High Tech Employers waiting for GOP immigration feast

Mark Krikorian has made commendable use of his Immigration Beard status at National Review to write a fine piece on the upcoming H-1B/Immigrant Tech graduate atrocity, with the curiously dull headline Reforming Legal Immigration February 6, 2012.

Brave too, because he opens by condemning a characteristically moronic attempt by the RNC to exploit the recent wonderful Obama H-1B ambush while dodging the substance of the matter:

The Republicans also want to import cheap foreign labor for tech companies. The Bloomberg/Murdoch group Partnership for a New American Economy (a/k/a “Billionaires for Open Borders”) ran an ad in South Carolina showing that every GOP presidential candidate wants increases in “skilled” immigration

Pointing out that it has been long recognized that the market for science PhDs in America has been wrecked because

…foreign Ph.D.s would be willing to accept lower salaries because part of the compensation package would be access to the U.S., something American and permanent resident students already have.

he summarizes the process

So, flood the market with foreign Ph.D. candidates, thus lowering salaries, thus inducing talented American young people to pursue other career options, thus creating the need for even more foreign Ph.D. students. Your government at work.

and adds

Among foreign doctoral students specifically, virtually all their funding comes from U.S. sources — often taxpayers. It’s largely a cheap-labor program for universities; as George Borjas has written: “Foreign students play the same role in staffing the research labs of American universities that Mexican illegal workers play in staffing the vast agricultural fields of California. Both groups of workers enter the country, substantially increase the supply of workers, lower wages in their respective occupations, and increase the profits and economic resources of the companies that hire them.”

Krikorian correctly warns

…the tech industry has shifted some of its lobbying money from the customary push for increases in the H-1B visa (ostensibly a program to import temporary labor) to new proposals to automatically give a permanent green card to any foreign student receiving a degree in the U.S. in a technical field

and concludes

The question now is whether lawmakers will succumb to a phony “missile gap”–style panic about U.S. competitiveness created by lobbyists for tech companies that desire cheap labor... Unfortunately, congressmen who don’t even know how to switch on their computers swoon for this Johnny-can’t-do-math nonsense like teenage girls at a rock concert.

He forecasts that a Republican sweep of Congress and the White House is likely to increase the chances to a cheap labor pork gift to the High Tech lobby: apparently within the Democratc majority the Hispanic Caucus has

held increases in skilled (mostly Asian) immigration hostage for years, wanting to trade them for amnesty for the overwhelmingly Hispanic illegal-alien population.

As so often with an article of this type, a great deal of value is found in the intelligent and well informed comments. One has even expressed the issue as a mathematical formula!

But significantly a troll has also appeared, screaming that that all dissent to immigrant inundation is “nativist”.

Greed plays a very large part in immigration enthusiasm.

So too does ethnic animosity