The false dilemma behind the Bush Amnesty

Sabretooth:

Very good offering, thank you for assembling and posting your article. It reflects thought and effort, and I appreciate it.

I noticed this statement in your comment accompanying your article:

I believe power tends to corrupt, and that it deludes long before it corrupts.

With apologies to Lord Acton and you, I've come to be of the persuasion that rather than corrupting, power tends to attract those who have some corruption within them, some deep personality flaw that drives them to seek power over other people, or to try to solve their problems or other people's problems by seeking power.

Power isn't solutions. The difference is not lost on people who are truly innovative and creative, like Henry Ford, Nicolai Tesla, Thomas Edison, and many of our Nobel laureates, or on people whose vocation or avocation is observing the dominance-driven personalities who cluster around power-giving institutions like Harvard, Yale, the Congress, and the great rulemaking executive agencies -- and journalism, with its power to bend opinion and the People itself to the journalists' collective will.

The first function of Republic, then, it seems to me, is to filter out to the greatest extent possible the kind of people who are drawn to power for its own sake, on the theory that such people will tend to be barren of real ideas but determined only to impose themselves, to no helpful effect, on society at large.

Oh, btw, I think Sec'y Ridge's estimate of the number of illegal aliens in the country is quite low. Including aliens who never reported for amnesty in 1986 and those who have fraudulently obtained papers or even citizenship, my own guess is more than double his high number of 12,000,000. I think 24,000,000-30,000,000 is more like it, including children who weren't really entitled to U.S. citizenship but who obtained it by their mothers' illegal efforts to ensure that they were born here, or by fraudulent documentation. I would describe this larger number as "people who are here illegally", which would include a number of U.S. citizens who shouldn't be citizens.

What your interlocutor chooses to ignore is that the New Bush Dawn of Immigration will also import technical/professional workers at $8.00/hour--displacing US natives who thought all that education was worth $60-75K in salary.

A point worth remembering whenever Bushbots begin touting the benefits of a looney space mission to Mars upon the US economy.

IBM Data Give Rare Look at Sensitive 'Offshoring' Plans Mon Jan 19,12:53 AM ET

In a rare look at the numbers and verbal nuances a big U.S. company chews over when moving jobs abroad, internal documents from International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM - News) show that it expects to save $168 million annually starting in 2006 by shifting several thousand high-paying programming jobs overseas, Monday's Wall Street Journal reported.

Among other things, the documents indicate that for internal IBM accounting purposes, a programmer in China with three to five years experience would cost about $12.50 an hour, including salary and benefits. A person familiar with IBM's internal billing rates says that's less than one-fourth of the $56-an-hour cost of a comparable U.S. employee, which also includes salary and benefits.

According to the documents, which also provide managers with detailed advice on how to talk about the moves and their effect, IBM plans to shift the jobs from various U.S. locations to China, India and Brazil, where wages for skilled programmers are substantially lower.

At IBM headquarters in Armonk, N.Y., a spokesman said that the company expects to shift 3,000 U.S. jobs overseas this year. He declined to comment on plans for next year. He said IBM expects to add 15,000 jobs world-wide this year, with a net total of 5,000 of them in the U.S. That would increase IBM's world-wide employment to 330,000, the highest level since 1991.

IBM hasn't announced the plan to shift workers overseas -- elements of which were reported in The Wall Street Journal last month -- either internally or externally. It isn't clear if the documents are final versions; most carry dates of late November and December 2003. The spokesman declined to comment on the documents seen by the Journal.

Like other high-tech companies, IBM is moving knowledge work to cheap-labor sites outside the U.S. This "offshoring" process has raised fears that even high-skill jobs that were supposed to represent the U.S.'s future are being lost to countries that have already taken over low-skill factory work.

Wall Street Journal Staff Reporter William M. Bulkeley contributed to this report.

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