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That name was dreamt up to play on the fears of Republican voters, including the suggestion that it would have "death panels". A survey early last year showed 35% of respondents still didn't realize "Obamacare" was the same thing as the ACA. We need to make decisions rationally, not out of fear.

For instance, you're more likely to be killed by pollution (200,000 early deaths per year) than an undocumented immigrant (750 per year). However, our administration wants to spend money building a wall to protect you from the "dangerous" Mexicans, but doesn't mention anything about how many people die from pollution when announcing cuts to emissions standards.

(The 750 number is 456 arrests per year, plus an estimated correction factor due to cases not being solved.)

Seriously?

And you just had the balls to lecture about misusing fear as a political factor?

What about the massive and widespread identity theft perpetrated by illegal immigrants?

IRS: 1.2 Million Illegal Aliens Committed Identity Theft in FY 2017

Hell, you just tried to paper over a complex issue with a lot of aspects using a childish fear-based statistic.

You played your NPC role well.

Tesla's stock is down 12% in the last 12 months in a strongly up market.

confirmed

Seems like a clear case of cherry picking.

Plus, Musk is a whiny little snowflake. He can't get enough of uncritical media praise, of which there is has been tons, but anything remotely critical and he shits the floor. Its nice he's doing the electric car thing, but lets not buy into a cult of personality here because there is tons of evidence he's got a shit personality (he fired his 12 year PA when she asked for a raise he used underpaid illegal foreign labor to build his factory he uses illegal union-busting tactics and he was emotionally abusive to his first wife, treating her like an employee.

Billionaires have their place, but they aren't special geniuses, they are just 99.9% lottery winner and 0.1% skill. If there was no Elon Musk, there would just be some other billionaire doing the same work. Do not put your faith in princes.

Obama was being petitioned to actually INCREASE the annual quota. But instead he bypassed the existing immigration laws through executive action to allow the fast track of the Green Card issuance for H1B visa holders and increasing the limit.

I for one did not want that direction of change. Trump wants to have US immigration laws benefit US citizens first, not last.

Here's 3 more cases that I thought of, off the top of my head. There's more with a simple Google search:
UCSF https://news.slashdot.org/stor...
Toys-R-Us https://www.numbersusa.com/new...
Southern California Edison http://www.computerworld.com/a...

Orrin Hatch is an old-school corporate-whore Republican who has made his position on H1B's quite clear.

Tell this to the Disney workers: https://www.numbersusa.com/new...

The original version of the "temporary worker program" was passed in 1952, and it's been continually revised over the years, in the direction of expanding it mostly. Some history here. The current version of the program dates to 1990, in legislation that was passed by a Democratic congress and signed by a Republican president.

But history aside, is there a meaningful partisan divide on this issue? My impression is that when it comes to actual legislative action, both parties have been mostly in favor of the program. There is opposition in both parties as well, in the Republicans mainly from the anti-immigration faction, and in the Democrats mainly from the union faction. But not enough opposition to do much about it.

Everyone says they have masses of H1B's, but only 100-150 thousand are issued per year. I actually wonder if many confuse every foreign worker as H1B's? I know where I work people on Slashdot have commented that 30-50% of people here are H1B's when I know for a fact it is actually less than 1%, they seem to label everyone that originated from a foreign country as being in the US on H1B's

According to this source, the H1-B program as it is today started in 1990. Since then, the visa cap fluctuated between 65,000 and 195,000 per year. Let's take an average of 85,000 and we're talking about 85,000 times 25 years which equals 2,125,000. That's 2.1 million.

According to this source. The total number of tech jobs in the U.S. in 2012 was 3,951,730.

So ~50% of tech workers could have come in under the H1-B program which, as you might know, is dual intent and allows for the application of permanent residence.

Whoops. Someone else was having a 9 mile long minimum wage argument with me; I thought this was a moving goalposts thing. My bad.

The hell? Remember when 80% of the workforce used to be farmers? Then they moved more towards factories. Do you not see that shift from the primary to secondary industry? There will always be some people in the primary industries (I don't think complete automation is really viable), but the bulk of the demand for workers has indeed shifted up the pipe.

Do you remember the Industrial Revolution? Do you remember greater than 70% unemployment, because machines took jobs? Do you remember it lasting 60 years, before we got back to some 5%-15% level of unemployment, like a normal, civil society?

Do you honestly think we're going to just up and move people to new jobs? We'll face major unemployment for decades in a giant paradigm shift. The demand for jobs will vanish until we invent a new way for people to be useful that cannot be equaled by machines. The ones we already have apparently haven't solved unemployment for us yet.

