Well, forget what I said on Trump and H-1B. He now says,
When foreigners attend our great colleges & want to stay in the U.S., they should not be thrown out of our country…I want talented people to come into this country—to work hard and to become citizens. Silicon Valley needs engineers, etc.
In other words, the “Intels good, Infosyses bad” attitude, which as I have often explained, is totally invalid and harmful. The Intels are just as culpable in abusing foreign worker programs as the Infosyses, and those who separate the two want to INCREASE the H-1B cap for the Intels. No more “arriba,” señor Trump. I’ll revise my previous post with a warning.
Someone got to Trump.
Upon Closer inspection 
[…] UPDATE, AUGUST 18: Trump tweeted comments today that totally negate the praise I had given him below regarding H-1B. See my new posting. […]
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Thank you for the information, he is off my presidential list. Is it possible to get the views of Ben Carson on legal immigration?
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Carson has already voiced support for guest workers in general. He is useless too.
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Sorry I should of said legal “Non Immigration”
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Well, and these words are actually coming out of his mouth. Who knows if he ever even read the position paper on his site. OTOH there’s this idea that he wants to end a J-1 visa?
http://www.rte.ie/news/2015/0818/722082-donald-trump-immigration/
But I don’t think the J-1 visa is the real danger, nor that it is necessarily one that should be ended.
Too bad there’s not even a contact/email on his web site – or wasn’t yesterday. I guess I could tweet something somewhere. Oh well.
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I noticed your comment about Trump being ballyhooed on Breitbart.com. They quoted your article extensively and called you a “prominent Democrat professor”. I tried to add a comment that you were in fact not a prominent Democrat, but they suppressed my comment. It doesn’t surprise me at all that Trump has changed his mind. What is more interesting is that he seemed to believe that H-1B visas could be given to unskilled laborers. He has not changed his mind so much as he has been re-educated.
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I’ve run across numerous instances where cooks were brought in on a H-1B so he is right on that perspective.
Problem is, as Mr. Matloff says, somebody got to him and said we have money and they have nothing.
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I do not think anyone who has not been in the trenches understands the problem and its effect on American workers. What people forget with all of the talk about STEM is that H-1B is for any job requiring at least a bachelors degree. Look at the number of unemployed business majors, attorneys, educators and even nurses who have been replaced or had their opportunities limited by foreign nationals on some form of a work visa.
Look at the number of US medical graduates unable to get residencies in their area of choice because they are given to foreign medical graduates who have no intention of taking their knowledge home to their Third World homelands. It is a moral question as to whether the US should be permitting any medical professional to use that credential to obtain entry into the US given the dire need in many of the countries in the world for even the most basic of health care. We should not permit someone who promised to return home and use the knowledge gained in the US to remain but should require that they serve their countrymen with their new found knowledge for some period of time.
Even at the university level, one sees travel reimbursement requests for interviewing potential post docs abroad but never in the US. When one sees a university department almost exclusively foreign nationals from one or two countries when there are qualified US citizen graduates anxious for a position, one must wonder whether there the “fix” is in.
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I don’t know about this issue of US medical graduates and residencies, but I do know that it’s nearly impossible to find a native-born practicing doctor who graduated in the last twenty years, at least in the places that my Blue Shield insurance seems to cover.
Has our Mr. Trump said anything at all about medicine, medical care, Obamacare, insurance?
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I would say that about half of the doctors in my local Kaiser, in Walnut Creek CA, are natives. Of course, many of them are children of immigrants, as I am.
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What about the younger contingent, graduated since about 2000?
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No, I’m talking about the younger ones.
I hope you’re not automatically treating those with Chinese and Indian names as immigrants.
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My requirement is US educated for their undergraduate and medical degrees. I find most of the hospitalists at my preferred hospital are foreign trained or women. There are so few new primary care MDs that it is hard to make a judgment. Most of the new specialists are US educated. We have a Osteopathic med school in the area and many primary cares are DOs rather than MDs and many use a different hospital system.
My problem is that few doctors – primary cares and specialists – are accepting new Medicare patients even with supplemental insurance or when the Medicare is secondary. What is bizarre is that some are accepting Medicaid but not Medicare. I also found that when DH had only employer based insurance he received more referrals to specialists than I who had his plus Medicare.
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It’s not like I’ve done an in-depth survey and I grant your point, but fwiw my latest doctor has his medical degree from the University of Tabriz and he’s a bit older than my filter. I just know that scrolling down the available doctors on the Blue Shield web site, there just aren’t many named Smith or Jones.
I think I’ve shared the story with you, something like ten years ago I was working an IT job with a mostly Vietnamese staff down in Orange County, and when we went to lunch and talked about stuff it turned out they were directing all their kids OUT of the IT world and almost all were going into medicine. Presume most or all of their kids by then were born in the US so they’d certainly be citizens, but sure, that makes it hard to guess by name.
