Zeitgeist Watch: Wall Street Journal Readers Criticize Article Defending Illegal Immigration Because Employers

A decent portion of the members of the actual or wannabe capitalist classes have realized they are on the losing end of class warfare and are identifying more and more with the great unwashed public. The most obvious sign is the extent to which alleged Brian Thompson killer Luigi Mangione is getting support on social media, despite efforts by platform-minders to tamp that down. Another instance is the overwhelming rejection by presumed generally business-friendly Wall Street Journal readers of an article last week, A New Risk for Employers: Losing Millions of Migrants With Temporary Work Permits

Keep in mind that the scenario presented in this article goes beyond what acting ICE director Tom Homans says his priorities are, which is expelling the roughly 1.3 million undocumented migrants who have outstanding deportation orders and over 400,000 convicted but not detained criminals. He plans to start with Chicago.

The Journal is instead fretting about another migrant population, those who do not have legal status, as in lack citizenship or a visa, but who have been kinda-sorta regularized under various temporary work permits. They are not on Homan’s hit list but appear to be on Trump’s. From the story:

Mass deportations are the most prominent of Trump’s immigration pledges, but a more urgent threat looms for millions of immigrants and their employers: losing access to legal work.

Trump has promised to eliminate several programs that offer deportation protections and work authorization to immigrants in the country illegally or whose visas have expired. As many as 3.3 million immigrants covered by the programs could lose their ability to work, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.

Those at risk include people from war-torn countries such as Afghanistan and Ukraine as well as people brought to the U.S. illegally as children, often called Dreamers. Many immigrants with temporary status, known as TPS, enjoy deportation protections—and work authorization—because the government has determined their home countries are too dangerous. Many more entered the country through a program set up by the Biden administration that rewarded them with work permits for coming legally rather than attempting to cross the southern border…

Immigrants whose legal work status is at risk work in sectors that range from healthcare and hospitality to manufacturing and education, for small businesses and for large employers such as Eli Lilly, Amazon and Microsoft. Some are recent arrivals; others have been in the workforce for a decade.

Despite this tender concern, the article does not any aggregate figures on who employs these immigrants, even though there are NGOs who have been placing them under the Biden programs.

In November, Axios provided some data on where illegal immigrants work, but it did not parse out the subset of those hired under temporary status programs:

Needless to say, this total is unlikely to include servants to the professional managerial class, such as maids, home cleaners, and yardmen.

However, casual employment, such as in construction, agriculture, and restaurant back-of-house roles, doesn’t seem a good match for the temporary work permits, since the idea is to get migrants into steady-looking jobs (even if they later wind up quitting and prove difficult to track down).

But one wonders how many temporary visa holders get slotted to the sort of physically harsh settings known to reply on illegal workers and have difficulty retaining them, such as meatpackers. Note that Amazon’s warehouses are notoriously demanding and “pickers” regularly wind up with back pain and repetitive stress injuries. Amazon is high enough profile that using workers under the temporary permit programs could serve as a bloody flag for union organizers…but what about other big warehouse operators?

The bigger point here is some portion of “Americans won’t take these jobs” is because no one should take these jobs. The site conditions are or should be deemed out of compliance with OSHA standards.

The Journal’s sources attempt to depict the migrants as skilled. Again, the story does not substantiate how representative the picture below is:

Chris Thomas, an immigration attorney in Denver, is working with one social-media company that has more than 1,000 employees whose legal work status could vanish, in roles that range from marketing to computer analyst. “A lot of other companies are expressing the same concern,” Thomas said.

Let us not forget that some reports depict Elon Musk as having reduced headcount at Twitter by 90%. Even if that claim is an exaggeration, it is undisputed that Twitter has a lot fewer people working there than Before Musk. One has to wonder if the manning numbers at the Journal’s unnamed social media company could be also heavily thinned, with the remaining staffers getting better pay?

And before we get to the whinge of the employers in this piece that they are having trouble getting workers and must resort to migrants…perhaps Americans aren’t signing up because they want better pay, better treatment, and maybe even more say? Labor force participation data shows there is hidden slack:

Admittedly, some of the fall in labor force participation is due to increased disability, such as long Covid. But some is also due to employer bias, such as pronounced prejudice against those who have been unemployed for over six months and older workers.

And we don’t see the Journal ‘fessing up that workers on temporary visa status, like illegals generally, are seen as more tractable than US citizens because they have limited options and are at risk of deportation.

Let’s turn to the reactions of the Journal’s subscribers. Of the most recent 50 of over 800 comments, it was two to one favoring strict enforcement of immigration laws. Some even backed a pretty literal version of Trump’s mass deportation threat, while others pointed out that Homan’s priorities looked to be first and the various temporary visa categories looked to be next. Interestingly, none I saw pointed out that the Trump noise-making on deportations and ending or cutting back the temporary visa programs might lead to a chilling effect, both by establishments using undocumented workers and those engaging staffers under temporary visa programs trying to reduce reliance on them as a hedge.

