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Comment by nhashem | Hacker News Reader

From the administration's response:

"As a part of immigration reform, the Administration strongly supports legislation to attract and retain foreign students who graduate with advanced STEM degrees, to establish a start-up visa for foreign-born entrepreneurs to start businesses and create jobs, and to reform the employment-based immigration system to better meet the needs of the U.S. economy. However, the Administration does not support narrowly tailored proposals that do not meet the President's long-term objectives with respect to comprehensive immigration reform."

Essentially this bill "converts" the 55,000 "diversity visas" currently available into "STEM visas."

It looks like this bill originated from the Republican party, so I'm wondering why they didn't just write a bill that allocated additional STEM visas without "cannibalizing" the diversity visas.

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Because they want to force Democrats to be on record voting against letting entrepreneurs into the country. The potential for attack ads during the next election cycle matters more in Washington DC than actually getting things done.

A little OT : Here's a great example of a bill being written with explicit intent of making anyone who votes against it look like a terrible person:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting_Children_from_Intern...

Written by Lamar Smith, Mr. Privacy Invader himself -- make sure to read the Privacy issues section of the wiki page

Lamar Smith also authored the existing immigration law (IIRIRA) which is widely considered to be an abject failure. One provision had esteemed Judge Richard Posner exclaiming 'the law can't be that ridiculous!' before setting it aside in a recent case.

The law had a provision for granting advance parole to people whose immigration proceedings were incomplete so they could leave the country for things like weddings, funerals and so on and get back in to pick up where they left off. However, leaving the country also caused the immigration application to be considered abandoned, and the advance parole could be rejected. It even says on the advance parole application form that if granted, the parole may or may not be worth the paper it's written on - it depends on how the immigration officer at the port of entry is feeling on that particular day.

That should tell you all you need to know about Rep. Lamar Smith.

Good thing he's chairing the next House Science Committee.

http://science.house.gov/press-release/chairman-hall-congrat...

Membership on House Science is unfortunately a signal of low status:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4655470

Did not realize that. How depressing :-(

I am not American, and I have no idea how American politics works... The bottom line to me is that despite (or because of) the things this chap is doing, he got reelected. Why are Americans voting for him?

People rarely vote for individuals. Instead they usually vote for parties.

This is certainly true in the UK. I suspect it's the case in the USA and most other democracies.

80% of individuals are re-elected in the house, in part because power structures reward seniority and create path-dependency, so the older your guy the he can "bring home the bacon" (aka, pork) to his constituents.

tldr, not true in the us. totally different system.

Rep. Smith is also responsible for the STEM bill in question here.

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d112:h.r.6429:

I've come to associate his name with being a bit of a red flag.

EDIT:

HN is mangling the hyperlink for some reason. Copy+pasting will get you to the bill.

I hire people who would be considered "STEM," but as mentioned below, this will drive down the wage my employees can get. I oppose this bill for other reasons too – but since my startup is too small, so I can't apply for H1B visa workers, I can't recruit outside the US anyway.

I care about my employees and at this stage I can afford to pay them above market rates. I don't have any trouble holding on to them, though occasionally life interferes – one employee moved for personal reasons.

These big companies that donated to the Obama campaign – "Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe" are called out in the article – if they are having trouble hiring highly educated employees while their profits are measured in billions, would they please consider offering a raise to their current employees?

I'd be surprised if they could demonstrate they raised their salary by 50% and were still unable to fill their open positions. Yes, I know that many companies consider salary one of their biggest cost centers, but I believe that misses the essential feature of hiring an employee: they become part of the company. Employees are compensated with cash; stockholders are compensated other ways. Especially in a large, profitable software company, it isn't _actually_ hard to pay your employees above average rates.

I don't see the point of these shenanigans. If they want to on TV and lie about their opponents, they can do that. Do they need the phony bill titles for plausibility? The voting public is nowhere near smart enough to soft through the distinctions.

They do it because it's effective.

Max Cleland lost his Senate race to Saxby Chambliss in 2002 partially on the back of attack ads that showed images of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein while claiming Cleland didn't support President Bush's "vital security measures."

In reality, the votes in question involved things like Cleland voting against a Republican and for a Democratic version of a proposal, or larger bills that contained poison pills.

It was downright shameful -- and John McCain called it exactly that -- but it was effective.

Max Cleland is known to hate America. He was only willing to sacrifice three of his limbs in the service of the United States Army.

Saxby Chambliss, on the other hand, is a true patriot who proves this by yelling and screaming about it and never letting some pedantic BS about the "Constitution" obstruct his plans to remake America into his utopian vision as expressed by the movie "Idiocracy".

Except they can't force the (Senate) