attracted a lot of attention in the press. Since it strongly undermined the "labor shortage" claims of the industry lobbyists, I was waiting to see how the lobbyists would respond. One of the arguments in their {lobbyists] response turned out to be, "Yeah, there are lots of American programmers and engineers, but they are not good enough for the employers. Therefore we need to hire H-1Bs."
Now Senator Rubio and his aides are making the same argument:
When the lobbyists first starting making such claims, I stated here in this e-newsletter that the quality issue IS an issue. If you have the choice of hiring a weak person versus hiring no one at all, it is much better to hire no one at all. Otherwise the weak person messes things up and slows down the entire project. And as I discussed in my 2003 University of Michigan article, the range of talent is quite broad.
That said, the industry lobbyists have NO evidence that there is a lack of quality people. On the contrary, my own EPI paper shows that it is the foreign workers, not the Americans, who are typically of lower quality. And my paper, in addition to reporting my own statistical analyses, cites those of other researchers, with similar results.
In addition, one must keep coming back to one of the central points made by Salzman et al (and also in a third EPI paper by Daniel Costa): Wages are not going up! . . . " Archived at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/RubioGaffe.txt
"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual." Thomas Jefferson
"If people can’t trust not only the executive branch but also don’t trust Congress, and don’t trust federal judges, to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution with due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here." - Barack Obama, June 7, 2013
RIGHT'S RIGHT 
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Tue Jun 18, 2013 11:39 am
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