Some of the “tough on immigration” viewpoint were employer-hostile and said they needed to pay more to hire Americans. Others talked about fairness, that illegal migrants were jumping ahead of those who had gone through the difficult legalization process. The comments on the other side depicted Trump and his voters as economically illiterate (bundling the tariff and immigration policies together as inflationary) or in the milder form, as unnecessarily getting rid of productive workers, particularly Dreamers. Some examples:

Paul Anderson
Boo hoo, employers can’t hire enough legal workers at low wages as they would like. There is an obvious solution.

Eric Marn
The sky is always falling. Trump already said, first get rid of the bad guys and secure the border, then onto the mess of illegal immigration and the millions here .
Media always wants some extreme when reality is that we need to get illegal immigration under control.

Ajay Tyagi
Meanwhile US born citizen 20 something are turned down by employers in so many industries because the employers want “experience” . My son born and raised US citizen just got a Class B driving license after 2 months of training and now the employers want experience and keep turning him down!
I see illegals in every industry everywhere being paid in cash!

John Matthew
I’m unclear, not sure we’ll start with these workers. If you have a work permit and it’s legal, what’s the problem.
I think people voted for President Trump on this issue specifically because if you come here Illegally then it’s like cutting in line anywhere else, it’s unfair and there are others waiting.
I have friends from India that have paid 10’s of 1000’s of dollars to become citizens and it sickens me when we want to give citizenship to these illegals just cause they are physically here.

Class warfare was out in the open:

brian reid
Hilary Clinton, Biden and the elite progressives still have not learned their lesson. Americans are not garbage or basket of deplorables. Their unwarranted sense of entitlement and condescending lectures are as hideous, ugly and depraved as they are.
Trump believes in America First, American Exceptionalism and the American people that is why he got elected. Trump has been given a mandate of historic proportion.
Those politicians who continue to resist can and will be voted out of office too. Elections do have consequences. They will turn America red for the foreseeable future.

Derek Benko

The title could have just as easily been referencing southern plantations in the 1860’s when slavery ended.
The idea we need millions of people suppressing the wages of laborers so white collar professionals can have cheaper luxuries is why voters are angry and re-elected trump

sicher keit
Nyt has brought out the ultimate threat. Avocados are going to go up. Yes no more cheap avocados for you republicans. But they’re the real racists. Measuring illegals in avocados. Can’t they understand that we just want to follow the law and do the right thing. Obviously something the left is incapable of.

Carlos Gallego
Hahahahaha… of course. The lazy, smoking fatties picking up apples and cleaning toilets… please.

One test of Trump’s tenacity and sense is what if anything he does about H-1B visas. Since at least as long as I have been reading Slashdot, a regular feature has been a new computer science graduate asking how he can find an entry-level job, and grey-beards confirming that it is well-nigh impossible (so much for “learn to code” exhortations). From the Journal’s comments:

Nick Ferrari
I’ve worked in the tech industry for 30 years, both at industry leading companies and startups. Thanks to the H1-B visa program, I’ve see major changes in staffing at tech companies, none of them for the better.
Tech companies used to be fun, collegial places where people had shared goals and culture. Collaboration was an industry hallmark. Now, one has to navigate a multicultural nightmare where his or her job is at risk if he or she is not of the same nationality as the majority of the team, staff celebrations have to be approved in advance by HR to ensure no one will be offended, Americans are lectured about inclusion while visa holder converse in a multitude of languages from Russian to Hindi to Mandarin and projects are hindered by mistrust and divisiveness.
Meanwhile, many of US citizen techies have children graduating with top STEM degrees who can’t get a job.
None of this has benefited the industry, consumers or the nation: we no longer make many new or innovative products and we’re rapidly surrendering our industry leadership to China.

One can try to depict the viewpoint about as wanting in enlightenment. However, Robert Cringely has been criticizing H-1B visas as bad for the tech industry, as in not saving money or improving output. But he depicts big employers as stuck in a bad equilibrium and recognizing it as such, much like the parents of Chinese girls in the footbinding days.

However, Cringely also pointed out that employers could keep the benefits of the H-1B visa by using another type, the L-1B visa. From a 2017 post:

H-1B visas overwhelmingly fill lower-level jobs that would normally serve as yeoman positions for young computer sciences graduates. The US is thus throwing away what it touts as a strategic asset by failing to train its next generation of computer professionals. And that’s before getting to the significant level of H-1B visa fraud. One type is where tech workers are brought to the US with no work lined up. Those workers are treated as near slaves, held hostage in “guest houses” until they find work. And the clients aren’t marginal players; major tech firms use these illegal operators. A second type of fraud is wage theft.

Moreover, it’s false that H-1B visa holders are providing needed and scarce skills. The press has been full of stories of employees being required to train H-1B visa replacements….

