Following Up: Mercury News Treats H1B Debate as Non-News

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Following Up, H1B, immigrants, Immigration, journalism, Mercury News, Neil Chase, Norman Matloff, Ro Khanna, Silicon Valley, tech, tech workers, workers

The story of the video of a major debate on U.S. immigrant tech worker policies that earlier this week looked like it was being kept under wraps now looks like the story of a video that never was – due to some astonishingly unenterprising journalism from the Mercury News, Silicon Valley’s main newspaper and therefore a leading source of information on the technology industry.

As RealityChek regulars know, the story began with a June 1 debate in Silicon Valley centering on the controversial H1B immigrant visas. Squaring off were the Valley’s new Democratic Member of Congress, Ro Khanna and Norman Matloff, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis. (A tech entrepreneur took part in the event, too, but in a minor way.)

Technology companies claim that the H1B and similar programs are crucial to accessing the world’s best talent. Critics charge that they’ve overwhelmingly been used to cut their costs by replacing native-born U.S. workers with much cheaper foreign counterparts. Khanna favors relatively modest changes to H1B policies; Matloff believes major surgery is needed.

Matloff, who’s become a valued friend of mine, has written that the event marked  the first time a debate has been held between an elected official and a researcher on the topic, a major event in that sense. (Khanna has not disagreed.) Matloff also noted that a videographer from the Mercury News was present and apparently recording the proceedings.

Yet the Mercury News failed to cover the debate and never posted a recording on its website. Matloff asked a reporter on the paper to find out why, and was told that a recording existed, but that “it was essentially scrapped as a standalone report, but there’s apparently a possibility that parts of it will be used in coverage of Rep. Khanna. Not sure the reason(s) for this…” Matloff then speculated that the paper failed to make the video public because Khanna performed poorly – leading the Mercury News, which editorially has sided with the tech industry on H1B and related issues, to consign it to non-event status.

I emphatically agreed that the video’s import deserved to see the light of day, and last Sunday urged the Mercury News to post it both to perform a public service on a major technology policy area and to affirm its journalistic chops. Gratifyingly, the post and follow-up tweets prompted Khanna readily to agree, and to call openly for the video’s posting. (For the record, he contends that it was Matloff who was highly ineffective.)

Two days later, Matloff and I got answers from Mercury News editor Neil Chase. In the version he sent Matloff, he wrote, “We had a photographer there who captured some still photos and some video for use with a future story, but we didn’t attend with the intention of taping the full debate and did not.”

Based on information Matloff had shared with me and my own journalistic experience, yesterday, I sent Chase the following email. I had hoped to get a response from him in time to prepare this post, but no such luck yet:

Dear Neil,

Many thanks for your comment to my blog and my apologies for the short delay in responding.  

I must confess, though, that the response leaves me somewhat mystified on two counts.

First, the statement that the Mercury News videographer did not “record the whole event” doesn’t track with an email from one of your reporters, Ethan Baron, to Matloff.  Baron said, in response to the latter’s query re the video’s availability, “it looks like the video was essentially scrapped as a standalone report, but there’s apparently a possibility that parts of it will be used in coverage of Rep. Khanna.”  Granted he’s conveying some uncertainty here. But Matloff also has written in his blog that “the videographer seemed to be taping continuously.”  In addition, Matloff noted that “the video cam [was] on a high tripod, seemingly much for an occasional clip.”

Similarly, it sounds odd, as your email indicates, to give the videographer the responsibility for choosing the portions of the debate to be shot.  Was this the case?  If so, what were the criteria used to determine what was captured?  Or were they simply taken to get a bit of file footage of each participant, irrespective of what they were saying at the time?  

Second, I certainly don’t mean to tell you how to do your job.  But as someone with a journalistic background, I’m hard pressed to understand the paper’s seemingly offhand attitude toward this event.  After all, the H1B issue has been described as crucial by the dominant industry in the region served by the Mercury News, and it’s surely of comparable importance to all your tech worker subscribers.  The new Congressman from your area, Rep. Khanna, has been touted by several national publications as a rising star in the Democratic party, and possibly all of national politics.  To his credit, he was willing to appear in public with an outspoken, prominent critic of the H1B and related programs – a rare event at the very least, according to Matloff.  And of course, H1B and other immigration issues have become even greater controversies nationwide since the last presidential campaign heated up.  So from all appearances, the leading paper of Silicon Valley would be expected to view the debate was highly newsworthy from the get-go.  And yet it seems from your email that no coverage was ever planned.  

