Sold Out: How High-Tech Billionaires & Bipartisan Beltway Crapweasels Are Screwing America's Best & Brightest Workers

Malkin, Michelle; Miano, John

ISBN 10: 1442390786 ISBN 13: 9781442390782

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio/Mercury Ink, 2015

Synopsis

The #1 New York Times bestselling author and firebrand syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin sets her sights on the corrupt businessmen, politicians, and lobbyists flooding our borders and selling out America’s best and brightest workers.

In Sold Out, Michelle Malkin and John Miano name names and expose the lies of those who pretend to champion the middle class, while aiding and abetting massive layoffs of highly skilled American workers in favor of cheap foreign labor. Malkin and Miano will explode some of the most commonly told myths spread in the media like these:

Lie #1: America is suffering from an apocalyptic “shortage” of science, technology, engineering, and math workers.

Lie #2: US companies cannot function without an unlimited injection of the “highly skilled” and “highly educated” foreign workers, who offer capital and energy that American workers can’t match.

Lie #3: America’s best and brightest talents are protected because employers are required to demonstrate that they’ve made every effort to hire American citizens before resorting to foreign labor.

For too long, open-borders tech billionaires and their political enablers have escaped tough public scrutiny of their means and motives. It’s time to trade the whitewash for solvent. American workers deserve better and the public deserves the unvarnished truth.

About this title

About the Author

Michelle Malkin is a mother, wife, blogger, conservative syndicated columnist, pundit, and #1 New York Times bestselling author. She started her newspaper journalism career at the Los Angeles Daily News in 1992, moved to The Seattle Times in 1995, and has been penning nationally syndicated newspaper columns for Creators Syndicate since 1999. She is the founder of Hot Air and Twitchy.com. She lives with her husband and two children in the Colorado Springs area.

John Miano is a leading expert on the effect of foreign labor on technology workers. He has testified before Congress three times on H-1B issues. John has written opinion pieces for publications including USA TODAY and The New York Times.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Sold Out 1

When Barry Met Jennifer

A Texas Mom’s Epic Reality Check for the White House

Jennifer Wedel describes herself as a “YouTuber” with “a sassy mouth.”

The thirty-two-year-old Fort Worth resident has a Texas-sized personality to match. She’s wild about her family, Schlotzky’s sandwiches, and fart jokes. Jennifer is also a self-described “big, dorky nerd” about technology and social media. Her YouTube channel, “Momma Wedel,” documents her family’s “crazy Texas life” with home videos titled “TICKLED TO DEATH,” “LITTLE GIRL PICKING HER BOOGERS,” “NINJA MOM SNOOPS,” “SILLY STRING PRANK,” and “WEIGHT LOSS FAIL.”1

On January 24, 2012, Jennifer departed from her usual wisecracking family fare. The vivacious online denizen had spotted a “little red telephone” symbol on her YouTube account dashboard.

“What the heck is that?” she thought.2

When she clicked on the icon, she was directed to a solicitation for citizen videos as part of a special event tied to President Obama’s State of the Union Address. YouTube’s parent company, Google, launched the public contest in cooperation with the White House—a high-visibility opportunity for the social media giant to promote its online video chat service, Google+ Hangout.

Jennifer read the invitation:

If you could hang out with President Obama, what would you ask him? Would your question be about jobs or unemployment? The threat of nuclear weapons? Immigration reform? Whatever your question is, submit it on YouTube for the opportunity to ask the President directly in a special interview over a Google+ Hangout from the White House.3

Momma Wedel marched to her dimly lit bedroom and recorded a twenty-second video. With minimal makeup and noticeable bags under her eyes, the busy wife and mom of two young daughters pointed a wobbly camera toward herself, licked her lips, and began:

“Mr. President, my husband was laid off three years ago. He has an electrical engineering degree and has yet to find a job,” she divulged, shaking her head.

“My question to you,” Jennifer addressed the commander-in-chief bluntly with a slight southern drawl, “is how are you preventing foreigners with H-1B visas from getting American citizens’ jobs?”

·  ·  ·

Foreign nationals who enter the U.S. legally are admitted as immigrants (aliens seeking permanent residence), nonimmigrants (such as students, diplomats, tourists, and workers), or refugees/asylees. The H-1B is a nonimmigrant guest worker visa created in 1990.4 The employer—not the foreigner or a family sponsor—makes the visa application to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services of the Department of Homeland Security. An initial H-1B visa is issued for three years. It can be renewed for another three years. If the H-1B worker’s employer sponsors him or her for legal permanent residency, the H-1B visa can be extended in one-year increments until a green card is granted.

H-1B visas are restricted to “specialty” occupations that normally require a college degree or equivalent professional experience—plus, believe it or not, fashion models.5 About three-fifths of H-1B visas go to workers in computer-related occupations. Most of the rest go to engineers, scientists, mathematicians, architects, surveyors, elementary and secondary school teachers, nurses, physical therapists, accountants, physicians, and those Beautiful People.