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Here’s the Breibart article I was referring to above. http://bit.ly/1hLrM0o
Here is Trump’s position plan. The section on H1-b visas is around the middle. http://bit.ly/1EvT3Ja
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We’ll see. So far that is not a reversal of his call to reform H-1b, to eliminate the low-tiers of prevailing wage, and to require jobs first be offered to Americans.
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Once again: If Congress creates special programs for the foreign students, e.g. fast-track green cards, H-1B will become irrelevant. The big problem will be the green cards.
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Not so fast. This is very disappointing and may very well be the tip of the iceberg but Trump still has a position on the H-1B that is closer to what we want than anybody else out there.
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I strongly disagree. As I’ve said so many times, once one supports giving work rights to the foreign students, the game is over.
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Well, Trump is going to have to reconcile that H-1B with the student position, if he tries to hold both. If Trump were willing to shut down H-1B 100%, maybe the student channel would be a little less harmful, but what about all the other visa categories, is Trump smart enough or does he care enough so people don’t just continue to leak in on several other visas? Don’t know.
Anyway he’s making so many silly noises today about deporting 11,000,000 illegals hey may gaffe himself out of the race before Thanksgiving anyway. He’s having a hot month right now, and I like a lot of his style, but it’s still just not clear if he’s serious, has enough serious staff, and can keep focused enough to get the nomination much less win a general election.
… and none of the other candidates in either party thrill me much more, fwiw, and most much less.
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I’ve been predicting that Hillary will self-destruct not too late in the primary campaign (too much baggage, lack of a winning personality etc.), and the same may turn out to be true for Trump, due to the gaffes and the perception that he’s not thinking things through. Voters are risk-averse, and though they favor some of the more extreme candidates when polled, they get cold feet in the voting booth.
Still, it’s nice that Trump is shaking things up. They NEED to be shaken up.
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It seems to be accepted wisdom that deporting 11,000,000 illegal aliens is not possible. The assumption is that deportations would get tied up in the courts forever and be very expensive. It has been done twice before. In 1954 President Eisenhower had a West Point classmate General Joseph Swing start Operation Wetback to remove illegal aliens. The operation employed about 1000 agents and took about a year removing about a million aliens. In1838 President Andrew Jackson defied a U.S. Supreme Court to remove the Cherokee to Oklahoma.
Where there is a will there is a way. What is lacking on illegal aliens is the will to do it. The way is already there.
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James, I agree it’s doable, I just don’t think anyone wants to do it. First the number may be more like 20,000,000, and removing just the million or three from Los Angeles would leave a lot of dishes unwashed, construction projects half-complete, and really, a lot of mortgages defaulted and trucks half paid for. Even after they were gone the lawsuits would clog the system for ten years. Lot of schools would be half-empty, lot of teachers would be laid off. California state budget would improve by several billions. For better or worse, it isn’t going to happen.
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JR, I agree that the number is more like 20 million and it is unlikely to be done. I disagree that it would cause economic hardship in this country. Rather, I would expect boom times. There is historical precedence for my expectation. The Black Death of 1347 reduced the population to the point that labor became so valuable that it ended serfdom in England and set up conditions that resulted in the Industrial Revolution. I am reading a truly great book “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty” by Daron Acemoglu (MIT Professor of Economics) and James Robinson (Harvard University Professor of Government and expert on Latin American and Africa). It is available from Amazon Prime for under $10. I highly recommend it but be forewarned it has convinced me that Trump has got it right and all the others are just going to make things worse
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The US will not deport millions of undocumented immigrants for a simple reason: mass deportation of civilian populations was declared a crime against humanity by the Rome Accords (1996). By deporting that large a number of civilians, the US would be joining Hitler and Stalin as the greatest human rights criminals of the recent past.
Your suggestion that such a process would follow the precedent of Andrew Jackson when he evicted the Cherokee nation from its hereditary lands demonstrates how history and world opinion would regard such an action. Jackson recently was voted the most shameful American on Quora because he perpetrated genocide against Native Americans.
Jackson’s crime pales against the suggestion of politicians like Donald Trump that millions of immigrants, including many who were born here, be taken from their homes and ejected from the country. When you make suggestions like that, you lose touch with reality.
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Godwin’ s probability goes to 1.0 so fast these days!
Article 7.2(d) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court says
“Deportation or forcible transfer of population” means
“forced displacement of the persons concerned by expulsion or other coercive acts from the area in which they are lawfully present, without grounds permitted under international law”
Thus it would apply to Andrew Jackson’s action but not to what Eisenhower did or what Trump proposes. As a descendant of Cherokee Indians who defied Jackson’s order and stayed in Kentucky I approve. However, it appears that the United States has never ratified that treaty so your point is mute.
I fail to see the lack of humanity is deportation. When foreigners decide to come here illegally they break up their families. Deporting them reconstitutes those families. Is taking stolen property from a thief inhuman? Is the child of a thief entitled to the property stolen by the father? We the people did not cause the problems in Mexico and we are not capable of fixing them without putting our own prosperity at risk.