Now it’s clear that some fur was flying at the event, and that Rep. Khanna and Matloff are begun feuding in public over what was said and over their qualifications to claim expert status on the issue.  I.e., because of this aftermath, their debate has become by any reasonable definition even more newsworthy.     

So I respectfully make the two following requests:

1. Would you check whatever video archive you have – including whatever the videographer might possess – to determine conclusively whether a full recording of the debate is indeed available?  (If not, I would hope to find out how it was disposed of, and why.)

2. Would you assign a reporter to cover this emerging Khanna-Matloff dispute — in which a local Congressman who’s increasingly prominent nationally has publicly gone after a critic on an issue that’s one of his top legislative priorities, and a major national concern?  The Mercury News would get an excellent scoop, and perform a valuable public service at the same time.  

Thanks for your consideration, and I look forward to your reply.

Sincerely,

Alan

As per the email, I’m still hoping that the Mercury News finds a recording and shares it, and that it reports on the differences between Khanna and Matloff, which cut to the heart of the debate on H1B and broader questions and arguments concerning the future of the domestic workforce in an age of rapid innovation. At a time when Fake News abounds, it would amount for welcome coverage of some real news.

Following Up: Progress in Freeing the Mercury News H1B Debate Video

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Following Up, H1B, Immigration, Mercury News, Norman Matloff, Ro Khanna, Silicon Valley, social media, tech workers, Twitter

What a day it’s been for RealityChek on Twitter today! Yesterday, I posted on the peculiar failure of the Mercury News, the top newspaper in technology industry center Silicon Valley, to post a video it made of a landmark and apparently heated recent debate on the H1B visa program. Under this controversial feature of U.S. immigration policy, American employers can secure foreign workers they can demonstrate are needed because they boast special talents that generally can’t be found in the U.S. workforce.  

Thanks to this item, and to some tweets today, I seem to have persuaded the most prominent participant, Rep. Ro Khanna (D.-Cal.) to ask the paper to release the full version.

Another participant in the event, University of California, Davis computer science professor Norman Matloff, had already made such a request, but got a “Thanks, but no thanks”-type answer.

So this morning, I decided, via Twitter, to ask Khanna to join the campaign. It was great to see him respond, and after a few tweets back and forth, at about 1:45 PM EST, he declared, “I have told them [the Mercury News] I would welcome the release of the tape if they have one. I would love for this to be public. I’m all for transparency.” So let’s hope that a request from a Member of Congress will do the trick. And let’s also hope that the paper still has the video!

I’ve asked Khanna to let me know the Mercury News‘ answer as soon as he can, and of course, I’ll pass the word on to you – ideally with a link – right away. And FYI, you can get in on this kind of action first-hand yourself by following me at @AlanTonelson. As with RealityChek, feedback is always welcome, and that includes heavy doses of snark!

P.S. Just for a bit of context, a major point of contention between Khanna and Matloff is a bill sponsored by Democratic Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois and Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa that attempts to address H1B-related problems.  Khanna is another sponsor of the legislation; Matloff considers its remedies inadequate.

Glad I Didn’t Say That! No More Excuses for the H1B Visa Tech Immigrants Program

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Ananya Bhattacharya, Glad I Didn't Say That!, H1B, immigrants, immigratiion, innovation, Jobs, Qz.com, tech workers

“Trump’s crackdown on H-1B visas could prevent the next US unicorn born of Indian immigrants”

–Ananya Bhattacharya, Quartz India, February 5, 2017

Share of Indian engineering graduates capable of writing “the correct logic for a program, a minimum requirement for any programming job”: 4.77%

–Ananya Bhattacharya, Quartz India, April 20, 2017

(Sources: “Trump’s crackdown on H-1B visas could prevent the next US unicorn born of Indian immigrants,” by Ananya Bhattacharya, Quartz India, Februay 5, 2017, https://qz.com/900729/trumps-crackdown-on-h-1b-visas-could-prevent-the-next-us-unicorn-born-of-indian-immigrants/ and “Fewer than 5% of engineers trained in India are cut out for high-skill programming jobs,” by Ananya Bhattacharya, Ibid., April 20, 2017, https://qz.com/964843/less-than-5-of-india-engineers-are-cut-out-for-high-skill-programming-jobs/)

Im-Politic: Beyond Parody with Uber-Pundit Thomas Friedman

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China, corruption, foreign students, higher education, Im-Politic, Immigration, Muslims, Reuters, tech workers, The New York Times, Thomas Friedman, travel ban, Trump

Last March, I took one look at a column by Thomas Friedman on then-presidential candidate Donald Trump’s trade policies and concluded that the multiple New York Times Pulitzer winner must have been hacked. Any other interpretation would have meant that Friedman was either stunningly ignorant about these subjects or (at best) willfully ignorant.

