The Usual Targets

Throughout history, foreigners have been the scapegoats -- and the targets -- during turbulent times. Regardless of whether the proximate cause is civil strife, geopolitical conflict, or economic upheaval, people are quick to point the finger of blame at those who are seen as "different" in some way. Sometimes the methods chosen are brutally direct, with victimizers resorting to harassment and outright violence. At other times, the discrimination is more subtle, like what we see described in the following Wall Street Journal report, "U.S. Deters Hiring of Foreigners as Joblessness Grows."

Recipients of Bailout Funds Face Hurdles to Recruit Skilled Guest Workers; Cutbacks Sought From Seasonal Employers

As more Americans lose their jobs, the U.S. government is actively discouraging the recruitment of foreign workers, from dude ranchers and fruit pickers to lifeguards and computer programmers.

At least three avenues of legal immigration have seen roadblocks erected. In the most visible and controversial move, companies receiving federal bailout money now face extra hurdles before they can hire highly skilled guest workers on an H-1B visa. On Friday, the Labor Department will close a public-comment period for a proposal to suspend an agricultural guest-worker program, known as the H-2A.

The State Department is asking some sponsors of the J-1 visa -- seasonal employers such as hotels, golf resorts and summer camps -- to reduce dependence on foreign labor. "Basically, because of the economic downturn, it will be difficult to place these people in jobs," said State Department spokesman Andy Lainey, confirming that a letter from the agency asked sponsors to make cuts "voluntarily."

With the unemployment rate at 8.1% and approaching double digits, the U.S. finds its longstanding quandary over immigration growing even more difficult. On one hand, fewer Americans have jobs and competition for available work is intensifying. On the other, the Obama administration says it wants to resist moves toward protectionism -- at least in the trade of goods and services -- and will push that view at next week's London summit with the leaders of the Group of 20 nations.

Immigration advocates say it is hypocritical not to apply the same approach to the flow of people.

"You don't abandon regulations because you have one bad year," said Jeanne M. Malitz, an immigration lawyer in San Diego who represents many growers who are trying to plan their harvests but are uncertain of their labor source. They have relied on the H-2A program, which allows guest agriculture workers to stay as long as 10 months. A spokeswoman for the Labor Department said a decision on whether the program will be suspended for nine months will be made in "a couple of months."

The H-2A program requires growers to try to fill vacancies with Americans first. Some farms, Ms. Malitz said, are seeing U.S. applicants for the first time in years, but remain apprehensive. "Will they stay?" she asks. "They quit in the middle of the season. They don't like it."

Indeed, an economic downturn tests an argument that has been the bedrock of legal, employer-sponsored migration: Americans won't or can't do certain jobs. Among the highly skilled, perhaps they didn't know programming languages such as Java or C++. Among the lower skilled, they didn't want to work with their hands, get dirty, or sweat.

At the Bitterroot Ranch in Dubois, Wyo., owner Bayard Fox said the dude ranch has sponsored equestrians from the U.K. and France, and cooks and housekeepers from Germany, under a summertime J-1 visa -- intended for foreign college students and trainees. But he doesn't plan to do that this year. Business is off, he said, and for a change there are enough Americans applying for jobs. Wyoming's 3.7% unemployment rate is the nation's lowest.

"The American pool may be small for highly qualified equestrian jobs, but has gotten bigger on account of the employment crisis," he said. "Some dude ranches are not getting the bookings, so they are just not opening this year."

Jack Brooks is the rare employer who calls himself "desperate to find people." Every year, the co-owner of the century-old J.M. Clayton Co. in Cambridge, Md., has relied on a dozen seasonal guest workers, mostly from Mexico, to pick the meat out of Maryland blue crabs all day long, March till November. But H-2B visas, as they are known, were all exhausted this year. So Mr. Brooks is trying to find Americans to do the job.

Three people responded to a newspaper advertisement. On the day one was to report to work, she called and said she had found something permanent.

"I can't blame her," said Mr. Brooks. "Imagine losing your job every year around Thanksgiving....I fear if we hire a few locals, they'll be gone as soon as the economy turns around."

Nearby, Bryan Hall, the fourth-generation owner of G.W. Hall & Sons, is in the same predicament. Dorchester County, where the crab-processing industry is based, had a 9.1% unemployment rate in January, second highest in the state. "I know unemployment's up, but I can't find Americans to do this job," Mr. Hall said.