There are three steps required to get an H-1B visa. First, the employer files a Labor Condition Application (LCA) with the Department of Labor. The LCA certifies that an employer will comply with all the labor protection requirements of the H-1B program. Filing an LCA is a simple process that can be done online and costs nothing. Congress requires the Department of Labor to approval all LCAs within seven days as long as the form is filled out correctly. The Department of Labor is also prohibited from subsequently reviewing approved LCAs. As we’ll explain in more detail later, the LCA process is nothing more than a meaningless paper-shuffling exercise. Next, the employer files an I-129 “Petition for Non-Immigrant Worker Form.” This complex and costly process usually requires hiring a lawyer. If the petition is approved, the last step is for the worker to obtain the visa from the State Department. Consular offices may require an in-person visit, interview, fingerprinting, and document review. The successful applicant receives a visa stamp in his passport and can now enter the U.S.

The media often use inflated terms such as “best and brightest” and “highly-skilled” to describe H-1B workers. In reality the standards are low. A bachelor’s degree, even a mail-order one from an Indian diploma mill, is all it takes to qualify.6 As tech journalist Robert X. Cringely points out, “when Bill Gates complained about not being able to import enough top technical people for Microsoft, he wasn’t talking about geniuses, just normal coders.”7

There is a visa for the world’s truly talented high achievers called the O visa, which is uncapped and available only to “individuals with extraordinary ability or achievement” in the fields of “sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics, or who has a demonstrated record of extraordinary achievement in the motion picture or television industry and has been recognized nationally or internationally for those achievements” who seek “to enter the United States to continue work in the area of extraordinary ability.”8 Google, Apple, and other top tech companies “will take as many of the O visa candidates as they can get, but there just aren’t that many who qualify, which is why quotas aren’t required,” Cringely explained. “So when Microsoft—or Boeing, for that matter—says a limitation on H-1B visas is keeping them from getting top talent, they don’t mean it in the way that they imply. If a prospective employee is really top talent—the kind of engineer who can truly do things others simply can’t—there isn’t much keeping the company from hiring that person under the O visa program. H-1B visas are about journeyman techies and nothing else.”9

·  ·  ·

Darin Wedel’s LinkedIn page is impressive.10 Damned impressive. He’s an American tech company’s ideal job candidate. Or rather, he should be.

The science whiz graduated from Texas A&M in 1995 with a BS in electrical engineering. He worked as a process engineer for Hitachi Semiconductor and Dominion Conductor. In 2000, he joined Texas Instruments, the renowned chipmaker whose products range from your high school kid’s graphing calculator to microcontrollers, data converters, processors, and integrated circuits used in touch screens, medical devices, surveillance cameras, tablets, and cars. He is “skilled in complex Electro-Mechanical, vacuum, gas delivery, materials, and quality control systems,” “adept at learning complex hardware and software,” and “skilled in leading edge manufacturing techniques: Six Sigma, SPC, DOE, ISO, FMEA, Predictive Maintenance, defect controls, material inspection, process optimization, capital equipment installation, and equipment development.”

Wedel co-led a cutting-edge development project evaluating a “liquid chemical process precursor” for “next generation silicone nitride film.”11 Silicone nitride film, which resists moisture and oxygen, protects the surface of semiconductors. Wedel’s work resulted in a valuable patented process for his company. Scaling the corporate ladder, he spearheaded development of more than forty complex electromechanical systems and manufacturing improvements.

The Texas Instruments electrical engineer prospered. He bought a nice home and lived the middle-class American dream, which talking heads in both political parties bloviate about every election cycle.

But after nine years of working hard and playing by the rules, Darin got laid off.

To the newspapers, he was just another bloodless statistic. “Layoffs spread to more sectors of the economy,” the New York Times blandly reported in January 2009.12 “Tech layoff parade continues: TI cuts 12 percent of workforce,” ZDNet.com wrote.13 The company slashed some thirty-four hundred positions through direct pink slips or “voluntary retirement” offers to “older” workers.

To his own company, he was a faceless liability. After nine successful years in the heart of the Dallas–Fort Worth tech corridor, the Lone Star State’s own Silicon Valley, TI tossed forty-three-year-old Darin into the swirling currents of the highly skilled unemployed—and threw his family into financial and emotional chaos.

·  ·  ·

To fully appreciate the political fraud and continuing bureaucratic molestation of America’s nonimmigrant visa programs, we must first travel back to the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (known as the McCarran-Walter Act). Congress enacted the Democratic-sponsored bill over President Truman’s veto to manage the flow of foreigners into America. With the Cold War and communist threat foremost on the nation’s mind, an overwhelming majority of lawmakers approved McCarran-Walter’s continuation of a national origins quota system (in place since 1924), combined with an orderly process to handle immigrants based on humanitarian reasons and a new set of visa preferences based on family reunification or skills.14

The law created two main guest worker visas: H-1 for guest workers with distinguished ability and H-2 for ordinary guest workers. (A third category was created for trainees.) The H-1 and H-2 visas had one feature in common and one major difference. Both visas were strictly guest worker programs. The alien had to maintain a foreign residence to qualify. The H-1 visa differed from the H-2 visa in that it did not require showing that Americans were not available for the job. It is clear from the legislative history15 that Congress originally intended that the H-1 visa would be restricted to truly extraordinary people, such as distinguished professors and other “outstanding scholars, scientists, and teachers” of “exceptional ability whose services are needed in the country.”16 Lawmakers mistakenly assumed that for a small cadre of high-level intellectual elites and professional heavyweights, domestic protections would not be necessary.