A year later, it’s painfully obvious that either some impostor is still publishing pieces with The Times, or that Friedman is still reality-challenged. His March 29 offering contains the same kinds of trade fakeonomics and crackpot geopolitics as that piece I spotlighted last March. But even worse this time around are some out-and-out howlers about major implications of the Trump administration’s travel ban proposals.

According to Friedman, President Trump wants to “make it harder for people to immigrate to America, particularly Muslims. This…signals the smartest math and science students in the world to start their start-ups overseas and not in America. “

As evidence, Friedman writes that “NBC News reported last week that applications from foreign students, notably from China, India and the Middle East, ‘are down this year at nearly 40 percent of schools that answered a recent survey by the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.’”

In other words, could any Trump policy be more catastrophically dumb, especially over the long-term? The trouble is, when you look at these matters in any depth whatever, you realize how deeply silly these claims and fears are. In the first place, the idea that foreign students on U.S. college campuses are all or mainly or even disproportionately academic superstars is completely fallacious. And nowhere is it more fallacious than in the case of Chinese students.

For anyone knowing anything about contemporary China knows that it’s become one of the world’s leading plutocracies. The wealthy generally either make (or keep or lose) their fortunes depending on their connections with or via help from the Chinese government, or are comprised of political leaders themselves who have exploited their power and contacts to become millionaires many times over. Given the astronomical costs of American higher education (especially by the standards of even the typical Chinese urban – meaning relatively well-off – family), it could not be clearer that the main distinguishing characteristic of Chinese students on U.S. campuses is family money, not brains.

The money angle is further strengthened by admissions practices of so many American colleges and universities. After all, even well-endowed schools prize foreign students to a great extent because they’re wealthy enough to pay “full freight.” That is, they don’t need financial aid. Indeed, they’re profit centers. In fact, as I reported last October, a Reuters investigation found out that many Chinese students have gained access to American colleges and universities through payments to these institutions that can only be called corruption. In other words, their parents have bought their way in. Would most of this bribery be necessary if the kids were such geniuses?

Moreover, if you think that the money issue is confined to China, think again. For an expensive American college education is also far beyond the reach of most families in most of the rest of the world, too – especially the developing world.

As for the world’s math and science whizzes, especially from the Muslim world, avoiding the United States and choosing other regions and countries to open up businesses, ask yourself the simple question, “Like where?” Economically speaking, America’s growth prospects continue looking brighter – as they have for most of the current global recovery – than those of other major economies. The United States also offers among the world’s best levels of intellectual property protection.

And as for tech whizzes from the Muslim world, does Friedman really think they’re going to be increasingly welcome in, say, Europe, given its understandable anxieties about Islamic extremism and global terrorism? Japan and South Korea, it’s widely known, aren’t welcoming to any immigrants. And the idea that China, which has long battled Muslim separatists in its western regions, is going to open its doors wider just doesn’t pass the laugh test.

Canada and Australia are unmistakably examples of national economies that are both successful and immigration- (and refugee-) friendly. But I’ll take my chances on America retaining its competitive edge over them for many decades to come.

These kinds of gargantuan goofs and omissions would be bad enough coming from a run-of-the-mill journalist or even pundits. Coming from Friedman, they are nothing less than appalling. For his almost uniquely lofty status stems for the most part from his (supposedly) unique knowledge of how the world works in the most fundamental senses. Indeed, he’s especially well known for writing books purporting to know what the world’s becoming in the same fundamental senses. Columns like his latest indicate that Friedman at best should spend more time learning about the present than predicting the future.

Im-Politic: Sadly Poetic Justice for California Open Borders Enthusiasts

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ACA, Affordable Care Act, border security, California, Disney, H1B, illegal immigrants, illegal immigration, Im-Politic, Immigration, Norman Matloff, Obamacare, Open Borders, San Francisco, Sanctuary Cities, tech workers, University of California

As I’ve mentioned previously, computer scientist Norman Matloff is a great source of information and analysis on immigration issues – and especially on the visa system that lets businesses replace high paid domestic tech workers with low-paid foreigners. Late last week, the University of California-Davis professor once again showed his chops. Thanks to him, I learned about a stunning instance of poetic justice for a leading national center of Open Borders policies and enthusiasm.

