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((Our borders AREN"T open to the highest intellectual capital: they
are open to the lowest, and to those high IQ outliers of backward
societies who will put up with H-1B. TRUE genius, with long
demonstrated potential, should always be welcome: and it is, but
that's a thousand or two thousand people a year tops. Bret.))


Thomas L. Friedman On Unrestricted Immigration–Who Is Really The
Idiot?
[Randall Burns] @ 7:06 pm

"Thomas L. Friedman writes in the New York Times corporate infomercial:

Landing at Kennedy Airport from Hong Kong was, as I’ve argued
before, like going from the Jetsons to the Flintstones. The ugly, low-
ceilinged arrival hall was cramped, and using a luggage cart cost $3.
(Couldn’t we at least supply foreign visitors with a free luggage
cart, like other major airports in the world?) As I looked around at
this dingy room, it reminded of somewhere I had been before. Then I
remembered: It was the luggage hall in the old Hong Kong Kai Tak
Airport. It closed in 1998.

The next day I went to Penn Station, where the escalators down to
the tracks are so narrow that they seem to have been designed before
suitcases were invented. The disgusting track-side platforms
apparently have not been cleaned since World War II. I took the Acela,
America’s sorry excuse for a bullet train, from New York to
Washington. Along the way, I tried to use my cellphone to conduct an
interview and my conversation was interrupted by three dropped calls
within one 15-minute span.

All I could think to myself was: If we’re so smart, why are other
people living so much better than us? What has become of our
infrastructure, which is so crucial to productivity? Back home, I was
greeted by the news that General Motors was being bailed out — that’s
the G.M. that Fortune magazine just noted “lost more than $72 billion
in the past four years, and yet you can count on one hand the number
of executives who have been reassigned or lost their job.”

My fellow Americans, we can’t continue in this mode of “Dumb as we
wanna be.” We’ve indulged ourselves for too long with tax cuts that we
can’t afford, bailouts of auto companies that have become giant wealth-
destruction machines, energy prices that do not encourage investment
in 21st-century renewable power systems or efficient cars, public
schools with no national standards to prevent illiterates from
graduating and immigration policies that have our colleges educating
the world’s best scientists and engineers and then, when these
foreigners graduate, instead of stapling green cards to their
diplomas, we order them to go home and start companies to compete
against ours.

This sort of thing isn’t anything new. Friedman is described in
Wikipedia by David Sirota as the “high priest of Free Trade”.

“It is pure idiocy that Congress will not open our borders — as
wide as possible — to attract and keep the world’s first-round
intellectual draft choices in an age when everyone increasingly has
the same innovation tools and the key differentiator is human talent.”

The problem is this: if you open borders without accompanying jobs
creation, you will drive US citizens out of whatever occupations are
given immigration preference. This is a simple, empirical fact. It is
no accident that US enrollment in Computer Science programs peaked
just as H-1b expansion started in earnest.

The countries that Friedman is admiring all have restrictive
immigration policies compared to the US. Even Singapore–which is a
tiny country– selects its immigrants very carefully and has tax
incentives to keep Singapore a high wage country. The combination of
increased trade and more open immigration policy simply hasn’t worked
the way is proponents said it would. The problems of the US have all
accompanied a period of greatly increased immigration and much looser
trade policies. It is time to try something different."

http://blog.vdare.com/archives/2008/...lly-the-idiot/

[MiNe 109]

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