If you read the plain text of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, you would expect that a Nobel Prize winner coming to lecture at a university would fall into the H-1 category and an ordinary engineer would fall into the H-2 category. This turned out not to be the case. A series of backdoor agency decisions wiped out labor protections in the H-2 program for many U.S. workers. The then–Immigration and Naturalization Service (now the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services) unilaterally started classifying anyone in a profession as falling under the H-1 category. The INS decided that any alien engineer deserved to be classified as a worker with “distinguished merit and ability”—thus qualifying him for an H-1 visa, even though Congress clearly intended the H-2 visa for such workers. Through that process, the INS gutted the labor protections of the H-2 visa. Expansive and overbroad agency interpretations have persistently plagued our immigration system, empowering unelected bureaucrats at INS, its successor, USCIS, and the State Department to undermine and sabotage congressional intent.17

In 1990, Congress finally addressed the H-1 visa abuse epidemic. A House Judiciary Committee report noted at the time that administrative decision-making run amok “meant that little known entertainers and their accompanying crews [qualify] within this category, and aliens with nothing more than a baccalaureate degree have been deemed “distinguished.”18 Politicians responded to the administrative sabotage of the previous H-1 program by placing specific limits on guest worker admissions.19 The Immigration Act of 1990 amended the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act to create the current H-1B visa program.20

Congress originally capped the number of H-1B visas at 65,000 per year, but the cap has changed several times thanks to the influence of the nonstop Cheap Foreign Labor Lobby. The absurdly named American Competitiveness and Workforce Improvement Act of 1998 increased the cap to 115,000 for fiscal year 1999 and fiscal year 2000. The American Competitiveness in the Twenty-First Century Act of 2000 (AC21) further increased the limit to 195,000 for fiscal year 2001 through fiscal year 2003. In addition, AC21 permanently exempted all foreign guest workers hired by institutions of higher education, as well as nonprofit and government-research organizations, from the cap. (See Figure 1.1.)

Beltway crapweasels in the House unanimously passed the 2000 bill on a voice vote that took place at night with only about forty members present. The vote took place after the leadership announced there would be no more votes for the day and most members had gone home.21 It is not known who was present voting for the bill. The dark-of-night adoption of these anti–American worker statutes is a habit of feckless politicians in both parties. Congressional leaders take great pains to avoid having direct votes on H-1B.

In fiscal year 2004, the cap reverted to its original level of 65,000. But the H-1B Visa Reform Act of 2004 allowed for an additional 20,000 visas each year for foreign workers holding a master’s degree or higher from an American institution of higher education to be exempted from the numerical cap limitation. In addition, in 2004, as a result of free trade agreements, more statutory changes allowed for up to 6,800 of the 65,000 H-1B visas to be set aside for workers from Chile and Singapore.22 To prevent members from being held accountable, this H-1B expansion was buried in a massive budget bill.

FIGURE 1.1 CHANGES IN THE H-1B CAP OVER TIME



Old habits die hard. In 2015, Washington insiders again called on Congress to slip a new H-1B increase into a budget bill.23 Sen. Charles Grassley rightly cautions against the Big Tech quota busters. “We’ll hear arguments all day as to why the cap on H-1B visas should be raised, but nobody should be fooled,” he said. “There are highly skilled American workers being left behind, searching for jobs that are being filled by H-1B visa holders.”24

·  ·  ·

Across the country, American tech workers like Darin in their thirties and forties face rampant discrimination based on their age and citizenship status. (Yes, dear readers in your thirties and forties, welcome to geezerhood.)

U.S. computer workers forty and older are more likely to be laid off than those under forty; take longer to find a job after being laid off; and, when rehired, receive a substantial loss in wages.25 The TechCrunch blog calls it “Silicon Valley’s Dark Secret.”26 Recruiters and investors lust after the “cachet of the young entrepreneur.”27 At a tech conference in 2007 in which he advised companies not to hire workers over thirty, baby-faced Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg infamously bragged: “Young people are just smarter.”28 (Zuckerberg, by the way, turns thirty-one this year.)

Once they’re out of their twenties, tech workers turn to makeover consultants and wardrobe stylists to maintain freshness. Piercings, biker boots, eyelid lifts. Whatever it takes.29 And that’s why the Botox-dispensing business is booming for San Francisco cosmetic surgeon Dr. Seth Matarasso, whose clientele now mainly consists of anxious American tech workers trying to rejuvenate their looks.30
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About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio/Mercury Ink
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1442390786
• ISBN 13: 9781442390782
• Binding: Audio CD
• Number of pages: 11