New H-1B Bill Sadly “More of the Same”: Part I

So, turns out that “the usual suspects” have introduced a new H-1B reform bill, proudly announced in a press release last week. Let’s see…we have Grassley, Durbin, Pascrell etc., and the new kid on the block, Khanna. To understand the bill, one must first understand the views of these men. I’ll explain the background in this post, and then present my analysis of the bill in the next one.

Khanna displaced longtime Rep. Mike Honda, a Democrat, for the latter’s Silicon Valley seat in 2016, on his second try. As a Democrat himself, not yet 40 years old, Khanna would have under ordinary circumstances failed to unseat Honda. But Khanna had enormous support from the Silicon Valley moneyed and powerful. As Politico reported at the time,

The hottest new startup in Silicon Valley isn’t a tech company; it’s Ro Khanna… The 36-year old attorney and former Commerce Department official, who is challenging six-term incumbent Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.) to represent Silicon Valley in Congress, has the overwhelming support of the deep-pocketed tech community’s CEOs and venture capitalists…Khanna’s donor rolls read like a who’s who of the Bay Area tech community: Google chairman Eric Schmidt, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, eBay CEO John Donahoe, and dozens of other tech or venture capital bigwigs…

Not surprisingly then, Khanna, with whom I had a formal public debate sponsored by the Voice of America in 2017, completely toes the Silicon Valley party line re H-1B:  “Intels Good, Infosyses Bad,” meaning that the mainstream firms who hire H-1Bs from the pools of foreign students at US universities, use the H-1B program responsibly, while the Indian outsourcing firms such as Infosys are the main abusers of the visa.  Note that the “Intels” include not only the household-name megafirms, but also smaller ones such as for instance the Bank of the West; the key defining property is hiring foreign students from US campuses.

(The above link is the last of four posts in which I reported on the debate and its aftermath. Follow the links if you are interested in more about Khanna.)

As I’ve explained in numerous blog posts (click here for a summary), the “Intels” are just as culpable as the “Infosyses,” actually even more so. So the “Intels Good, Infosyses Bad” is false and highly misleading. Yet, IT SELLS. The American people, and in particular Congress and the press, generally have a high opinion of the Intels. So when the latter say in unctuous tones, “Yes, H-1B is badly abused but not by us; it’s those Indian firms,” it sounds plausible. Again, it’s blatant scapegoating — I strongly suspect the industry PR people go out of their way to insert the word “Indian” — but the PR people know very well what sells. Sadly, even many of the H-1B critics have bought into IGIB.

So, what about those other authors of the new bill? In summary:

• Grassley, a very decent, common sense person, was originally quite a critic of the visa, and at first was introducing good legislation (though it never got anywhere). However, at some point he “fell in with the bad kids,” and has had the IGIB view for some years now.
• Durbin has always viewed the issue in IGIB terms.
• Pascrell, though also an IGIBer, has also introduced some good, though also unsucessful legislation.

So — my gosh, what a surprise! — this new bill is all IGIB. In fact, in the above-linked press release, the quotes of ALL 7 POLITICIANS each boil down to IGIB.

Next post: My analysis of the bill itself, and what GOOD reform should look like.