Author:
797
Excerpt:
Employers hire high-skill immigrants for the same reason they hire low-skill ones: out of necessity.
Publication date:
Wednesday, August 17, 2016
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Related Topic:
Employment
Immigration
Employers hire high-skill immigrants for the same reason they hire low-skill ones: out of necessity.
It was an example of what Rush Limbaugh calls “drive-by media” coverage—the sensational and superficial reporting of a story while skimping on context.
The technology revolution that began in the 1990s has dramatically increased the demand for workers in the fields of math and science.
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In June of last year, the New York Times wrote on its front page that the Disney World resort in Orlando, Fla., had furloughed about 250 tech workers. The employees were offered severance packages and bonuses if they remained for a few months to train their replacements. One hundred and sixty of the displaced workers retired or were rehired in new jobs by Disney. About 90 took the severance.
No one likes to read about someone losing his job, but Disney employs more than 70,000 people in Orlando alone. The fact that 90 of them ultimately were pushed out is free-market economic churn and wouldn’t normally be news. The reason the Times highlighted the story is because some of the replacement hires were high-skill immigrants. The layoffs at Disney and other companies, such as Southern California Edison, said the Times, “are raising new questions about how businesses and outsourcing companies are using the temporary visas, known as H-1B, to place immigrants in technology jobs in the United States.”
The suggestion here is that U.S. companies are gaming the visa system by using foreign-based outsourcing firms to replace more-expensive Americans with less-expensive immigrants. It’s what those who see labor markets in zero-sum terms—an immigrant worker’s gain is a U.S. worker’s loss—would have us believe. Donald Trump invited the laid-off Disney workers to a rally in Alabama in February, showing once again that the Republican presidential nominee’s opposition to immigration isn’t limited to the illegal variety.
But a report released last week by the National Foundation for American Policy challenges some of the basic assumptions...
Read the entire piece here at The Wall Street Journal
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator.
Photo by Jeff Swensen / Stringer
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Url:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-misses-the-point-on-tech-visas-1471388482
Source:
The Wall Street Journal