We’re supposed to belief this sh*t, after the last several times they’ve pulled this maneuver?

There should be a lot fewer H1b visas, given the numbers of unemployed tech folks.

But that would require Gates and MS (and many other tech companies) to actually pay the competitive wages to US citizens.

Jane, is there an actual relatively progressive political party out there, or is our choice either D or what’s left of the Greens?

But that would require Gates and MS (and many other tech companies) to actually pay the competitive wages to US citizens.

perish the thought

Is Harry trying to lose the lady who wants people to pay for healthcare with chickens is his GOP rival but Harry can’t win if he shoots his own foot.

Given his opponent I still think Harry can win.

the Senate has a lot to do

like watching the stock ticker to keep track of the value of their Berkshire-Hathaway holdings.

Having just read the proposal and commenting on it a few threads down, I have to say it is pretty awful. It makes the current mess look less bad. The proposal comes across as a bunch of half-baked ideas that no one has thought through as to how to implement, just a lot of Social Security and DHS shall do such and such. I don’t like the idea of the electronic Social Security card. Along with all the government databases, domestic spying and surveillance, and healthcare individual mandates, it just seems like the government is boxing us in, not with any offsetting benefit to us, but just to make us easier to control. And I am no libertarian.

Really Jane, how far away from the Socialist Party are we anyway? I never disagree with Bernie Sanders.

I thought I read this wouldn’t be addressed until next year because the congress is already too over worked.

It’s an obamanation (purposely mis-spelled for snark value).

Ya mean they would actually pay prevailing wages??? In this recession just what are the prevailing wages… I bet they are down considerably from just 2007…

I thought I read this wouldn’t be addressed until next year because the congress has already too over worked.

Selling out, talking out of both sides of one’s mouth is hard work, setting up fundraisers with lobbyists, putting out pap for the rubes constituents, it’s a lot harder than it seems.

My favorite part of the proposal for a comment down a few threads:

The last page of the proposal which has various odd add-ons, includes this:

A new program will be created to provide visas to promote property ownership by foreign nationals for the enhancement of America’s housing market.

So buy an overpriced house from a bankster and get a visa. What an interesting scam idea

me either, except the part where he caved in and voted for the insurance giveaway bill

I think that’s true. But Reid has to seem like he’s trying.

Couldn’t he at least “pretend” with something better?

ROFLMAO

OMFG

They’re goin to try to reinflate the housing bubble with immigrants.

Not that I like Reid but if this bill his last hope then he may has well pack his bags and start sending out resumes. To quote myself in a previous thread, because no one else surely will, this bill is change we can BELIEVE in codified. How this is supposed to appeal to hispanic voters, except those that would never vote for a D under any circumstance is beyond me. Maybe this is supposed more of the special triangulation magic that the Ds seem to be cooking up everywhere we look.

if anyone really wanted to look seriously about ending the undocumented person thingy, all they need to do is start jailing the employers, and I mean home owners as well as businesses and corporations

bing, the problem would be solved

nobody is serious

Already exists, E1 visas.

heavy on enforcement to escalate the war on drugs

How’s that going after 40 years?

but the entire country is socialist, every single person to a man they just don’t know it or refuse to admit it

everyone wants an armed branch, everyone wants roads, water, electricity, cops, fire dept, parks, beaches

even money is a socialist program and socialism

most people have no clue what they are advocating against when they claim they don’t want socialism

there are countrys they can live that don’t have socialism and I assure you, they don’t want to live there

The bill supposedly ramps up fines against employers and suggests increases for repeat offenders. The problem being, just as we already have all sorts of laws on the books related to financial fraud. Nobody is interested in applying the law to the crooks that took the economy down for personal gain.

Or, like the two faced Mayor in Nightmare Before Christmas?

Obama: I need some help on the Republican side

Seems like this draft bill would appeal to the Arizona legislature and Governor with very little change.

Well, Miami already is sort of New Hamburg. Maybe Seattle can become New Shanghai.

I don’t disagree with a single word of that.

At least in high tech, the foreign nationals here get paid the same as US citizens from what I’ve seen.

Definitely not true for smaller businesses. Even where it is more or less true the H1-Bs are obliged to stay for the length of the contract and that makes them effectively more loyal and therefore more appealing than fly-by-night Americans who might find something better in a couple of months. Which in turn makes it harder for American tech employees to compete. In a down economy these are jobs that are not as common as a few years ago and wages are declining simple due to competition among applicants. The H1-B card allows the employer to drive down wages for an industry that has never accepted unions.

I ranted and tiraded about this all of yesterday, so I’ll just say today: this Immigration stuff is nonsense. If there was any whit of seriousness about it (there’s not), the laws would be applied to the business owners, who deliberately hire, recruit and travel to third world countries to bring back undocumented workers. Businesses – esp ag, construction, hospitality and meat packing – rake in the bucks off of the back of poorly paid undocumented workers who get to work in appalling and unsafe conditions.

This is just going to HCR on steriods, if and when it ever gets off the ground (yeah, pity the poor overworked congressfarts… sucking up to lobbyists and sticking your snouts in the trough is very hard work, indeed), because our corporate overlords have no intention of doing away with the slaves that they utilize to increase their profits.

