more than $1 million in sales were also founded by the foreign-born.”
These claims, cited by Brooks and many others, arise from a body of research that has been the subject of scholarly dispute—though you’d never know it from the media coverage of this issue. The overwhelming majority of coverage presents the conclusions reached in studies like the one conducted by Duke University’s Vivek Wadhwa, who publishes widely in popular media and speaks frequently on immigration issues. About a quarter of the 2,054 engineering and technology companies that responded to Wadhwa’s telephone survey said they had a “key founder”—defined as a chief technology officer or a CEO—who was foreign-born. Extrapolating from that figure, the study credits immigrant-founded companies with employing 450,000 people nationally in 2005.
But a nationwide survey by political scientist David Hart and economist Zoltan Acs of George Mason University reached a different conclusion. In a 2011 piece in Economic Development Quarterly, Hart and Acs note that between 40 and 75 percent of new jobs are created by no more than 10 percent of new businesses—the so-called high-impact firms that have rapidly expanding sales and employment. In their survey of high-impact technology firms, only 16 percent had at least one foreign-born founder, and immigrants constituted about 13 percent of total founders—a figure close to the immigrant share of the general population. But the more fundamental problem with Wadhwa’s study, Hart and Acs suggest, is that it does not report the total number of founders at a given company, making conclusions about immigrants’ overall contribution impossible to quantify.
Evaluating the issues of statistics and sample selection that divide the academic researchers is beyond the purview of most general media, but informing readers that reputable researchers reached different conclusions is not. Though real, the immigrant role in high-tech entrepreneurship could be considerably less dramatic than many writers claim. Research on Silicon Valley entrepreneurs in 1999 by AnnaLee Saxenian, for example, found that 36 percent of high-tech companies owned by Chinese immigrants were doing nothing more groundbreaking than putting together computers for sale from components.
* * * As Erin Neill, of Senator Mikulski’s staff, pointed out, no one in the immigration debate speaks effectively for US-born STEM workers. The IT world’s libertarian ethos, the relative poverty among young scientists and their unemployed and underemployed peers, and a fear of antagonizing present or potential employers all hamper efforts to organize these workers. National scientific associations and advocacy groups sponsored by industry and universities, meanwhile, represent the interests of those who benefit from the system—tenured faculty, university administrators, and company executives, including those at companies whose donations support scholarly conferences and other association activities. These organizations and their lobbyists frame their policy arguments with feel-good abstractions about the inherent value of science and research and innovation, suggesting they are a panacea for America’s economic ills.
Which brings us to the story of Xianmin Shane Zhang, a software engineer in Minnesota. According to his LinkedIn page, Zhang earned his BS in engineering in his native China, one MS in physics at Southern Illinois University, and another in computer science at the University of Houston. His profile next lists a series of IT jobs at US companies. In 2005, 43-year-old Zhang was one of a group of workers over 40 who sued their former employer, Best Buy, for age discrimination, when the company laid them off after outsourcing their jobs. The suit ended in an undisclosed settlement.
After being laid off by Best Buy, Zhang eventually fulfilled the rosy forecast of those advocating increased STEM-worker immigration by becoming an entrepreneur, though hardly following the innovation and jobs-for-Americans script. His Z&Z Information Services in St. Paul helps US companies outsource their IT and programming needs to China. “Giving green cards to foreign students can lead to offshoring as well,” notes Norman Matloff, who uncovered this tale. That’s because young scientists and engineers from abroad get older, and wind up facing the same age discrimination and glutted market as their native-born colleagues. Why isn’t that reported, too?
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Below you see Pritzker-----Hyatt heiress as Obama's Commerce Secretary. She is of course the face of impoverishment and workplace abuse of many immigrant workers coming through her hotel chain.
This Senate Immigration bill was never about a pathway to citizenship or even Hispanic immigrants....it was always about a market-based immigration policy that seeks only to lower US global corporation's labor costs using immigrant labor mostly from Asian nations and mostly at the high-skilled level. So, the millions of Hispanic immigrants who are always made the face of these immigration reforms are being relegated to the same underserved and underfunded schools as US children having little opportunity to access the higher education paths needed to land anything other than poverty jobs.
