MICHELLE MALKIN: QUESTIONS ABOUT HIGH-TECH GUEST-WORKERS SHOULD BE ‘CENTERPIECE’ OF GOP PRES. DEBATE

by TONY LEE
10 Nov 2015

Conservative journalist Michelle Malkin and co-author John Miano say that questions regarding the guest-worker programs and high-tech immigration that are devastating American workers should be a centerpiece of tonight’s GOP presidential debate.

Malkin and Miano have just published the timely and must-read book, Sold Out: How High-Tech Billionaires & Bipartisan Beltway Crapweasels Are Screwing America’s Best & Brightest Workers. On Tuesday’s Breitbart News Daily (6AM-9AM ET on Sirius XM Patriot channel 125), Malkin told host and Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon that the discussion about foreign guest-workers in the tech industry “blew up a couple of years ago.”

That’s when Jennifer Weddel, the wife of a semiconductor engineer who could not find work, took advantage of a YouTube forum and asked President Barack Obama what exactly he was doing to stop the layoffs of American workers like her husband who are being replaced with “cheap, foreign journeymen, mediocre workers… largely from India.”

Malkin, who was writing about all things immigration long before the mainstream media and even the conservative press started to cover the issues, mentioned that Obama stumbled when answering the question, “doing exactly what these Beltway crapweasels have done and deny the massive, glaring reality right in front of the their face and then lie” about how America’s guest-worker laws are betraying the best and the brightest in America.

Malkin said she would ask the GOP candidates the same question Weddel asked Obama and would love to see the Fox Business Network’s moderators and the Wall Street Journal questioner (Malkin pointed out that the Wall Street Journal is the “notorious home of the editorial page that declared that there shall be open borders”) bring up the issue in tonight’s debate.

“We’re trying to force this issue and help facilitate its rise at the forefront of all of these debates,” Malkin said. “I definitely hope it is not only going to come up in a cursory way, or a grudging, reluctant way. It ought to be a centerpiece.”

Malkin asked, “How can we have these debates about jobs, [the] economy without talking about the deleterious effect that these kinds of foreign guest-worker rackets have on the best and brightest of America?”

Miano asked if there really was a shortage of American workers, how come 250-300 American workers at Disney got replaced by foreign workers? Miano further added that the notion that there is such a shortage, which has been debunked by numerous nonpartisan studies and scholars, is “complete baloney.” Miano, a former computer programmer, said that “I’ve worked with these H-1B workers for many years, and the very best among them were average and most were completely incompetent. “ He said it is also ironic that “the companies don’t end up saving money in the long term” because American workers are more productive.

“The problem is these decisions are made by accountants at the high level who just see American programmers are $10 more an hour more than foreign programmers,” he said.

Malkin added that in addition to the “anecdotal evidence flooding the headlines now and forcing their way into the mainstream media that has looked the other way for so long… you’ve got the New York Times playing Johnny-come-lately now… and following much of great work that has been done in the tech press” on guest-workers. Malkin blasted mainstream media journalists, “many in the pockets of the donor class themselves,” who are “pretending that somehow that it is aberrant that you have Disney and Southern California Edison” that have recently made national headlines by abusing the H-1B visa laws. Malkin emphasized that the wages in the tech sector—the primary indicator of whether there is an employment shortage—have been stagnant since the Clinton era, largely because major U.S. companies have used H-1B visa laws to import cheap foreign workers who are no better qualified than the Americans they are replacing.

She praised scholars Norm Matloff, Ron Hira, and Hal Salzman for “for doing the yeoman’s work [that] completely blows out of the water that there is a STEM worker shortage,” and she mentioned that her book traces much of the propaganda regarding the so-called shortage of American workers to some of the government science foundations that had every incentive to create the myth in the first place during the 1990s.

Malkin said that the “platitudes that so many of these establishment candidates just roll out of their tongues about supporting the American dream while it’s being sabotaged by so many of their billionaire donors” just “sickens” her.

She also said her book is not just about H-1B visas and emphasized that “it’s important to have a comprehensive understanding of all of the ways in which these Silicon Valley companies are circumventing the already flimsy protections that were supposed to be in H-1B law.”

To that end, Malkin said the second question she would ask the GOP candidates is, “Do you support a moratorium on the B-1 program, killing the EB-5 program, putting the freeze on the L-visa, the F-1 visa, and do you support the same kind of scrutiny and moratorium on OPT [Optional Practical Training] in the wake of this injunction by the 5th Circuit on Obama’s executive amnesty?”

http://www.breitbart.com/big-governm...p-pres-debate/