Centerfield

Political bias always shows up most in a given newspaper editorial when it concerns important pet issues. Thus, an undesirable outcome on a pet issue suggests a fundamental flaw in the system, a "scathing indictment" of it. When someone calls a result a scathing indictment, your spin/bullshit meter should flash and buzz furiously, warning of the sanctimonious high dudgeon that is imminent.

The bill didn't pass because (DUH) it didn't have enough support. The bill reflected the more generous and forgiving nature of democrats when it comes to immigration (and I don't mean generous as compliment per se, merely as a comparative descriptor).Bottom line, the bill didn't pass because it didn't sufficiently address the concerns of let's call them immigration hawks.

It wasn't bipartisan enough. The compromises that needed to be made to get the votes were found unacceptable and the bill supporters were unwilling to make them. There is a kind of faux or half-@ssed bipartisanship in which the majority party tries only to get a bare minimum of folks on board to pass a bill that most closely suits the majority party's purposes. Pragmatic, and there's not necessarily anything wrong with that.

But it didn't work here. So for the folks who supported this bill and who are eager to get a reform bill passed, there is really only one basic albeit huge question to ask:

On the issue of immigration policy, what does genuine compromise look like?

Now the viewpoint of the democrats in the wake of this failure, (whether it be posturing spin, genuinely felt disappointment, or a little of both) is that the immigration hawks were immovable and inconsolable, that they could not be made happy.

If that's the case, then clearly that's regrettable to folks who wanted reform. But, and this is a huge 72-point typeall caps BUT, that's how the system is supposed to work.

The fact is that the immigration hawks have enough support from their constituents that they can take the positions they have with a fair measure of confidence. At least that's my hypothesis. Hopefully we'll get to see it tested in the next round of congressional elections, where robust pro-immigration pols run against incumbent immigration hawks.

We've done our fair share of sppeculating abour precisely where public sentiment lies on immigration, relying on polls and sometimes dangerously on our own guts.Well, let's SEE. Let's find out how people feel when the issue is prominent in actual elections. I really don't think its the end of the world if no bill gets passed now and then we have elections which serve to correct congress in one direction or the other.

We've had an incoherent, indeed, schizophrenic immigration policy for many decades, and the sun keeps rising and the world keeps spinning and America keeps going forward. So it's legitimate to question what the source is for the sudden urgency today. Sudden urgency can lead to bad rulemaking. Today, there's insufficient consensus on reforming policy. That means we have to wait, and keep muddling. Oh well.

Posted by: bk at June 8, 2007 10:09 AM

There may be no real urgency in some areas. Certainly people from Latin America will continue to arrive illegally to do the work that they do. The current approach (make it illegal, then tolerate it anyway) may be irritating, but it sort-of works.

In other areas, however, the urgency may be greater. We have high-tech companies which can't get the people that they need. No matter what the nativists say, there simply are not enough Americans with the requisite skills to make "hire Americans" a viable alternative. Consider that the annual quota for H1-B visas gets twice over-subscribed on the first (and therefore only) day that it is opened. The primary actual alternatives for large companies tend to be "set up facilities in other countries" and "outsource to other countries."

Which would be bad enough. But what also happens is that American high-tech companies simply don't get started. Instead, the people who can't get here to work for American companies end up starting their own somewhere else. How much better off would the American economy be if Google and Yahoo were based somewhere else because we didn't let their founders in? (Anyone want to argue that the government can successfully figure out which would-be immigrants are likely to start world-beating companies?)

There may be times when technology isn't changing too fast. And when we can therefore afford not to move briskly to deal with the immigration issue. But these are not those times. In ten years, companies which are starting now will be in the same position that the booming computer companies were for the last decade. (My guess would be bio-tech companies especially. But if I was good at picking the next big technology, I'd a rich.) And if we don't let people in to start and work at those companies today, the next Silicon Valley will be located somewhere else. Along with all the jobs that it could have brought in.

Posted by: wj at June 8, 2007 11:45 AM

I work in the IT industry (have for over 15 years).... and I haven't seen this so-called lack of qualified american candidates. My company has gone through a hiring spree in the past few years and have had no lack of qualified domestic applicants. However, we were willing to pay a reasonable wage for the positions we were filling.

The claim that there aren't enough qualified IT candidates so we have to import them from overseas, rings a little hollow when the majority of companies making it lay off a large portion of thier existing engineer staff.... RIGHT BEFORE they go out and hire a whole bunch of H1-B's.
I've seen that time and again.

The reality IS that many companies simply don't want to pay a fair, competitive wage for local labor.... so they seek to reduce wage competition across the board... by importing a who slew of worker from countries where the standard of living is marginal and the exchange rate for U.S. dollars is exceptoional....thus depressing domestic wages.