Critics of the visa programs blame sponsors for driving down wages. Mr. Brooks said he offered the no-show hire an entry-level salary of $6.71 plus some incentives by piece and pound, and the potential to double her salary with experience.

"With our competition in Southeast Asia, we can't pay more," he said. "It's just better to close." The irony isn't lost on both sides of the debate: Foreigners are needed so Americans can compete with...foreigners.

To be sure, nearly all players in the global economy have grappled with the question of how open borders should be. In Europe, several countries with steep unemployment rates are paying migrants to return home.

The U.S. government's attitude marks a stark turnaround. During the boom years, Congress actually raised the number of H-1B visas, reserved for highly skilled immigrants. Now, some economists have suggested that allowing more foreigners into the U.S. -- say, an immigrant who buys a house in exchange for a green card -- would actually help jump-start the economy.

But a public beleaguered by lost jobs seems loath to embrace such an idea. The federal economic-stimulus package restricts H-1B hires among companies that receive funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Program. They must prove they have tried to recruit American workers at prevailing wages and that foreigners aren't replacing U.S. citizens.

Comments

[roger]

Yea.... remember the dust bowl migration to CA.
my guess is you where born after the 60's you never heard of it

[MichaelN]

I've read "Financial Armageddon" twice and will pick up "When Giants Fall" tomorrow. If I'm not mistaken, both books predict rising unemployment and so I believe it foolish to increase immigration solely for the purpose of filling jobs and thus preventing Americans from applying. Wouldn't this provide an additional reason for negative societal stress?

I'm 49 and so of course I know the argument about "jobs that Americans won't take," etc, but wasn't it the Wall St Journal that ran an article yesterday announcing that IBM was laying off 4,000 employees in the US and transferring their job functions to India? The reason for this was NOT that they can't find enough Americans to fill the technical positions - but that they want to outsource the position to India and save money.

I don't think that "the victims" with IBM are the "foreigners" - they are the Americans who trained the staff who are now taking over their jobs - in India.

Now, for just a moment, try and visualize any country other than America that wouldn't riot or burn effigies if their jobs were being outsourced to, say, America?

[Flin]

I'm not sure which word of the 'temporary visa' definition of the h1-b you don't understand. The US already allows in 1 million new citizens each year.

You want to empty out some of those tent cities? STOP ALL IMMIGRATION FOR 5 YEARS!

You got illegals on the bottom and H-1, F-1, O-1, L-1 visas from the top which are largely untracked and their caps are not limited as required by law.

It ain't about the foreigners, it's about the jobs! Please show us mercy and donate your life, your family and property to a foreigner. Why don't you show us the way???

[Fu]

The H-1B program was always a scam to hire cheap foreign labor. It should have never existed. It has destroyed our engineering base.

>say, an immigrant who buys a house in exchange
>for a green card

Houses are already highly overpriced. Why do we need more people to drive up the prices even more?

It true that American was built from immigrants and has a long history of immigration. But things change. The US already have 300 million people. Why on Earth do we need even more people in the US?

[Fu]

haha... I'm not making a good showing:
It true => It's true
already have => already has
that American => that America

[Gman]

One of the pillars of immigration advocates is that "Americans are too lazy/prissy to do the jobs filled by immigrants". You see that sentiment in this article as well. That may have been true in the bubble years, but with half a million American citizens losing their jobs every month that argument just isn't true any longer. A couple of weeks ago there was a story posted on this blog (intended to pull our heartstrings for the plight of the poor illegal immigrants), about 28 illegals who were rounded up and deported. The next day hundreds of unemployed American citizens lined up to apply for those jobs. There simply is no justification at this time to support allowing millions of new job-seekers into this country.

[ArtE]

Where I work at, I see hoards of Indian programmers on-site for the "knowledge transfer" to move the jobs off-shore. In large firms, there is a good chance that there will only be Americanos in jobs that require business facing communications skills. All other jobs are considered "tradeable" by our leaders regardless of the security risk or the poor productivity of the off-shoring initiatives.

This has been developing for a long time due to US university students not wanting to take on career paths that require a lot of work in school or can't make you a millionare real fast. At some point, the constrained skill supply here and insanely low prices for off-shore programmer labor tipped and we accelerated the exodus of many more of these positions.

I think that, very soon, only Defense Contractors (if there is a US jobs clause) will have American programmers. Maybe even they will off-shore all the subcontacts.