Surely everyone knows by now that, as a municipality, San Francisco is proud to be one of America’s most ardent cheerleaders and enablers of dangerously permissive immigration policies. Its sanctuary city status directly resulted in the murder of a young woman by an illegal immigrant criminal that it released from custody rather than comply with an extradition request from the federal government. And of course the entire Bay Area’s zeitgeist is strongly influenced by the Silicon Valley tech companies whose profits depend heavily on continually driving down labor costs by hiring relatively young and extremely cheap immigrant programmers and the like and getting rid of older, more expensive native-born employees.

In addition, these descriptions also apply to the entire state of California – which has been charged with moving ever closer to become a full-fledged sanctuary jurisdiction.

So although it’s always unfortunate when someone loses a job, some smirking is surely understandable in response to the news – summarized in this September 8 post by Matloff – that the University of California’s San Francisco branch is pink-slipping 80 of its tech workers and some of the vacant positions will be filled with H1Bs supplied by an Indian outsourcing company. Worse, at least some of the cashiered employees at this public university believe they will need to train their imported replacements – as with a widely publicized case involving the Disney Corporation two years ago.

As made clear in this comprehensive account, the university’s decision could well spread throughout its numerous branches and potentially affect thousands of tech workers. And as Matloff explains, these government tech workers

“are highly sophisticated, aggressive people who know how to pull strings. It becomes especially important in light of UC’s generous defined-benefit pension plan. If someone has worked, say 10 years, at UCSF and had planned to work 25, they are having enormous future pension sums snatched away from them. So it’s real money” they’ll be losing.

A final point worth considering. According to the executive in charge of information technology services at the University of California-San Francisco:

“the campus is facing ‘difficult circumstances’ because of declining reimbursement and the impact of the Affordable Healthcare Act, which has increased the volume of patients but limits reimbursement to around 55 cents on the dollar….”

California, of course, is a major Democratic Party stronghold, in part because its (immigrant happy) public employee unions are so enormous and so powerful. I wonder how many more state university workers will be replaced by immigrants – and how long it will take the broader state government to adopt these practices – before the Golden State’s politics begin to change.

Im-Politic: The New York Times Loses It on Trump and Immigration

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2016 elections, deportation, Donald Trump, E-Verify, H1B, ICE, illegal immigration, Im-Politic, Immigration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Jobs, Republicans, September 11, tech workers, The New York Times, visa overstays, visas, wages

The New York Times‘ recent editorial trashing of Donald Trump’s immigration proposals was so over the top and intellectually dishonest that you’d think the paper’s editorial board members and owners’ main worry was losing access to the super-cheap illegal nannies and gardeners that support their one percent-er lifestyles. Certainly nothing else about Trump’s policies can possibly justify the vehemence with which The Times attacked him.

Predictably, the editorial focused on Trump’s position on deporting America’s huge illegal immigrant population, and the related issue of birthright citizenship. Trump does deserve some criticism on this score. As I’ve argued, aside from criminal aliens, he should be focusing not on active deportation but on a policy of attrition – discouraging illegals from remaining in the country by denying them both employment opportunities and government benefits. And although I agree with Trump (and many others) that the anchor babies problem is unacceptable, it does seem that Constitutional issues will prevent any solution for many years.

But as I’ve also pointed out, mass deportation wasn’t even a part of Trump’s plan, although he did endorse the idea in a media interview. Completely indefensible, by contrast, is the paper’s charge that every plank of Trump immigration platform is “despicable,” “cruel,” “racist,” and “xenophobic.” If anything’s despicable, its much of The Times’ own tendentious analysis.

Take the editorial’s treatment of Trump’s call to make mandatory the E-Verify system that was developed to enable employers to check the legal status of job-seekers. It’s currently a crime for businesses to hire applicants residing illegally in the country, but many illegals find work anyway largely because the documents needed to prove legal status are so easy for forge, and because so many businesses simply don’t care and believe that the government really doesn’t, either.

E-Verify is a federally created “internet-based system that compares information from an employee’s Form I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification, to data from U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Social Security Administration records to confirm employment eligibility.” The good news is that it’s free to use, it produces results quickly, and its accuracy rates are not only astronomically high, but improving, according to independent auditors of this program. Moreover, E-Verify enjoys overwhelming bipartisan Congressional support. The only significant problem associated with it is that in most of the country, its use is voluntary.

So here’s how The Times characterizes Trump’s view that every U.S. employer should be brought into E-Verify to ensure that a law that’s on the books, and that the paper apparently does not oppose, is effectively enforced: It would “impose a national job-verification system so that everyone, citizens too, would need federal permission to work.”

