Peter Brimelow writes: It’s a minor tragedy that Linda Chavez’s career has never really recovered from a single moment of destructive cowardice – resigning as Executive Director of U.S. English when the usual allegations were being made during the Arizona Official English initiative in 1988. (It’s a major tragedy that the Official English movement was seriously damaged too.) Since then, she’s been wiggling on the impossible immigration-with-assimilation highwire at her Center for Equal Opportunity http://www.ceousa.org/. Her recent syndicated column

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/chavez.html at least concedes (probably inadvertently) that immigration does impact American wages, something immigration enthusiasts have always denied. But it also performs the shell game trick of conflating the current immigration, relatively unskilled, with an alleged need for MORE immigration, this time skilled, to fuel Silicon Valley.

This takes Chavez into the territory of Norm Matloff, the University of California-Davis computer scientist, Chinese speaker and remarkable one-man crusade against Silicon Valley’s debauching of the high-tech labor market. We’ll be hearing more about Matloff because the industry seems determined to compel Congress to allow in more indentured labor – the so-called H1B visa workers – in this election year. VDARE asked Matloff for his comments on Chavez’s column: He writes:

1. Whenever I hear an economic justification for immigration based on the notion of cheap labor, which seems to be the main theme of this Chavez piece, I always point out to the person making the argument that their reasoning is quite similar to that used by Southern slaveholders in the 1800s.

2. As I have explained before, the computer industry would be BETTER off without immigration. I strongly support taking "the best and brightest" talents in the world, but the vast majority of immigrant programmers and engineers are not in this category at all; on the contrary, they are on average WEAKER than the natives.

Even an HP executive admitted in court that the H-1Bs working at HP were not as good as the domestic engineers he hired from nearby UC Berkeley. Also, there are cultural factors impeding many of the H-1Bs' ability to do good programming, which is a creative art, not a science. (Both these points are discussed in my paper on immigration and the computer industry, at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/pub/Immigration/ImmigAndComputerIndustry/SVReport.html)

The availability of a huge foreign labor pool has also been a major factor behind the employers' hiring on the basis of skill sets rather than talent, which is highly detrimental to productivity and innovation, since talent is far more important than skills. Plus, extensive anecdotal evidence, plus the INS testimony on H-1B fraud, indicates that the H-1Bs don't even have the skill sets they claim in the first place, though again talent, not skills, is what counts. (Both these points are discussed in my "Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Shortage" paper, at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.html)

3. Chavez again parrots the industry lobbyists' disinformation on numbers of CS [computer science] degrees, etc. Look, for example, at the fact that she conveniently stops her data at 1995, just after the decline due to recession and defense downsizing and just before the meteoric rise in enrollment. CS enrollment has risen and fallen exactly in synchrony with the job market in this field, quite contrary to the claim by industry that American youth just don't have the interest and background to study CS. (See my "Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage" paper for details.)

4. Chavez may be doing great financially herself, but many people aren't. The low unemployment rate is one of the most misleading economic statistics extant. Many, if not most, people today are working harder, for less purchasing power (especially housing) and less security, than in the past.

 5. It has become almost unpatriotic to say this, but money isn't everything. The fact that I can buy a head of lettuce for 5 cents cheaper (Phil Martin's calculation; see his paper presented at the Stanford University immigration conference in October 1996) is not nearly as important to me as the fact, for example, that it's getting very difficult to get across the SF Bay Bridge in a decent amount of time, even on weekends.