The foreign graduates that are allowed to stay are trapped in an indentured state with low wages never truly advancing from the most menial of jobs in the high-skilled areas. At the article above made clear------there are fewer than 20% of foreign grads that go on to building viable corporations that contribute to the US economy.
The other side of this is that these foreign grads now allowed to work in US corporations are hired to work on overseas expansions of global corporations giving little value to the US economy------and in fact contributing to the stagnation of the economy by displacing thousands of US citizens graduating with STEM degrees.
OBAMA AND NEO-LIBERALS ARE DELIBERATELY CREATING THE CONDITIONS TO KEEP UNEMPLOYMENT HIGH FOR US WORKERS AND GRADUATES LEFT WITH TONS OF STUDENT LOAN DEBT AND WITH A WALL STREET STUDENT LOAN COLLECTION PROCESS-----STUDENTS ARE NOT ONLY UNEMPLOYED----THEY ARE PREY TO WALL STREET FEES, FINES, AND HARASSMENT.
Obama to ease rules for foreign high-skilled workers
Alan Gomez, USA TODAY 5:48 p.m. EDT May 6, 2014(Photo: Mandel Ngan, AFP/Getty Images)
The Obama administration wants to let nearly 100,000 spouses of foreigners working in high-tech fields to work here as well in a move critics say is harmful to nearly 10 million jobless Americans.
The administration also hopes to ease the process for foreign professors and researchers who are trying to extend their stays in America.
The proposed changes, announced Tuesday by Department of Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, come as high-tech companies and university officials continue pressing Congress and the Obama administration to ease restrictions that they say make it difficult to import highly skilled foreign workers.
Groups like FWD.us, created by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and other tech organizations are lobbying Congress for expanded visa programs they use to hire foreign workers.
Mayorkas said the proposed rule changes keep America competitive as more countries offer incentives to attract the workers.
"The proposed rules announced today provide important support to U.S. businesses while also supporting economic growth here in the U.S.," he said. "This enhances our country's competitiveness to attract skilled workers from other countries."
But critics accuse the pro-visa groups of wanting cheap labor, and say Obama should be helping U.S. citizens get jobs rather than making it easier for foreigners to expand their employment opportunities in the United States.
"The U.S. already provides businesses with 700,000 temporary guest workers every year to compete against unemployed Americans, in addition to the annual flow of 1 million permanent legal immigrants," said Stephen Miller, a spokesman for Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., who has opposed efforts to import more foreign workers.
"The administration's unilateral decision to increase that number will hurt already-struggling American workers."
The proposed changes will be published in the Federal Register this week and then be open to 60 days of public comment before the administration can implement them.
The first proposed change affects holders of H-1B visas, which are granted to foreigners trained in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Current rules allow their spouses to move to the U.S. with them, but restricts them from working.
The new rule would allow the spouses of those H-1B holders who are in the process of applying for a green card to find work.
Mayorkas estimated that 97,000 people could benefit from that rule change in the first year, and 30,000 each year after.
The second proposed change focuses on a series of visa holders who come from Chile, Singapore, Australia and the Northern Mariana Islands. Current rules allow workers from those countries who have at least a bachelor's degree in a specialized field to extend their stay, but they must produce certain evidence of the success they've had. The proposed change would extend the time those workers could stay in the U.S. and allow them to use new forms of evidence to win their stay in the U.S.
Microsoft vice president of government affairs Fred Humphries said they remain committed to getting a broader immigration fix through Congress. But in the mean time, he said the two "thoughtful, commonsense changes" would help them recruit abroad.
"These changes will improve American competitiveness for the best talent in the world," Humphries said.
Critics say the changes are not being implemented for economic reasons.
"The administration's political motivation in announcing this change now is to throw a bone to the tech firms to keep them in the (comprehensive immigration reform) camp and not try to cut a separate deal with Republicans," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for lower levels of immigration.
Mayorkas and Pritzker said the changes will help U.S. business and universities retain the workers they need, but they stressed that Congress needs to find a broader immigration solution to address all the deficiencies in the system.
"As the president said in his State of the Union Address, we are committed to achieving a lasting solution," Pritzker said. "Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle can make this happen."
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