And... really? You think getting an engineering degree is going to "fail" since other people want those engineering jobs? HA! Well this might just be an anecdote, but it worked pretty well for me. And every other engineer I know.

Good to know no credible research shows an oversupply of the STEM market. There's news that STEM graduates have low unemployment, with half of engineers and computer people not working in STEM jobs, and 75% of STEM graduates overall not working in STEM-related jobs. CIS has found 8 million non-working STEM graduates, and thinks there are 50% more STEM graduates than STEM jobs.

Yeah, you're hearing 2+2=5, but that's not what I'm saying.

You're saying there is infinite demand for engineers. All current research says we have plenty more than we need. You know why I'm not listening? Because I have access to current data that says exactly the opposite of what you're saying, coming out of multiple research sources, and plastered all over the fucking place. In short: you're wrong.

Yes, that's harsh, and unfriendly. But you can take a fucking look and see. My sources linked above are 2013-2014 sources, not 2002 or some stupid shit. It's current. I'm arguing correctly, by credible and recent data. I understand that part of good negotiation is to give people a way to save face, but I'm going to call a lifeline here and say I know more about the job market in this discussion than about how to not make you look stupid for being wrong.

Wow, corporate control over not only the wages of all their workers, but also the primary force of upward social mobility.... yeah, that paints a pleasant picture of the future.

That's what universal college education is: cheap labor, pre-trained workforce, trained on the backs of the individual and the taxpayer, with an oversupplied labor market so wages can be kept low. When your education is no longer adequate, we'll replace you with a new college grad who is up-to-speed, unless you keep yourself up-to-speed using money from your wages we pay you, without costing more than a replacement grad.

Have you not realized that selecting an education career is a risk? It's a big risk: even if it's free, it's years of your life relegated to whatever useless McBurgerJackInTheAss fry runner drive thru job you can get, with the hopeful return of a career. If you pick the wrong career, you will not gain employment by your degree; your upwards mobility

>> In a few decades, native-born Americans will be about 25% of the U.S. population
>
> That seems like some sort of critical math failure.

You're right; I shouldn't have used the term "native-born" because the most natural interpretation of that would be "anyone born here," at any time under any circumstances. Parents come here on vacation, kid pops out, suddenly he's another "native-born" USian. He's legally entitled to birthright citizenship, of course (although absolute birthright citizenship isn't the norm in most developed countries). But that's not what I meant, though it's the most obvious interpretation of what I said.

Since I was talking about the negative consequences of the mass immigration begun in 1965, what I really meant in detail is, "In a few decades, the descendants of people who were already here before the mass immigration started by the 1965 Immigration Act will be about 25% of the U.S. population." The immigrants and their descendants will be about 75%. There's nothing special or "more American" about those people who were already here by around 1970 than anyone who immigrated here legally, attained citizenship, and integrated productively into the fabric of American society after that; we just need a baseline date to compare the pre-Act and post-Act population so we can assess its numerical impact. But certainly not all the immigrants and their descendants have integrated into the larger social fabric--some have, some haven't, and their presence has led to changes both good and bad; among the bad, some post-1970 immigrants and their children feel no connection with narratives of the Founding Fathers and the Enlightenment principles which shaped the Constitution; many take to the streets waving flags of their country of origin and advocating for even more open borders, for example; teaching the children of immigrants whose first language isn't English costs 1.65 times as much as teaching the children of native speakers (hello education meltdown); and some have very racist and tribalistic loyalties ("por la raza todo, fuera de la raza nada"); there are clear and sometimes arguably negative and divisive cultural differences in some immigrant communities even after having been in this country for decades.

At any rate, if we take the 1970 census data as our baseline, just 5 years after the new immigration begun by the 1965 act, we see exactly how big its effects were and continue to be:

http://www.flsuspop.org/images/population459.gif
http://www.numbersusa.com/content/learn/about/question-where-does-census-bureau-say-we.html
http://www.mnforsustain.org/united_states_population_growth_graph.htm

I'm not anti-immigration in general, I just object to the way the 1965 Act skews immigration toward unskilled Latin American immigrants and certain Asians to the exclusion of other groups, and how it's had a continuous unchecked growth. I just think instead of H1B and other special ad hoc programs, immigration should be reformed to shuffle skilled immigrants who want permanent residence and citizenship to the front of the line, regardless of national origin, and should have low ceilings built in for the time being. Americans are fond of recalling the mass immigration of the late 1800s/early 1900s when championing the current mass immigration; what they forget is that in the 1920s we stopped almost all immigration entirely for the next 40 years (until the 1965 Act) to give the country time to "digest" and assimilate these relative newcomers. I really think it's time to do something similar.