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Godwin’s Probability goes to 1.0 immediately when you suggest deporting 11 million human beings is feasible or even possible. Your suggestion that deportation would reunite families is a cruel joke in keeping with your general lack of compassion for the suffering of others. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) Discussion paper, Expulsions of aliens in international human rights law (2006), concludes that mass expulsions are clearly against international law. That’s the beginning and the end of the story. There is no right of any government to inflict suffering on masses of people.
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This must be so frustrating for unemployed Americans that even somebody as strong and self-dependent as Trump can’t protect their rights. At least he changed his stance before being elected as President. Obama talked about getting rid of outsourcing and H1B during his campaign and then reversed his position after being elected as President. Maybe, its the right time for US stem graduates to organize, after all in a democracy (the most celebrated democracy in the world), the people must stand up for their own rights. Only Trump knows why he changed his stance, but, I suspect that he doesn’t completely believe that there would be no shortage at least in the short run (a shortage which is direct result of years of H1B program). What had struck me as odd in his original immigration plan was that there was no mention of getting rid of H1B visa program altogether or at least reducing the cap significantly (say from 65000 to 1000). The plan doesn’t directly take away the power of immigration from the hands of the industry. His immigration plan also didn’t mention any steps to curb the large number of foreign students in American universities (many of them studying on generous scholarships) while encouraging American students to invest in higher studies (Masters and PhD). If he wants to make America great again, he must provide incentive for a large number of qualified American students to go for higher studies. It is appalling that many prospective American students can’t afford college education but generous scholarships are being given away to foreign students and a large number of foreign students are being accepted in all kinds of American universities. And all that in a country where there are around 250 national universities and best universities in the world.
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Did he change his mind? From what I see he is okay with immigration as long as they are legal citizens. H1B allows companies to outsource and allow the workers to not become citizens in the United States. Which means they are not paying taxes or anything else we all pay.
Why not allow immigrants in that are going to stay and become citizens. H1B doesn’t do this at all. Just allows companies to hire cheap labor and not require them to become U.S. citizens. They then don’t pay taxes and we lose jobs.
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I regard the distinction you’re making as irrelevant. Why should it matter whether the foreign workers become Americans or not? The people who ARE Americans are getting harmed by the foreign worker influx either way.
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Hmmm. UC Irvine’s medical center wants a software developer. I went to the interview and was told my background was not a good fit. This is the UC Irvine campus telling me, a former UC Irvine computer science student that I am not good enough for a computer science job. I wonder if the UCs are in on the information technology scam as well. What a waste of 4 years of my life.
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Actually, universities are involved in multiple scams. 🙂
One of them is H-1B, yes. For example, at my campus, a professor wanted to hire his sister-in-law for a permanent position at a programmer. She was a foreign student, but the American applicants were rejected as “not a good fit.”
But beyond that, universities play the game of placing ads for jobs they already have filled. Say they want to give an existing employee, X, a promotion to job J. So they go through the motions of announcing the opening for J, placing ads for it, etc., when all along they intend to “hire” X.
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Can you say more about what’s going on, what you think they want and why they would tell you that?
I interviewed a couple of years ago for UCLA’s medical center group, it wasn’t a great match and of course the were looking for someone younger (and stupider, who would put up with more bs, and of course cheaper). BTW, their web site won’t even let my new doctor there post results, he’s been working with the IT group for three days, they couldn’t make it work, so he gave up and will mail me results.
Pretty exciting to hear a medical center has an IT group that sharp, isn’t it.
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Hmmm. I see room here. The key is standards.
Yes,we should bring in/keep the best. Not the 2M nor 1M best each year. Not the 500K best each year. Not the 100K nor 50K nor 25K best. But certainly we should try to bring in the 500 or 1K best each year.
So, all we have to do is sort out who those 500… are. Standardized tests wouldn’t quite be acceptable. Nor Nobel prizes. Some of those aren’t really all that great. Some are past their one great breakthrough of their life-times. Positive creativity is often easy to overlook, and just as often delusional.
Price or total compensation? That would be a pretty handy dandy indicator, but we’d still have the occasional problem of some crazed billionaire clearing the way for a brilliant enemy operative… enemy of the USA, that is.
Yes, I know I have asked variants of this question in several places, but have yet to hear back or think of a good answer.
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We already do have formal visa/immigration programs for “the best and the brightest,” in the form of the O-1 work visa, the EB-1 green card category and National Interest Waiver. I believe these work fairly well, though I have advocated broadening them somewhat.
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If I were planted in the Trump press core I would ask what portion of the Trump Empire are guest workers and illegals. Justifiably they hold jobs ‘merkuns won’t do’?
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[…] had earlier praised Donald Trump’s position on H-1B on August 16, a couple of days later I wrote an outraged blog piece reporting that Trump had”clarified” his position, in that he thinks those who are hired as […]
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[…] A+ rating. “Well, forget what I said on Trump and H-1Bs,” the UC Davis professor wrote in a post on his blog, adding: “Someone got to […]
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