Only somewhat less inane is The Times‘ description of Trump’s plan to “triple the number of [immigration enforcement] officers”: It would “flood the country with immigration agents….” What the paper doesn’t tell readers is that this “flood” would amount to 10,000 new employees for the Enforcement and Removal Operations branch of the Homeland Security Department’s bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Talk about crying wolf.

Also falling into The Times‘ category of “despicable” Trump proposals:

>ending the phony “catch-and-release” practice applied to illegals crossing the border and detaining them until they are sent home;

>establishing criminal penalties for legal visitors to the United States who overstay any of the wide variety of visas offered by Washington (a group that has included at least two of the September 11 hijackers);

>stepping up ICE’s cooperation with local law enforcement authorities to increase the chances that illegals belonging to criminal gangs will be deported;

>and addressing employer violations and other abuses of the H-1B visa system for workers supposedly possessing special skills in technology or other areas, practices which needlessly cost American workers both jobs and wages;

The Times of course wasn’t content to savage Trump. It castigated other GOP presidential hopefuls who haven’t repudiated all of his proposals for “racing to the bottom” on immigration. But if the paper’s editorial writers are looking for demagogues on immigration, they should try a mirror instead.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Tech Labor Shortage My…Foot

Tags

compensation, ECI, Employment Cost Index, immigrants, inflation, inflation-adjusted wages, labor shortages, skills gap, tech workers, wages, {What's Left of) Our Economy

So many myths were busted in today’s Employment Cost Index (ECI) report from the Labor Department, which should put the kibosh on wage inflation claims until…the next Employment Cost report. One of the most important is the longstanding notion that America is experiencing a scary shortage of high tech workers, and will fall hopelessly behind the rest of the world in the innovation race – with dangerous implications for national security and living standards – if the “skills gap” isn’t filled pronto with zillions of brainy immigrants.

The ECI data – which doesn’t adjust for inflation when it comes to detailed occupational and industry data – lacks information on technology workers per se. But it does provide statistics on pre-inflation total compensation (including non-wage benefits) for workers in the “professional, scientific, and technical services” field, which includes engineering and computer services.

Remember that textbook economics and common sense both tell us that when businesses can’t find the workers they want, they tend to react in one of two ways. They either increase pay to become more attractive to existing workers they need, and over the longer- term to draw more people into their field. Or they figure out a way to get the necessary work done by becoming more efficient – say, by buying or developing some gizmo that can replace human beings, or make their current employees more productive. (The textbooks, incidentally, don’t teach that businesses facing labor shortages typically lobby governments to boost immigration levels in order to create labor gluts and suppress wages – which seems to be the strategy of choice in Corporate America nowadays.)

Of course, economics also teaches that employers urgently needing more workers will try various mixes of both approaches over time. But those facing genuine shortages usually can’t afford to skimp on pay. Why, then, do the data on total compensation for “professional, scientific, and technical services workers” show that that’s exactly what’s happening to compensation?

The new ECI numbers covered the quarter ending in June, and deep in the Labor Department website, you can find statistics going back to 2001. Since that June, here’s how pay has improved over each previous June quarter:

2000-01: 3.4%

2001-02: 2.4%

2002-03: 2.1%

2003-04: 4.5%

2004-05: 2.6%

2005-06: 3.1%

2006-07: 4.7%

2007-08: 4.1%

2008-09: 2.0%

2009-10: 1.4%

2010-11: 3.0%

2011-12: 1.5% 

2012-13: 2.0% 

2013-14: 1.7% 

2014-15: 1.1% 

Do these look like the kinds of pay raises given out by businesses that are desperate to hire? It’s clear that total compensation increases slowed down considerably once the Great Recession took hold in 2008-09. But why should even that deep downturn have produced the dramatic deceleration revealed here? After all, we’re talking about the industries of the future – sectors and companies that are generating outsized growth because they’ve not only found brilliant new ways to meet wants and needs the rest of the economy already has, but because they’re great at identifying completely new wants and needs.  And anyway, the recession ended more than six years ago – remember?

But here’s a finding that’s even more stunning – and destructive to claims of tech worker shortages: For the last three years, total pay for the private sector workforce overall has risen faster than total pay for the professional and scientific etc. workers. 

Lying about the hiring picture isn’t exactly admirable behavior, but we’re talking about businesses here.  They’re supposed to be obsessed with making money in any legal way possible.  But elected officials who swallow their propaganda presumably have a different set of responsibilities.  If I can find information debunking their labor shortage claims, so can the politicians.  Why haven’t they?