Gordon Crovitz /WSJ: millions of Americans are unemployed, so let's ramp up immigration

Posted Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 1:58 am

Former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz offers "We Need an Immigration Stimulus/A recession is exactly when we want innovative outsiders" (link). Bracketed by various absurdities, he offers the following stats:

Companies founded by immigrants include Yahoo, eBay and Google. Half of Silicon Valley start-ups were founded by immigrants, up from 25% a decade ago. Some 40% of patents in the U.S. are awarded to immigrants. A recent study by the Kauffman Foundation found that immigrants are 50% likelier to start businesses than natives.

Someone who supports Americans (in Crovitz' words, a "nativist") might look at those stats and wonder how we could spur entrepreneurship among Americans, such as by making an entrepreneur class some sort of graduation requirement just as other subjects are. Someone of the WSJ's bent might look into taxes that make being an entrepreneur difficult for Americans; someone to the left might suggest some sort of government program. That would be the American approach. You don't need to guess Gordon Krovitz' approach:

The pace of lower-skilled migration has slowed due to higher unemployment. This could make it less contentious to ease the path to legalization for the 12 million undocumented workers and their families in the U.S. It's also a good time to ask why we turn away skilled workers, including the ones earning 60% of the advanced degrees in engineering at U.S. universities. It is worth pointing out the demographic shortfall: Immigrants are a smaller proportion of the U.S. population than in periods such as the late 1890s and 1910s, when immigrants gave the economy a jolt of growth... Banks getting federal bailouts are saddled with new hurdles to get visas for skilled workers. The wait for H-1B visas for skilled people from countries such as China and India is now more than five years, with only 65,000 visas granted annually among 600,000 applications.

We've got over 300 million people in the U.S.; importing talent now will only hurt us later as we become reliant on that talent and no longer have much need to, for instance, establish engineering schools. If all our bank tellers come from Romania, why establish bank teller schools?

Discussing the rest of Gordon Crovits' sleaze with the same restraint I've struggled with in this post is left as an assignment.

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Comments

schrammenomics (not verified)

Mon, 04/27/2009 - 15:00

Carl Schramm’s “Schrammenomics” Recession, Far From Over, Already Setting Records April 27, 2009 by entrepreneurshipeconomist Having made the economy worse over the past seven years by instituting the entrepreneurship-free entrepreneurship that is the central plank of Schrammenomics, Carl Schramm is now attempting to institute Austrian-free Austrian Ecnomics, hiring Dane Stangler to replace the noble content of the Austrians with Bo Fishback MBA buzzwords such as “growthology.” The theory is that if Carl Schramm gets enough invites to fancy dinners on first class flights (bought and paid for by Kauffman, like Carl Schramm’s George Eastman Kodak Medal and schrammenomics vanity press), he can revive the economy as he and Bo Fishback and Dane Stangler hold hands as they fly first class, chanting “growthology,” “growthology,” “growthology” while coming up with new ways to konsolidate power at kauffman so that no matter how bad the economy gets, no matter how many entrepreneurs and true academics they they oppose and afflict, no matter how many superior competitors must be defunded and detsoryed by the innovation-free, entreprneurship-reee, invention-free, innovator-free “MBA/JD bureuacrat/pencil pusher only” schrammenomics juggernaut, they will yet receive millions for Carl Schramm’s seven years of failed, eocnomy-killing, home-foreclosing, self-serving, MBA-buzzword chanting Schrammenomics. They define this plundering of a noble man’s foundation for personal, welath-killing profit as “entreprnuership.” Sure you can buy a lot of medals, friends (univeristy administrators who you wire millions to in exchange for medals), and supporters with a $2.5 billion foundation, as long as you are an ambitious, soulless, echaracterless political manipulator who sees opportunity for personal profit in the destruction of academia and treu entrepreneurship. When the noble, exalted Kauffman left his estate for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship, he never, never defined entrepreneurship as the hijacking a foundation and using it to fund one’s own content-light, insipid, anti-intelletcual vanity press and purchase George Eastman Kodak medals while hiring anti-entreprneur MBAs/JDs to replace the exalted spirit of entrepreneurship with “growthology” buzzwords, konsolidating power while killing the spirit of entreprneurship and raging against the free marketplace of ideas, spamming the internet with growthology buzzwords as the economy died, due to schrammenomics. The New York Times reports, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/25/business/economy/25charts.html?_r=1&ref=patrick.net Recession, Far From Over, Already Setting Records Dane Stangler and Bo the Harvard MBA Fishback will never link to this, as their #1 job is to make sure that Carl Schramm’s image is exalted even as the economy crashes after seven years of of Schrammenomics. The economy is in Schrambles, as Bo Fishnback and Dane Stangler come up with new buzzwords to shout as they fly over America in f

Fred Dawes (not verified)

Mon, 04/27/2009 - 21:40

Its all about obama getting his people in power and making a new USA Out of the bodies of the people who live here now for the New people ( see: La Raza for meaning of the New people see Hitler the Master Race ) Get out of the cities if you can within 6 weeks or before.

Ivan Simmons (not verified)

Thu, 02/11/2010 - 23:26

I am a refugee from California now living in Chiang Mai Thailand. I had to get a Visa from the Thai Embassy to enter Thailand and a Passport to leave the USA and get a Thai Visa. Why is it that a Mexican citizen can cross the border without papers, get a job, pay no taxes, get free medical care, education for his/her childen, and then demand citizenship. What kind of nuthouse has California become?