Stupidland

America was once a nation of winners, scared of almost nothing, adventuresome, home of the brave, the cutting edge, excellence in invention, and independent in spirit. A nation of immigrants who knew how stupid it was to keep people down, and contain their inventiveness on the basis of their religious or ethnic background. E Pluribus Unum! Upward mobility. The place where the next “new” was definitely going to come from.

That was then, before we began to covet what we had, grew our own kind of fear that “they” were going to take it from us, and began a long history of exclusionary policies that have taken American competitiveness down a couple of very significant notches. Even though the majority of recent U.S. jobs have come from small businesses, so very many of which were founded by immigrants, we fear immigrants, believe that a bevy of Boston Marathon bombers lurk in every batch of newbies seeking fame and fortune in the “promised land,” and think that those damn foreigners are taking jobs away from hard-working Americans. Keep America for Americans! It’s basic Tea Party 101. Forget the fact that the real “Americans” are the “native” ones! The rest… immigrants and their descendants.

Aside from the fact that American companies have trouble finding local-born Americans to engage in stoop labor to pick crops, dig ditches the old fashioned way or engage in the most difficult and menial construction and domestic housekeeping jobs, they even have problems with super-qualified potential immigrants. At the top of the value spectrum, where foreign-born and often educated scientists, engineers and mathematicians crave U.S.-based opportunities, despite the chronic labor shortages among these senior levels of expertise, we make immigrating to the United States living hell for these experts and their families, even though studies repeated show how valuable they are in creating jobs for everyone around them.

Canada has watched our chronic stupidity with glee. Let those ultra-smart, super-educated non-white tech experts struggle with U.S. visas for themselves and their loved ones! Piss ‘em off enough with bureaucratic rules and barriers to entry! Yep, Canadians just love this stuff. You see, Jason Kenney, Canada’s minister of citizenship, immigration and multiculturalism, took a 4-day visit to our Silicon Valley mid-May. Before he left, he said (brazenly gloated) the following in an interview in Vancouver, British Columbia (Canada): “I think everyone knows the American [visa/immigration] system is pretty dysfunctional… I'm going to the Bay Area to spread the message that Canada is open for business; we're open for newcomers. If they qualify, we’ll give them the Canadian equivalent of a green card as soon as they arrive.”

The San Jose Mercury News (the voice of the Silicon Valley) summarized it this way on May 17^th: “[J]ust days before Kenney was set to tour San Francisco and the South Bay to promote his new visa for startup entrepreneurs, a giant red maple leaf emerged on a billboard off Highway 101 on the route from San Francisco to the heart of Silicon Valley, part of a Canadian advertisement encouraging tech workers here temporarily to migrate north permanently.

“Modeled on an idea first introduced but never passed in the U.S. Congress, Canada's new ‘startup visa’ grants permanent residency to entrepreneurs who can raise enough venture capital and start a Canadian business… ‘H-1B problems?’ asks the South San Francisco billboard, referencing America's temporary visa for skilled foreign workers. ‘Pivot to Canada.’”

The Silicon Valley has lobbied long and hard on this issue. They’ve generated concessions in the legislation pending before the Senate, but they still think that even with these proposals, they will still have to develop jobs overseas to provide them with the expertise they require:  “The industry achieved its main goals in the draft Senate bill: an easing of the green card process and an expansion of the number of skilled guest worker visas. That draft, though, includes language that it considers excessive regulatory oversight of when a company can hire a temporary foreign worker and lay off an existing American worker.

“Executives from Silicon Valley companies say such language would effectively keep them from using the larger numbers of temporary work permits, known as H-1B visas. They also warn of more jobs being shipped overseas. They are backing proposed amendments that would reverse those provisions… ‘The amendments are very important because they allow high-tech companies to use the visas as intended rather than creating regulations that make it so difficult they cannot practically be used,’ the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, which includes I.B.M. and Oracle, said in an e-mailed statement on [May 17^th]. It added that most technology companies already hire a preponderance of American workers.” New York Times, May 19^th.

Let U.S. hard patent applications drop, just as China’s and India’s applications are accelerating! We having such a strong economic recovery – NOT – that we can afford to keep solid value-producers and their families out of our country while poll-watching slogan mongers in Congress continue to vote and act against this nation’s best economic interests. Jingoism trumps genuine “really care about your country” patriotism every time! Are we out of our minds?! Why are we now a nation dominated by fear?!

I’m Peter Dekom, and it seems as if we have managed to elect one of the stupidest Congressional delegations in living memory!