Robert Cringley is a fierce critic of outsourcing, and he attributes it to CEOs keen to push up stock prices at the cost of the long-term health of their enterprises. As he wrote in 2015:

Now let’s look at what this has meant for the U.S. computer industry.

First is the lemming effect where several businesses in an industry all follow the same bad management plan and collectively kill themselves…

The IT services lemming effect has companies promising things that can not be done and still make a profit. It is more important to book business at any price than it is to deliver what they promise. In their rush to sign more business the industry is collectively jumping off a cliff.

This mad rush to send more work offshore (to get costs better aligned) is an act of desperation. Everyone knows it isn’t working well. Everyone knows doing it is just going to make the service quality a lot worse. If you annoy your customer enough they will decide to leave.

The second issue is you can’t fix a problem by throwing more bodies at it. USA IT workers make about 10 times the pay and benefits that their counterparts make in India. I won’t suggest USA workers are 10 times better than anyone, they aren’t. However they are generally much more experienced and can often do important work much better and faster (and in the same time zone). The most effective organizations have a diverse workforce with a mix of people, skills, experience, etc. By working side by side these people learn from each other. They develop team building skills. In time the less experienced workers become highly effective experienced workers. The more layoffs, the more jobs sent off shore, the more these companies erode the effectiveness of their service. An IT services business is worthless if it does not have the skills and experience to do the job.

The third problem is how you treat people does matter. In high performing firms the work force is vested in the success of the business. They are prepared to put in the extra effort and extra hours needed to help the business — and they are compensated for the results. They produce value for the business. When you treat and pay people poorly you lose their ambition and desire to excel, you lose the performance of your work force. It can now be argued many workers in IT services are no longer providing any value to the business. This is not because they are bad workers. It is because they are being treated poorly. Firms like IBM and HP are treating both their customers and employees poorly. Their management decisions have consequences and are destroying their businesses…

Cringley weighed in yesterday on Trump’s executive order…

His key observation:

Channeling President Trump, I think Trump IS going to wack the H-1B program, which will affect mainly Indian IT consultancies, but he’ll leave unchanged the L-1B visa program that allows American companies to shift their employees to America from abroad.

Think about it, in this case with IBM as an example. IBM Global Services sees itself as competing with big H-1B users like Tata and Infosys and an H-1B ban or severe limitation would give IBM — or any similar U.S.-based multinational — an advantage, especially if the L-1B visa program is left untouched. With L-1B, IBM can use its own Indian employees MAKING INDIAN PAY AND BENEFITS to do the work here in the USA. No need to pretend you can’t find an American worker as presently required by H-1B. No need to advertise. No need to pretend you are paying a locally competitive wage.

L-1B visas are hardly ever mentioned in the press yet they are even bigger than H-1B already. It’s worse for American workers than H-1B, too. So what if Trump cuts back or freezes H-1B numbers without touching the (presently unlimited) L-1B program? He’ll still be keeping a campaign promise, yet also working to enrich Big Business at the expense of the very people who voted for him.

A 2014 article by Daniel Costa of the Economic Policy Institute in The Hill has one of the rare discussions of the L-1B program:

At least 650,000 college-educated temporary foreign workers are employed in the United States through the H-1B visa program, mostly in the high-tech industry. The H-1B is a well-known guestworker program that is inadequately — but at least minimally — regulated, with an annual limit and a requirement that employers pay a “prevailing” wage. Other visa programs, like the L-1 and the F-1 Optional Practical Training (OPT) program, have almost no rules and receive little scrutiny, but are used to employ hundreds of thousands of foreign tech workers…

Multinational companies use the L-1 visa to transfer employees from their foreign offices to offices in the United States. Over the past five years, an average of 68,000 L-1 visas have been issued per year, but there is no annual limit. There are two types: the L-1A for managers or executives (valid for seven years), and the L-1B for employees that have qualifying “specialized knowledge” (valid for five years). According to government audits, the majority of L-1 workers are in occupations related to computers and information technology (IT), and the biggest users of the L-1 are also the biggest users of the H-1B — outsourcing tech firms like Tata, Cognizant and Infosys — firms whose business model focuses on sending jobs overseas…

The media have reported on major companies laying off U.S. tech workers and replacing them with L-1s (legally), after first forcing the U.S. workers to train their own replacements. And there is no requirement that employers pay L-1s the prevailing wage for the specific job they will fill, which allows employers to pay far below the market rate. This practice takes advantage of the foreign worker and hurts U.S. workers by pushing down wages for everyone employed in similar occupations.

Back to the present post. The H-1B/L-1B arena is a clear case where both workers and employers would come out ahead over time. But Silicon Vally is sure to be opposed because Mr. Market would punish their stocks initially, and managing a transition and then (typically) having more employees would amount to more work for the top brass. Can’t have that!