Billionaire businessman Mark Cuban insists that
the H-1B visa racket is a feature of the vaunted American free market.
This is nonsense on stilts. It can't go unchallenged.
Another
billionaire, our president, has ordered that
the H-1B program be reformed. This, too, is disappointing. You'll
see why.
First,
let's correct Mr. Cuban: America has not a free economy, but a mixed economy.
State and markets are intertwined. Trade, including trade in labor,
is not free; it's regulated to the hilt. If anything, the labyrinth of
work visas is an example of a fascistic government-business cartel in
operation.
The H-1B permit, in particular, is part of
that state-sponsored visa system. The primary H-1B hogs – Infosys (and
another eight sister Indian firms), Microsoft, and Intel – import labor with
what are grants of government privilege. Duly, the corporations that hog
H-1Bs act like incorrigibly corrupt rent seekers. Not only do they get to
replace the American worker, but they get to do so at his expense.
Here's
how.
Globally,
a series of sordid liaisons ensures that American workers are left high and
dry. Through the programs of the International Trade Administration, the
Export-Import Bank, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, the
International Monetary Fund, and other oink operations, the tax-paying American
worker is forced to subsidize and underwrite the investment risks of the very
corporations that have given him the boot.
Domestically, the fascistic partnership
with the State amounts to a subsidy to business at the expense of the taxpayer.
See, corporations in our democratic welfare state externalize their
employment costs onto the taxpayers.
So
while public property is property funded by taxpayers through expropriated
taxes, belongs to taxpayers, and is to be managed for their benefit – at least
one million additional immigrants a year, including recipients of the H-1B
visa, are allowed the free use of taxpayer-supported infrastructure and
amenities. Every new arrival avails himself of public works such as
roads, hospitals, parks, libraries, schools, and welfare.
Does
this epitomize the classical liberal idea of laissez-faire?
Moreover,
chain migration or family unification means that every H-1B visa recruit is a
ticket for an entire tribe. The initial entrant – the meal ticket – will
pay his way. The honor system not being an especially strong value in the
Third World, the rest of the clan will be America's problem. More often
than not, chain migration entrants become wards of the American taxpayer.
Spreading
like gravy over a tablecloth, this rapid, inorganic population growth is
detrimental to all ecosystems: natural, social, and political.
Take
Seattle and its surrounding counties. Between April 2015 and 2016, the
area was inundated with "86,320 new residents, marking it the region's
biggest population gains this century. Fueled in large part by the
technology industry, an average of 236 people is moving to the Seattle area
each day," reportedGeekwire.com. (Reporters for our local
fish-wrapper – in my case, parrot cage liner – have discharged their
journalistic duties by inviting readers to "share" their traffic
jam stories.)
Never
as dumb as the local reporters, the likes of Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Mark
Zuckerberg, and Mark Cuban are certainly as detached.
Barricaded
in their obscenely lavish compounds – from the comfort of their monster
mansions – these social engineers don't experience the "environmental
impacts of rapid urban expansion"; the destruction of lush, verdant open
spaces and farmland; the decrease in the quality of the water we drink and air
we breathe, the increase in traffic and traffic accidents, air pollution, the
cell block-like housing erected to accommodate their imported I.T. workers and
extended families, the delicate bouquet of amped up waste management and
associated seepages.
For
locals, this lamentable state means an inability to afford homes in a market in
which property prices have been artificially inflated. Young couples line
up to view tiny apartments. They dream of that picket fence no more.
(And our "stupid leaders," to quote the president before he
joined leadership, wonder why birthrates are so low!)
In a
true free market, absent the protectionist state, corporate employers would be
accountable to the community and would be wary of the strife and lowered
productivity brought about by a multiethnic and multi-linguistic workforce –
all the more so when a foreign workforce moves into residential areas almost
overnight as has happened in Seattle and its surrounds.
Alas,
since the high-tech traitors can
externalize their employment costs on to the community, because corporations
are subsidized at every turn by their victims, they need not bring in the best.
Cuban
thinks they do. High tech needs to be able to "search the world for
the best applicants," he burbled to
Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Yet
more crap.
Why doesn't the president know that the
H-1B visa category is not a special visa for highly skilled individuals, but
goes mostly to average workers?
"Indian business-process outsourcing companies, which predominantly
provide technology support to corporate back offices," by the Economist's accounting.
Overall,
the work done by the H-1B intake does not require independent judgment,
critical reasoning, or higher-order thinking. "Average workers;
ordinary talent doing ordinary work," attest the experts who've been
studying this intake for years. The master's degree is the exception
within the H-1B visa category.
More significant: there is a visa category reserved
exclusively for individuals with extraordinary abilities and achievement.
I know, because the principal sponsor in our family received this visa.
I first wrote about
the visa that doesn't displace ordinary Americans in 2008.
It's the O-1 visa.
"Extraordinary
ability in the fields of science, education, business or athletics,"states the
Department of Homeland Security, "means a level of expertise indicating
that the person is one of the small percentage who has risen to the very top of
the field of endeavor."
Most
significant, there is no cap on the number of O-1 visa entrants allowed.
Access to this limited pool of talent is unlimited.
My
point vis-à-vis the O-1 visa is this: the H-1B hogs are forever claiming that
they are desperate for talent. In reality, they have unlimited access to
individuals with unique abilities through the open-ended O-1 visa program.
There
is no limit to the number of geniuses American companies can import.
Theoretically,
the H-1B program could be completely abolished and all needed Einsteins
imported through the O-1 program. (Why, even future first ladies would
stand a chance under the business category of the O-1A visa, as a
wealth-generating supermodel could certainly qualify.)
Now
you understand my disappointment. In his April 18 executive order,President Trump promised to merely
reform a program that needs abolishing – that is, if "Hire American"
means anything to anybody anymore.
Ilana Mercer is the author of The
Trump Revolution: The Donald's Creative Destruction Deconstructed and Into the Cannibal's Pot: Lessons for America From
Post-Apartheid South Africa. Follow her on Twitter & Facebook. Subscribe to Ilana's YouTube
channel.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/04/why_the_h1b_visa_racket_should_be_abolished_not_reformed.html
