Thread: Major candidates for Obama administration support H-1B

From Professor Norm Matloff's newsletter:

Recently I posted some disturbing news on major candidates for the
Obama administration. See

http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/O ... tPicks.txt

There is more news of this sort to report now.

Tomorrow's Wall Street Journal reports that "Republican Sen. Judd Gregg
of New Hampshire has emerged as President Barack Obama's top choice for
commerce secretary, with an announcement coming as soon as Monday, an
Obama administration official and lawmakers said Sunday." Given this
phrasing and the source, it would appear that this is more than rumor,
though of course no one knows until the event occurs.

Nevertheless, if it's true, then DOC would be headed by a hard-core
supporter of the H-1B program, as made quite clear in Gregg's video,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvoHBqtMR4k

Next we have that "McKinsey Global Institute Director Diana Farrell has
joined the Obama Administration as deputy director of the National
Economic Council and deputy assistant to the President for economic
policy," according to a letter distributed by McKinsey. As many of you
know, McKinsey is in the vanguard of promoting offshoring. Her views
on H-1B are naturally in line with the word "global" in the McKinsey
Institute's title. Note for instance, this from 2006, at
www.workpermit.com/news/2006_01_23/aust ... grants.htm

But Diana Farrell, director of the McKinsey Global Institute, said
that in fields such as engineering, the U.S. and other developed
countries needed to import talent or send work overseas because
universities weren't producing enough graduates to replace retiring
baby boomers and fill new positions.

This of course is pure industry lobbyist phrasing.

And here's a howler: Ms. Farrell penned an article in the Harvard
Business Review, Sept. 2008, titled, "New Thinking for a New Financial
Order." The summary says, "World financial assets are growing faster
than the world economy. Confronting that and other modern realities of
global finance requires more than regulatory reform: It calls for deeper
thinking..."

On the plus side, I forgot to mention last time that VP Biden appointed
Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute as chief economic
adviser. EPI, closely tied to labor, has generally been critical of
H-1B and offshoring.

Norm

Well, that may change and fast. The AP article about H-1B abuse by banks receiving bailout money has gone viral, as has Grassley's questioning of Microsoft. The AP article is showing over 650 appearances, which is not all of them, and has even reached my small local paper. You may well imagine the response to find out that the same companies that have let go of tens of thousands of Americans sought foreign workers to replace them and will probably do so again once the yearly quota opens this April.

If you missed the AP article, here is a link to it:

http://www.benningtonbanner.com/business/ci_11608404