As the damn FIRE economy tide goes out in this depression, we are swimming naked as far as alternative jobs prospects. Services jobs will size to economy and without the fake wealth manufacturing of the FIRE economy, we are way smaller due to a lot of digitally delivered services and real manufacturing having relocated off-shore.

[Brad Surly]

Mindless adherence to an over-arching principle of "non-discrimination" is silly and contrary to human experience. Not all discrimination is wrong. Post-secondary schools discriminate in favor of those who actually have a chance to graduate; sports teams from middle school on up discriminate against those who can help them win; employers discriminate in favor of those who can help them maximize profit; speculators in the marriage market discriminate against "losers" in the "hotness" lottery. Why, then, is it ipso facto a problem from your perspective, Mr. Panzner, to favor citizens who contribute to society to a much greater degree, both financially and socially, than persons who are not citizens? Again, to consider this somehow odd, wrong, or unethical is downright bizarre to me, but it is unfortunately par for the course for those whose automatic reaction to disparate treatment of any kind is to label it "discriminatory" and thus, according to contemporary liberalism, necessarily immoral.

[CharlesHK]

I fear that people are confusing two different issues. One is xenophobia (and other isms) and the other is the US economy. I understand both issues. My wife is an immigrant and I work in high-tech with many people that have work visas.

Does xenophobia and bigotry exist? Yes, obviously it does! Is xenophobia and bigotry the primary reason US citizens are asking for work visas quotas to be reduced? No, it’s the economy.

The fact is that work visa programs were developed to help fill hard-to-find jobs. As the workforce ebbs and flows, it can be quite helpful. Today we are in a major economic down cycle and the need for temporary workers has been significantly reduced. The logical conclusion is that the visa program quotas need to be reduced.

The argument that the US was built by immigrants is really a moot point. There is no argument that immigration is a good thing long-term, but the need for temporary workers does not hold constant. The need sometimes increases and it sometimes decreases. Currently the need has sharply decreased to historic lows.

This is only temporary. As the need rises again, and it will, then the quotas can be increased. Keeping the economy in the US as strong as possible is key to providing opportunity to people in the future and that sometimes requires taking logical, although uncomfortable, measures.

[Borealis]

You're exhibiting an unwonted credulity on this subject. Nobody who's been paying attention to this issue would take anything the WSJ has to say about "jobs Americans can't or won't do" with anything but several industrial-sized drums worth of salt, and would be exercising a great deal more skepticism toward the perennial hysteria about "skills shortages" and "crops rotting in the fields".

What many, many of these employers (of both unskilled and skilled) want from "willing workers" is a more than an honest day's work for less than an honest day's pay and working conditions. As Fu points out, letting the cheap labor lobbyists run wild among credulous or venal Congressmen for the last several decades is having a pernicious effect on the nation's engineering base (as well as any other career that can be offshored). Contrary to ArtE's claim, young Americans don't avoid career paths because they require hard work and commitment; they will prudently avoid investing time and money in training if they know - from seeing their parents' careers destroyed by labor arbitrage - that employers will kick them to the curb at the first opportunity. (As it stands, it's remarkable how many employees who are being replaced by "the best and brightest" with "specialized skills" have to train their replacements in just those "specialized skills" that the sack-ee ostensibly lacks.)

Don't know about you, but I'm fed with CEOs who will offshore any job that can't be nailed down, replace with visa holders on-site as many skilled citizens as they can get away with, practice vicious age-discrimination, all while whining to Congress for more, more, more visas - and then turn around and hypocritically wail and gnash their teeth about non-existent or self-created "skills shortages". (And the universities have been going along for the ride, with access to unlimited visas to glut research jobs and shut out citizens from internships and other necessary experience.)

It is beyond absurd to claim that it is "discriminatory" for a nation to protect the welfare of its own citizens. China and India aren't troubling themselves with these sorts of globalist pieties - though everybody is of course these days hypocritically or self-servingly slinging "protectionist" at everyone else. They are, properly, looking out for their own. That "scapegoating foreigners" slander is of a piece with the most cynical, self-serving corporate propaganda. Shame on you. As somebody quipped on a blog recently, "I guess the definition of 'xenophobe' now is 'an American who wants to keep his job'".

[roger]

Nationalistic boundaries ..the band aids of history & the
most unnatural thing in the world.Migration is a basic law
of nature,better we learn to live with it.
In the 1920's we where 90 million in the US & 2 1/2 billion
world wide against 350 million now & 6 1/2 billion in the world.
GOT THE PICTURE?

