So the news has arrived from the heavenly land of paradise of
Facebook Green.  High Tech and Silicon Valley have walked the halls of
Congress and have parted the aisle, both left and right and soon the
path to the chosen land will be laid clear for a whole new generation
of deserving tribes.  Immigration law will be turned upside down and
computer engineers will be allowed to swarm here from around the world.
Today, April 12th, 2013, the Washington Post is announcing

The best-known names in technology, including Microsoft, Google and Intel,
are poised to be winners in the latest round of bipartisan immigration
talks as a group of senators prepare to unveil a bill next week.

This hasn't been easy to accomplish.  Silicon Valley has been begging
for years to lift  restrictions on importing brain power from overseas,
especially India and China, to fill what they perceive as critical gap in
needed engineering muscle for the future of American Industry.  Along the
way,  Mark Zuckerberg got so excited about sinking his teeth into the
foreign labor market pie that forgot to tell Mark Andersen and Bill Gates
that they had already signed on to the political effort.  According to
Reid J. Epstein on Politico (4/4/13), Facebook's boy wonder passed the
entire project to his college roommate who screwed the whole thing up:

   That plan, sent to board members and staff, was written by Joe
   Green — one of Zuckerberg’s Harvard roommates and the man the
   young billionaire tapped to lead his group. But before the group’s
   unveiling, Green has apologized for the plan’s phrasing and several
   claims which he now says aren’t right....

   [For one thing] Gates and Andreessen, however, are not yet signed
   on to the Zuckerberg group, according to a source familiar with
   its operation. The group will also not be operating under the name
   “Human Capital,” as Green advertised in the prospectus. And
   they’re now denying that the high-tech executives involved will
   use their companies to promote their message, which could have run
   them into trouble with broadcasting and campaign finance laws.


Problems aside, the press seems to think that Congress is already signed
up to unlimited importation of foreign educated help.  Forget picking
cantaloupe, it is the electrical engineers who are to get the free pass.

And while we are reviewing this effort, it seems that North Korean
Dictator Kim Jong Il has released Secret Joker Laughing Gas across the
Facebook Green, if not across the consciousness of then entirely of
Western Civilization.  As sure as the Young Jong Il will prepare his
rockets!, the Young Zuckerman has declared:

    1: We control massive distribution channels, both as companies
    and individuals. We saw the tip of the iceberg with SOPA/PIPA.  2:
    “Our voice carries a lot of weight because we are broadly popular
   with Americans.  3. We have individuals with a lot of money. If
   deployed properly this can have huge influence in the current campaign
   finance environment.”

The news would be entertaining if it wasn't so scarey and depressing.

So what's the problem?  Aside from deceitful practice of tacking
their lobbying effort onto the legitimate discussions over illegal
immigration, and despite that they color this request for corporate pork
as a human rights issue, going as far as invoking the Statue of Liberty
and Superman,  there is yet the real policy problem which the nation
still needs to tackle, that is affordable higher education.  Over the
last 30 years these captains of industry have spent their long nights
with foreign engineering students from the highest levels of third world
aristocracy the world over.  They have seen first hand the value that
our great schools, like Harvard, MIT and Stamford have afforded these
'immigrants' from India, Bangladesh, the Persian Gulf, Russia and China.
Jong Zuckerberg  has seen the quality of the education that has been
dispensed to our foreign students.  To lose these students, upon their
graduation from MIT, is a waste.  The Zuckerman's of the world want to
keep them.  If we don't have the talent here, we can just import it.

And that is also the problem.  That is the policy problem.  Why invest in
the education of a kid out of Wingate HS in Brooklyn when you can just
import talent from overseas that was educated here with foreign money.
Zuckerman can go fuck himself.  How is that for a Young Jong Il'ism...

Its not like we don't have talent here.  Its that we have been pulling
the educational opportunity out from under out Urban lower classes
for DECADES.  Even the middle class suburbanites can't afford to send
their children to graduate schools anymore.  Instead, the schools support
themselves themselves on a feast of foreign students.   The NYU's of the
world, have been aware of cash paying foreign students for decades and
using them to prop up university graduate schools since the mid-1970's.
And now, low and behold, we have an inexcusable education gap, while
spoiled brats like Gates and Zuckerman will now part the red sea to get
their hands of the educated minds these schools have been pushing out
the door.  We don't have an immigration problem, Jong Zuckerman problem.
We have an education policy problem, one that consigns our own youth to
poverty and suffering.  That is the problem.