At any rate, that book I linked above, _Alien Nation_, makes some very valid arguments about the history of American immigration and since it's free I highly recommend it. I grew up in an almost ideally mult

Contact your representative. Ask them to clearly and concisely state their stance on ACTA. If it doesn't comply with your views. Vote. That. Fucker. Out. Tell your friends.

Keep doing it. If enough people continually push the douschers out of office, perhaps they will get the message. Send them welcoming letters. Make them feel the recession (thats supposedly over). In reality, businesses swept off all the excess cream and just went with lower quality, cheaper wages, and cut benefits, and offshoring and now they're profiting again! Yay! No more recession!

Or we can do nothing. Be apathetic, and let our rights continually be trampled on by these asshats. Can we bring some semblence of intellectual curiosity and creative initiative back to America, or piss it away?

If you at least vote, you have some say in the complaining process. And if you have never voted, perhaps now is the time to start. I know I will.

In this California, Joe Sixpack has already seen his cost to commute to work (which he has little choice about, because homes and work are seldom anywhere near each other) skyrocket -- from about $100/month to almost $400/month in just the past two years. Joe Sixpack is already plenty incentivized, but has no alternative -- jobs are not to be had on every streetcorner, unless you can feed your family on $7/hour and don't mind competing with an endless supply of illegal aliens. And public transit (which isn't much cheaper anymore) doesn't serve everyone or every location, let alone at the hours your employer dictates you will be present.

Before you whine about how spread out we are, I was astonished to learn that Los Angeles has HIGHER average housing density than New York City. http://www.numbersusa.com/interests/urbansprawl.html

This is indeed the case, which means the corn farmer either needs to save his profits from good years or do some diversifying. Of course, even if the farmer has apples, corn, and pigs (which are easy to raise in tandem) he's still not going to have every food he wants to eat, and will still want to trade with the farmer who has rice and fish, and the farmer who has wheat and barley and beef, etc. My example was overly simplified to show a point, but it's still the case that specializing in a few goods is better than trying to do everything.

And my point is that the truly secure *community* contains within it the ability to do everything- and no need left to trade at all. That's the difference between looking at the community and at the individual.

My example was more along the lines of "I don't buy pot now, so I don't feel the need to buy it from anyone, whether or not they are my neighbor". I should have made it more clear. Also, I would like to point out that while I'm not involved in my immediate community, I spend time and money supporting causes I care about, including charities, scholarships, and medical organizations. I still don't see why the people living next door to me are any more important than people living anywhere else, and why you want to put me into a 'community' based on where I happened to be born. I suppose if I wanted to be an astronaut, you would tell me to build an airstrip where I was born instead of moving to Florida.

Well, that seems to be what New Mexico is doing, and in so doing, they're making their state more secure by hosting the first American Public Spaceport. But more importantly- if your community doesn't need to import and survives *first* on local production, trading only out of surplus, then they no longer need to worry about foreign policy or foreign interests. So when faced with radicalized Islam, for instance, instead of sending a bunch of people to other nations to be killed, they can simply *stop trading with Islamics*, thus solving the original problem.

But really, our most serious disagreement comes from our different perspectives on the environmental impact of trade. Your views on the matter are so extreme I don't even know where to begin. Greenpeace and the Sierra Club aren't nearly as out there as you are.

Depends what part of the Sierra Club- there are certainly a range of opinions there as well. What I see though is these so-called Superfund sites that never actually get cleaned up because the businesses that created them go bankrupt paying for them. I see us closing factories here and moving pollution to China- only to have it come back to Oregon courtesy of the jet stream winds to poison my nephew with mercury. Obviously we need to do something- and small scale craft industry is certainly one among many answers.

Lastly, Distributism is all in favor of specialization and trade. What it's opposed to is giant megacorps with undue influence on the State. For instance, a distributed society would still have fast-food restaurants, but instead of having a McDonald's in every town, one town would have a McDonald's, one would have a Joe's, one would have a GnarlBurger, etc., and each would be locally owned. However, the Joe's, the McDonald's, and the GnarlBurger would probably still all import beef, cheese, buns, and/or ketchup from outside of town. (McDonald's might be in a good beef&cheese area, Joe's might be near a Bakery, and GnarlBurger might be in the middle of tomato fields, but they would still want to trade for other ingredients). Also, the State wouldn't be controlling all the services in such a system either, since Distributism favors local, private ownership of the means of production.

