A new USA Today article declares that the boom times of 1999 are back. According to the article high tech workers are once again in high demand as employers throw down the red carpets.

Tech workers like Mersy are coveted commodities as the high-tech industry undergoes its biggest hiring binge in more than a decade. Not since the dot-com bubble of the early 2000s has competition been so fierce. Would-be employees are being enticed with fat contracts, hefty bonuses and such freebies as iPads, meals, sporting events and shuttle services. These and other perks are in play to hook top talent in engineering, social media, website development, product design and management. Tech jobs boom like it's 1999, By Jon Swartz, USA TODAY, 4/21/2011

The article goes on and on about the increasing demand for high tech workers without quoting anyone but industry spokespeople. This one is a real whopper:

The jump in tech hires highlights what some economists see as a bounce-back in the $805 billion U.S. tech industry that could eventually make a dent in the national unemployment rate of 8.8%. ”The majority of the lost jobs in California were in construction and manufacturing, so gains in tech may help,” says Doug Henton, CEO of market researcher Collaborative Economics. ”The one sector where there is some hope is in construction in clean tech.”

What's not mentioned is that even if high tech industries are experiencing a hiring binge the effect on total unemployment would be negligible. Currently less than 1% of the workforce are employed in high tech professions.

Most of the new hiring, if there is any truth to the article, is among young college graduates. This paragraph is code that means: "if you are over 35 don't apply because we don't want you!":

Google, Facebook and Microsoft are aggressively recruiting college students in hopes of landing them before they graduate, says Gayle Laakmann McDowell, a former Google software engineer and author of The Google Resume: How to Prepare for a Career and Land a Job at Apple, Microsoft, Google, or Any Top Tech Company.

Industry may be hiring college graduates but that doesn't mean the students are from the U.S. The Optional Practical Training Program (which authorizes the employment of foreign students) was just expanded, and that is where many of these new hires are most likely coming from. The OPT expansion will be the subject of a blog that will be coming soon to Vdare.

If any of you get a feeling of D?©j?  vu reading the USA Today article it's because almost identical propaganda was published during the big push for an H-1B increase in 1998-1999.

According to the American Electronics Association (AEA), the high-tech industry added close to a quarter of a million new jobs to the U.S. economy between 1995 and 1996. That's a record high for this decade. From the American Electronics Association, John Hatch says unemployment in the Silicon Valley is so low it's almost a nonissue.

"People can get a job at will," he reports. The AEA completed an exhaustive report on high-tech employment state by state. Electrical Engineering, By Charlotte Thomas, Graduating Engineer, 1998

The 1999 era is not only notable for its high-tech worker shortage propaganda — the H-1B visa cap was raised from 65,000 to 130,000. In the year 2000 the cap was tripled to 195,000. USA Today mentioned the DotCom bust but glossed over the fact that the hiring binge that supposedly preceded it was mostly composed of a few highly paid specialists and foreign workers that came to the U.S. with H-1B visas.