If there wasn’t work available here in el Norte, then the undocumented workers would stop coming. Stat.

The rubes have just been manipulated, per usual, to blame teh poorz for all the ills of the world. Twas ever thus.

A load of horse hockey as usual. And fie on H1-B visas – that’s another load of crap to make Bill Gates and his cronies rich. Some H1-B workers may make as much as US citizens, but certainly not all of them. MANY are willing to come here to work for far lower wages, to live in crummy tiny apartments, etc, bc it is more money than they’d ever earn back home.

H1-B visas just legalize white collar work for serfs from other countries. Talk about a rip-off.

Exactly. And don’t believe the crap they poop out that there’s “not enough trained Americans” to the work. It’s a LIE of epic proportions. There’s plenty of well trained IT engineers, etc, who are citizens. Plenty. These high tech companies are just doing, legally, what ag, hospitality, construction and meat packing do illegally.

I need to be coarse, no other way to do message this.

FUck You Bill Gates. We have the technical horsepower here, and it’s unemployed. You simply don’t like us homegrown techy geeky dweeby nerdy USA types. Why, because we’d like to have something other than subservient wages.

And what happens to all that technology that gets transferred into those H1-B’s? It goes back to wherever they came from eventually. Now that’s good business.

For what it’s worth, my contempt for you has grown steadily unceasingly since the first time I called your office in 1975. What a prick.

But what the fuck, Walmart needs some more Greeters.

nope, not by a long shot

We are more in line with what the majority of voters want than the Dems are Socialist is just a word the GOP uses to demonize us.

The sponsorships are a burden. Still easier to hire American PhDs and MAs when they’re qualified and available, all else being equal. At least at our place. Expanding overseas operations is a different debate. We should be taxing offshore profits of our multinationals but Obama shelved that last year.

From the politico link. This is bizarre:
“A dispute over the timing of the immigration reform legislation began brewing weeks ago as advocates and some Democrats became convinced Graham was trying to delay a debate and vote this year that could damage Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), his long-time friend and ally.”
From what I’ve been seeing, it seems like McCain/Lieberman/Graham together all the away. Besides I hear John loves Papers Please, and he’s running to the right of Mussolini. How on earth could it hurt him 1) if the reform is as right wing as they say it is, in which case Graham doesn’t need to pull a drama. . . Or what difference does it make either way for McCain unless someone puts something remotely humane in the reform proposal?
Come to think of it that whole Politco article was er . . .

Agreed Preach it!

Jane, I’ve seen a couple times this week a comment about House Blue Dogs being made to walk the plank.

I thought I was paying attention, but I don’t seem to remember it that way.

Is this snark or am I forgetting something?

congress forces them to buy a golfcourse/swamp in Florida, maybe?

Yeah but that would be admitting businesses are the problem and not undocumented workers.

See we can strip the Tea Baggers from the GOP if we use this:)

At Microsoft specifically, non-advanced rote coding jobs, that used to be filled by workers with programming associate degrees from public Seattle area community colleges, now require a “PhD”. Real computer science PhDs from US universities or the best Indian and Chinese universities are not going to take these relatively low paying, low skilled positions. The “PhD”s filling these jobs are all from Indian/Chinese diploma mills who cost much less than a local person*.

There needs to be investigations into how H1-B recruiters operate or are paid. Is it any different than the abuses(debt peonage) in agricultural guestworker programs? What kickbacks are tech companies receiving?

*Given the demographics of Puget Sound community colleges, the local is as likely to be the child of Indian, Chinese, Russian, or African immigrants as not. They’re locked out of jobs for the “misfortune” of their families immigrating freely instead under corporate serfdom.

I will surprise you by saying I See Harry’s Pointe. He NEEDS to bring this up Even though it won’t get anywhere to Show the Base he’s on it. At least doing something.

I can get that. The substance is another matter.

By the Way, I’m doing this on ano iPad, and i am Not able to Control what’s going on so well. So excuse what Look like mistiges.

Back during the Carter Administration, when mortgage interest rates were running at 16 and 17 %, most of the realtors I know told me that they would be out-of-business but for the upward mobility of first and second generation immigrants, as they were just about the only ones buying at that time. It sounds wacky, but it would likely juice the market price of homes and further line the pockets of lenders and the real estate industry (both building and sales).

As a liberal I agree with Dem’s that a reasonable program to let illegals work their way into citizenship makes sense.

But we must respect this special right, and insist on a heavy penalty which could be spread out over years. Same with the kids, sympathetic to them but they should not automatically be citizens if born here, they can also have a path to citizenship. Only American children deserve our citizenship automatically.

We need a strong border, in triple layers if necessary in places. Mexico has serious problems but they have many very wealthy people, including the richest guy in the entire world ! They should be helping their country, their poor, and tighten their own borders. They should welcome US technology to help their oil fields and stop this foolish anti-US thinking that’s been around for over 100 years.