The key there is local- and local doesn't work without strong tariffs and borders.

Step 1 - log in to http://www.numbersusa.com/index Step 2 - subscribe to H-1B updates Step 3 - send free faxes to your congressmen. You don't need to agree with nubmersusa on every topic, just H-1B. It's the only way to fight back. Finally, donate money to them. I have and it's paid off. They have been able to thwart several increases to the H-1B cap. Don't be a freeloader - it's your job on the line.

Why don't you tell me one non-prosecuted case of someone getting PAID to vote a certain way that is not in harmony with that representatives ideology or constituent interest to begin with?

David Wu claims to protect American Worker's rights as a part of his ideology AND constituent interest, but has a D- score in Numbers USA's website for voting for the interests of immigrants.

JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER
                                          by Rob Sanchez
                              October 21, 2005 No. 1352
---

Today I talked to Roy Beck of NumbersUSA to get some inside information about why the Senate Judiciary approved more H-1B and green card visas. He said the word is out in Washington DC that this was the result of intense lobbying by Microsoft. Last week lobbyists from Microsoft went to every Congressional office to lobby for more visas. Some people on Capitol Hill are actually referring to the Senate proposal as the "Bill Gates" bill.

---

My source for the "Bill Gates Act" is this "Job Destruction Newsletter," sent out to a free e-mail list by Rob Sanchez. Although the Newsletter is archived at his web site:

http://www.zazona.com/

This recent one is not there yet.

Rob got his information from Roy Beck:

http://www.numbersusa.com/index

Prof. Norman Matloff of Univ of Calif.

http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.html

also sent this information out to his free e-mail list.

I consider all of these people reliable and well-informed, in contrast to the pro-industry propaganda found in MSM [Main Stream Media].

I can't suggest stories to /. since they apparently dump all attempted contributions from Win XP users, a bug that is not being addressed currently according to their bug list. - The wrong way to attack Microsoft, IMHO.

I would be grateful if you or someone would attempt to post this info, and even more the following time-critical info [e-mail from Norm Matloff: ]

---

To: programmer mailing list

I urge you to call and express your opinion, pro or con. (Obviously I support Byrd on this issue.)

Yes, CALL. And make sure you talk to someone who handles immigration, NOT whoever answers the phone.

The sample message below is far too complicated. CONGRESS DOESN'T CARE ABOUT REASONING OR LOGIC; all they understand is pressure. Keep your message short, just a couple of sentences. But make sure they understand that you feel STRONGLY about this issue.

Norm

----- Forwarded message from Sandra Gunn

Date: Tue, 1 Nov 2005 13:15:55 -0800 (PST)
From: Sandra Gunn
Reply-To: Sandra Gunn
To: matloff@cs.ucdavis.edu
Subject: URGENT ALERT! Senate Voting Tommorrow on Amdt to Stop Foreign Worker/Immigration Increase

URGENT ALERT FROM FAIR!

Senate Voting Tomorrow on Amendment to Strip Foreign Worker/Immigration Increase from Deficit Reduction Bill

Call your Senators Immediately and Urge a YES Vote for the
Byrd Amendment

THIS JUST IN...Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) has decided to offer an amendment tomorrow to the Deficit Reduction Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 2005 (S. 1932) that will strip out language added by the Judiciary Committee that sells out American workers by expanding employment-based visas, H-1B high tech worker visas and accompanying family members by an estimated 368,000 per year.

PLEASE CALL YOUR SENATORS IMMEDIATELY AND URGE A YES VOTE FOR THE BYRD AMENDMENT.

This will come up tomorrow, so we have less than 24 hours
to make an impact. If you call during business hours, ask to speak with or leave a message for the legislative assistant handling immigration. If calling after business hours, please leave a message on your senators' voicemail.

Call the Capitol
Switchboard (202-224-3121) and ask to be connected, or find direct phone numbers on our web site at

http://capwiz.com/fair/dbq/officials/

There is a mandate for each congressional committee to come up with some savings to compensate for such brilliant expenditures as Alaska's bridge to nowhere. So the Senate Judiciary Committe has recently passed a proposal that will make them some money while satisfying their corporate masters. Businesses will be able to buy hundreds of additional green cards and H-1B visas to keep their labor costs low http://www.numbersusa.com/hottopic/H1B.html.

The 2029 near-collision is a warning shot regarding American's immigration problem.
Take a look at this projected immigration graph: http://numbersusa.com/overpopulation/posters.html
In 2029 the "domestic" Americans will be just crossing their maximum point, and if we cannot figure the situation out after that, god will swing back around in 2036 or so when everything is out of control, and completely annilate his pathetic creation and start over.

