Verbosities

Media Matters - CNN's Dobbs said Clinton is "selling out our middle class" on H-1B visas, but ignored GOP candidates

On the July 9 edition of CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight, Dobbs reported that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) "repeated her call for an increase in the number of H-1B visas" during a recent speech to the Indian Institute of Technology, adding that Clinton "backs a plan that would raise the number of H-1[B] visas to 115,000 from the current level of 65,000." Dobbs teased the segment by saying, "Tonight, Senator Hillary Clinton facing charges she's selling out our middle class to boost her presidential ambitions. Is the senator putting the interest of India ahead of working Americans?"

As someone who has first-hand real world data on this subject, let me just say that Lou Dobbs is an idiot. H-1[B] visas are the lifeblood of corporate America right now. Whether Lou Dobbs wants to admit it or not, these visa'd immigrants are absolutely essential to the economy.

Why? Because American students and American technology workers can't be bothered to learn the hard stuff on the IT side in big enough numbers to choke off the visas.

Let me give you a concrete example of what I mean. In a wholly unscientific survey, I looked at the names of the last 100 candidates submitted for high-level IT contract jobs at a Fortune 500 company, and took an educated guess as to whether these candidates were born and educated outside the country, and would presumably be here on a visa.

81% had names of obvious foreign origin, mostly from India.

This is not to say that Americans aren't out there in the marketplace, but if they're pricing themselves above the Indian H-1[B] price point, I guarantee you that eliminating the visa doesn't guarantee more Americans those jobs. On the contrary, outsourcing then becomes vastly more prevalent than it is now, and those IIT educated Indian nationals get the jobs anyway.

This is what happens when free market capitalism collides with globalism. Like it or not Lou, when Hillary says she wants more H-1[B] visas here in the states, she is actually preserving American jobs through this policy.

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