[Angela]

Migration may be the "basic law of nature" but in civilized society, people respect the boundaries of others. Our border is simply a boundary, designed to keep one thing in and another thing out. We cannot just decide that "migration is a law of nature" and then let our border be compromised. For the safety of the people inside the border, this is not a good thing.

[bobn1955]

The H1-B program is a scam. Always was. There are plenty of qualified American engineers and programmers - the americans are typically more qulaified. But the foreigners are cheaper, and the H1-B visa is only good as long as they are employed by the company that brought them in so the employee has *zero* leverage in any issue.

See this amazing video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbFEgFajGU - the head slimeball states that "our goal is not to find a qualified and interested American".

[Omitted Kingdom]

If you read Alan Greenspan, he regards the American workforce absolutely interchangeable and replaceable and praises the lack of union power in the United States.

Read Alan Greenspan closely because he points the way to the only jobs left in the US: health sciences, registered nurse, anesthetist, doctor, dentist, xray tech, respiratory tech, nurse tech, physical therapist. In other words, staff to care for America's aging population.

The Plan as I have come to understand it: you pay for your retraining yourself, and if you have to use a credit card, so much the better for the banks. Retraining in health sciences is a long, multi-year process. It is not a foregone conclusion that someone who is good in IT or manufacturing will be able to retrain in health sciences.

All manufacturing jobs to China. All IT jobs to India. What's left in the US is health sciences jobs.

[farang]

What nonsense and gibberish from such a usually astute observer, Mr. Panzer.

Exactly HOW can we be "scapegoating" someone that isn't even in our country yet? We in America have some RESPONSIBILITY to be sure FOREIGNERS find FULL EMPLOYMENT in OUR country???????????????????? While tent cities flourish in California?

Geeeez, isn't the heat, it's the stupidity.....

Greenspan stated quite clearly in 2003 that when the Debt reached a critical level, we would simply "Monetize the Debt." Now they label it "quantitative Easing".

I call it the Weimar Dollar Strategy to force folks to desperation. Brace yourselves folks, here in Thailand, they are CROWING about the Chinese push to dismantle the US Dollar as the Reserve currency: soon, no longer can we print our Debt away....Third World status, here we come!!

So, we have a deliberate assault on the dollar.

Clinton stated quite clearly when he signed Bush1's odorous NAFTA bill, that it would "level the playing field" for workers throughout the Americas. Did you think he meant he wanted to pay Mexican workers a wage that would enable them to live like American workers did in 1993???? Yeah, right.

Gibberish, we KNOW what he meant. Drag us all down down to the level of a poor farm worker. While stationing US troops fresh from murdering innocent citizens in iraq and Afghanistan to patrol our streets. WONDER WHY??? Grow a brain, people, grow some BALLS.

Yesterday, we had the president of Brazil blame "white faced, blue-eyed" people for their problems in Brazil and the world, yet he even was spouting the "protectionism is BAD" propaganda line, straight from the CFR handbook. Sure, bad for HIS workers that dump their goods on us.

SUUUURE, protecting a wage that allows a American nurse or bus driver to own a home and send his kids to college is BAD POLICY. Protecting a standard of living that LIFTS OUR SOCIETY is BAD, if you happen to believe in fairies, unicorns and "globalization."

Those of us in the REAL world understand EXACTLY what they are up to: The Nation, a daily here in Thailand, showed Tim Geithner leaving the NYC HQ of the CFR this week. Got his marching orders: SCREW AMERICANS UNTIL THEY SCREAM.

Prepping the Alabamans, Mississippi double digit IQ masses and low brow Texans to invade Iran, on Israel's command.

"Scapegoating"....luckily I wasn't drinking coffee when I read it, I might have burned myself spitting it out.

Perhaps this website is no longer the breath of fresh air it once was......

[Charlie]

big business is a numbers game the cheaper the labor the bigger the profits and the stock price rises there's no mystery here. Do you think big business actually cares about Americans. If it were their choice they would operate overseas, wait some of them already do.

[Electric Bicycles]

I agree with the article, people who comes to work in the US, they don't come because they have money, they come because they don't have money but they have brains, that is what the H-1B program has been based on, it has been very useful to the US economy and technological growth even Bill gates pointed that out saying that we can at some point enforce stricter immigration laws but make an exception for those who are smart and are considered to be pioneer in their field, I think this is fair statement.