Just go to http://www.numbersusa.com/ and order a few of their pamphlets and videos. Especially the ones about how Arizona is losing the new Mexican war- and how coyotes and drug runners are teaming up with the Mexican army to smuggle people & drugs into Tuscon.

The U.S. would have had a negative population growth rate as of the 1970s. However, immigration has resulted in a MASSIVE population growth in this country. See NumbersUSA for the details.

People who live in the U.S. today, who are under 20, are completely screwed as far as their quality of life is concerned.

Take a look at NumbersUSA. More people results in more pollution, more urban sprawl, more destruction of the environment, reduced quality of life, less freedom for all, and nothing much that's good. It doesn't matter where the current group of people came from, the fact is that more people is going to make everything worse.

The population of the U.S. has doubled since I was born and increased nearly 40% since I graduated from high school (210M to 293M). Traffic which used to only happen on Labor Day weekends is now the normal daily commuting traffic. The quality of life in the U.S. is not improving. Yes, we have all sorts of new gadgets and live a little longer but unless you're over 45 you really have very little idea as to the things we have lost in the meantime.

Listen to people in your area talk about the "insane growth". It is happening not just in your area, your area is not unique. It is happening nearly everywhere in the U.S. (I believe the Dakotas are an exception?). The U.S. is rapidly turning into one giant zit of a strip mall.

This country is going to hell and there is nothing I can do about it.

Here's a great source for the whole immigration vs job growth thing: Numbers USA

Most people think they're just racist- until you dig into their membership and the mathematics behind their statments. Even the Border Control admits that between legal and illegal immigrants, we have ~240,000 new Americans of working age EVERY SINGLE MONTH. Let me know when the Labor Department gets a ClueX4.

100% of the couples that have >2.1 births per married couple are IMMIGRANTS!

Check out Numbers USA for more information. Among people born in the United States- the birth rate is more like .8 births per married couple. If it wasn't for the 2 million immigrants per year we'd be falling- and that's why there are more hispanics than whites in California these days.

Numbers USA has a free service for faxing them. Yep you got to register, but this makes sense so that you don't have spam bots abusing the service.

The Associated Press reports that "U.S. companies and other groups applied for 342,035 H-1B work visas in 2001, up 14 percent from 2000, before the economy tumbled.", "The number accepted also rose by 40 percent..." and "About half ... are for computer related jobs." The article cites research by UC Davis Professor Norman Matloff saying that "wages of computer programmers and engineers working in the U.S. on the visas are 15 percent to 33 percent lower than those of U.S. citizens".

Mark Shevitz of VisaNow is quoted as saying, "I think it surprised everyone. All that you hear about in the media is these huge layoffs and the tech industry is just shedding workers."

Finally, the article reports "Bay Area companies Oracle, Cisco Systems, Intel and Sun Microsystems were among the top users of the program in 2000, as were universities such as Harvard and Yale. The INS did not have numbers available on how many applications the companies filed last year amid layoffs.

----

BTW: It is illegal to use the H-1B program to lower wages from the rates prevailing in the absence of the program.

Here's information posted by an anti-H-!B activist at another site:

Additional information provided by an h1b activist (although I encourage people to avoid political action, there are far more effective things they can do with technology to deconstruct the edifice that did this to us because it is, after all, in existence because of technologists -- the real ones, not the Wired magazine ones):

80% of the US public opposed H1-B expansion. Part of what makes the bill increasing H1-B Visas so unusual is that it was so unpopular and was passed with very, very little debate.

Zazona is the most comprehensive site on the H1-B issue. Corrective legislation is now in a US congressional Committee. The philosophy of HR 3222 has been supported by a diverse group that includes Buchanan Supporters, Nader Supporters, and the National Urban League. HR 3222 is a compromise-it roles the level of new H1-B Visas back to 1998 levels and puts in place an unemployment adjustment mechanism.

H1-B Visa expansion was advocated by the ITAA. Organized opposition to H1-B includes:the AEA and the Programmers Guild.

You can Look at H1-B applications by company,state,city. You can write your Congressional representatives if you have a problem with the current H1-B situation. You can also write your state representatives. The only aspect of the H1-B issue that is in state jurisdiction is use of H1-B labor at state institutions. However, state representatives are influential in their parties-if your state representative writes a letter to congress it could mean a lot.

Check out AOL --basically these folks keep these company alive by getting special immigration legislation. If you don't like this, speak out.