On April 11th, 2013, David Brooks of the New York Times nicely outlines
just how severely radical our domesticated priorities have been.
He points out in his op-ed piece that:

   We’re living in a country where 53 percent of children born to
   women under 30 are born out of wedlock, according to government
   data. Millions of people, especially men, are dropping out of the
   labor force. Nearly half the students who begin college are unable
   to graduate within six years. The social fabric for people without
   college degrees is in shambles....  The president is increasing total
   revenues to a historically high 20 percent of G.D.P. by 2023. Federal
   spending would remain at a way-above-average 22 percent of G.D.P. But
   Washington still can’t seem to devote enough money to address
   the challenges faced by the less-educated and ease the segmentation
   of America. That’s true even after you account for the domestic
   programs that are outside the discretionary budget category and have
   their own funding stream, like the new early childhood initiative.

Now, in the US the states are the primary providers of educational
funding, and the states have passed much of that effort to local
governments who depend on property taxes to support their schools. On the
college level, states established universities and help fund students.
Higher education also get Federal support from a multitude of programs
including direct student grants, program grands, research grants and
crippling student loans.  The results stand on their own.  Not only have
we nearly run our lower and working class Americans out of the educational
system, but even in those professions where we still graduate students,
such as in Medicine and Law, the loan burden of these students is so
high that we are pushing these students into poverty to repay loans
that dwarf even what most people believe would be a large mortgage.
They are paying for these loans for the rest of their lives, pushing the
costs of healthcare and legal services, along with advanced education,
way past the ability of middle America to pay.  And now they have no
one to help Facebook Green stay watered... my heart BLEEDS.

Let Zuckerman take facebook to India.  Good riddance.  And the same for
Google, and Microsoft and any other silicon valley company who wants to
move from Palo Alto to Calcutta.

What we need is education reform.  And we've needed it for 30 years.
The Economist is telling us that these immigrants are starting new
businesses here and hiring locals.  They argue we need this law.  The give
fancy charts on immigrants and business.  And then they forget to tell you
that they have defined immigrants differently than the immigration law is
addressing, or what Zuckerman is proposing.  There is nothing deceitful
from the Economist.   Here is something for the Economist editors to
consider.   All the damn tech jobs in the world haven't helped US citizens
stuck in urban isolation to break out and join the high tech party at all.
The families dependent on public school education still suffer from lack
of education, lack of opportunity, and certainly can not be the high tech
entrepreneurs of the future.  They will have to keep coming from India.


AND YOU KNOW these people who have been left out:  The Haitian
immigrant who fled to save their lives from political repression,
the Cuban immigrants who fled Castro and settled here,  the children
of Irish migrants from 2 generations ago, the children of Holocaust
survivors, the Central Americans migrants escaping petty tyrants from
banana republics, and all the other US residents who are being frozen out
of the educational system.   It was the higher education system in the
1920's to 1950's that acted as the engine of social and economic growth
for generations of immigrants that arrived here.  Today there is no
graduate school for these children.  They don't have the core education
coming out of primary school, they struggle to catch up in undergraduate
college, and they certainly don't have the money for graduate school.
Hell, Hunter College of CUNY has classes with 800 students in a single
biology class and then flunk out the majority of the students.  Yah think
we have a problem here?

Yes, I think we do.  Maybe one should read what has been commonly known
as “The Classes are too big” report 1

 Written by Joe Cusoe at Marymount College,  to sum up it says, “large
 classes for poor students sucks”:


   Placing college neophytes in large, lecture-laden classes that are
   conducive to passive spectating may initiate maladaptive mental habits
   or predispositions to learning that linger beyond the first year of
   college year. In his book, Rejuvenating Introductory Courses, Kenneth
   Spear artfully expresses the potentially dangerous consequence of
   subjecting new students to large lecture classes: “In these normative
   experiences, [students] learn what it is to be a student, what is
   required to get by. If students are taught to be passive seekers and
   transcribers of information, that is what they become. Further, they
   set their sights accordingly in subsequent courses, often actively
   resisting our attempts in upper-division courses to get them to go
   beyond the information we give them” (1984, pp. 6-7) (1)



Here is a deal for Zuckerman and his merry band of privileged upper middle
class children.  For every foreign Computer Engineer you bring into the
US, you give me 20 million dollars to spend on the school programs of
MY choice.  Otherwise, to hell with your free lunch.  Pony up and pay
the education bill for our families so we can also produce nice educated
Comp Sci graduates who can make facebook while lounging around and eating
Doritos in the Harvard Dorms.


~~~ 1
http://steenbock.library.wisc.edu/instruct/class_support/imd/Week%2013%20Cuseo.pdf.