A little point about Carter. I think the economy did not need those insane interest rates, it was a bunch of baloney made up by Wall St., in order to make it easier for Reagan to win. The claim was that federal spending was driving inflation, yet the debt under Reagan, and both Bush’s, was Far Higher vs. the size of the economy!

Wall St. has owned the GOP for over 100 years.

Imported slave labor, kickbacks, right in Redmond. We should release the bloodhounds, now.

Thankfully, the Lake has had multiple threads on immigration these past few days, and I have made an effort to offer some commentary one each one. Therefore, permit me to “Quote” myself since no one else will. :-))

Several years ago I wrote that any legislative package would have to come in Four and even possibly Five Parts, and all distinctly different from each in this series. Thus, I started with the following:

1. The Reduction in Adjusting the In-Migration Pattern.

2. Prioritization in the Naturalization Objective.

3. The Process.

4. Addressing Border Security.

5. TransNational Technology Centers for Various States.

With respect to Element 1, and for Adjusting the In-Migration Pattern, I was thinking of our international trade agreements such as NAFTA. And because NAFTA does not have a “labor standard”, what passes for EFCA or Card Check, could concievably fill this vacant Standard. With Card Check inserted into NAFTA, and other trade agreements as well, governments such as Mexico would have to relinquish their ownership rights to Organized Labor, and if done correctly, the migration flow would be reduced considerably since in asking an immigrant, he or she would not have left their nation of origin had decent employment been available.

And with respect to Element 2, and as to prioritizing who gets to enter into the formal standing line, I would start with the chldren born in the United States, and have since been repatriated with the family intact to the parents’ Nation of Origin. Thus, the parents would be offered the opportunity for “naturalization” and if accepted, would move to the head of the ‘standing line’. This would configure as a Priority One situation. As to a Priority Two Schematic, I would start with the chlldren of Undocumented Immigrants and where these children arrived with their parent, and are attending or have since graduated from a high school here in the USA. Effectively, this addresses the concerns found in the Dream Act. And for argument’s sake, let’s consider a Priority Three situation to be the H-1B visa program for working in the United States. Of course, there are other priorities that will have to be included as well. Now, do you get the bigger ‘picture’?

As a follow-up to my post above, let’s create an Element 6 and label it “Employer Sanctions”.

Here in Arizona, we have ‘employer sanctions’ and they are the equivalent to political toilet paper. But it’s a starting point for crafting this Element to be far more effective.

Aside from tossing the employer in jail forever, what would the commenters here at the Lake, suggest be included in this Element for employer sanctions?

The original argument (in Silicon Valley) wasn’t about wages, it was that they wanted to do Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the best people were coming out of Russian colleges. They desperately needed the young people with the right education.

That obviously wasn’t it at all and AI is dead for now, so they hire from India, China and everywhere else.

Now, their argument is that there are all these foreign kids being educated here and we should hire them instead of sending them back to their homes. Bizarre argument if you ask me.

With unemployment this high I can’t imagine anyone saying we must hire from abroad or spend money educating so many foreign kids. Of course, if the foreign kids bring money in and we make a nice profit off them it’s okay. Then, send ‘em home to become billionaires.

American companies should be hiring Americans. American colleges have been called the best in the world (as a group), so I can’t imagine any need to hire from Lower Somewhereistan. Hire Americans and pay good wages.

It could easily be seen as ‘protectionism’, but I prefer to think of it as defensive or common sense Americanism.

We send too much capital overseas and we lose jobs due to that too. If foreign companies would come here and employ people we might not mind so much. If foreign countries would let us sell more product there we might not mind so much.

But, for now, we have to be defensive and employ more Americans.

We should be taxing offshore profits of our multinationals but Obama shelved that last year.

His idea got killed, but Wyden & Grassley are looking at a new idea which might work and be politically acceptable.

It’s to lower the corporate tax rate to the level where overseas earnings can be brought back home and taxed the same as they would in most other countries. If the rate is too high (as Obama and most Dems wanted) they just won’t bring the money back.

So, lower the rate, more money comes back, taxes applied, revenues come in. More money will come in that way than does now.

I personally think that even better, in the long run, is to not tax corporations which are not citizens, but force them to disgorge cash on hand (if they don’t want to actually use it) to their stockholders and then tax the stockholder who’s just received cash.

I also like one tax rate, so dividends and interest and mutual fund managers’ compensation should all be taxed at the same relatively high rate. What that might be is highly debatable.

It sounds as if you are trying to justify further tax cuts. Are you suggesting that U.S. based multinational corporations will quit hiding the role of their foreign subsidiaries which shift profits into low tax jurisdictions if the United States would only lower its corporate tax rates to that of the Cayman Islands (as an example)? That “lower corporate tax rates” excuse has been used for decades now and has contributed to the problem we are in. At some point, these multinational corporations need to take responsibility for their actions.

It’s not just tech. It is also biotech. I got laid off 1.5 yrs ago from academic research because after 25 yr in the profession I finally made too much. Of course 15 yrs at below poverty line wages during post-graduate training didn’t account for anything. The majority of the biomedical researchers at my former “state” university are on H1B visas.