By the way, alot of tech companies who have outsourced over-seas are retreating from that trend. They initialy get attracted by the low $$$ labor cost...but then discover there are alot of other hidden costs to doing business overseas that they didn't factor ...and that the loss in quality of service that they experience just doesn't make the savings worth it. There ARE situations where outsourced labor can be very effective.... but in many situations the hidden pitfalls outweigh the benefits... and more and more companies are discovering it.

P.S. This situation really doesn't address the VAST majority of illegals in the country anyway....who overwhelmingly are unskilled labor. I think latest studies show that well over 50% of them aren't even literate in thier native languages.... let alone english.

Posted by: cengel at June 8, 2007 01:08 PM

I too am on the skeptical side when it comes to the whole "not enough qualified workers" tale. Most tech companies are continuing to push the envelope more and more when it comes to hiring a group of folks just long enough to make the desired high-margin product and then dumping them when its done. When they say, "we can't find enough people to do x," that's corporatese for "we can't find enough people to do job x at the price y we've determined we can pay in order to make plausible the very generous profit margin z that we're using to attract wealthy investors v.

Of course, an economist can argue about how much sense this makes and the good that flows to investors and how much freer the market is....but from the point of view of the laborers in the trenches, higher displacement rates are very undesirable. As a member of the labor force, I sure don't like it.

It's veering off topic, but it's worth mentioning briefly that at least one of the looming 900-lb gorillas in the room is the cost of healthcare. Whether a company outsources domestically or overseas, they can contract for a better and more fixed cost by the job by paying someone else to do the job while a 3rd party worries about the benefits(domestic) or doesn't provide them(foreign). IMO there's very little reason to hope companies will voluntarily stop trying to get out from under the shadow of the scary cost growth of health benefits.

Posted by: bk at June 8, 2007 01:29 PM

I think you're right on the money in this post, Simon. This was a hard bill for many centrists to be enthusiastic about.

There's so much FUD on this issue that it takes alot of work to see where the truth might lie. When MS, AT&T, and other companies that maltreat their labor forces says they need more slots, my reaction is like all of yours - they're being opportunistic.

Now, there are two spots, I think, where legal immigrants are key to our society. One is at the high end of the education scale. A pretty small proportion of native-born Americans are willing to delay gratification long enough to get high-end engineering degrees, especially Ph.Ds.

The other spot is in starting businesses. Part of it is in low-end things that make more economic sense for immigrants, like restaurants, nail parlors, and laundry. But, also a huge proportion of the most dynamic and innovative businesses are started by immigrants as well. Of course, you won't hear MS or AT&T talk about that.

Posted by: Jon Kay at June 8, 2007 04:00 PM

immigration hawks ?

Is that a real term? Am I an immigration hawk?

Who ever seriously said there weren't enough qualified Americans for hi-tech jobs or that the illegal immigrant problem was meeting this issue.

Yes, I'm for a liberal immigration policy. I don't buy the cultural crap (coded racism) and I do beleive firmly that it benefits America. As for security we were once again reminded this past month that the porous security risk border isn't US/Mexico but US/Canada.

Posted by: c3 at June 8, 2007 07:25 PM

Chris I just made it up because i didn't think "anti-immigration" quite captured things. Basically, it feels to me like its more a matter of sterness versus laxity, speaking loosely. I don't think it fair or accurate to say that all or even many who want a sterner policy are "coded" racists or whatever. but it's certainly there, no doubt about it. In my experience, primarily among the blue collar set who, let's face it, have much more to lose from an increase in the supply of comparatively unskilled labor.

Me, I just want our policy be coherent as a starting point. It just seems absurd to me that there are some agents of government looking to find and deport illegal immigrants at the same time as other agents may be giving them various forms of public assistance if they are poor, have kids, etc. Of course the schizophrenic incoherence of gov't immigration policy taken as whole does seem to match the incoherence of public opinion as a whole.So maybe we're getting the policy chaos we deserve...

Also FWIW, I too tend to think that immigrants today have the same beneficial invigorating effects on our culture as every past wave has had. I just don't like the idea of large and indeterminate undocumented flow. We ought to be able to do better. The fact that we don't is probably attributable both to a lack of will and a lack of anything resembling unanimity of opinion.

Posted by: bk at June 8, 2007 10:56 PM

The tech industries, for example,have evolved from permanent employment to domestic temp-workers(contractors) to foreign so-called temp-workers whom the outsourcing interests themselves describe as needed to facilitate outsourcing.

As far as immigration goes, you cannot build a society on what business "demands" right at the moment, not when it is software engineers this quarter, truck drivers the next quarter, belly dancers the quarter after that, then real estate brokers, then bankruptcy lawyers, then divorce and personal injury lawyers, then when they run out of cannon fodder it is back to immigration lawyers. Do we really need a FUTURE supply of displaced workers and a FUTURE supply of forced early retirees? Guestworkers to fill somebody else's predetermined slot is just wrong and does not encourage start-up business or stable work environment for anybody.

Posted by: MJ at June 12, 2007 04:31 PM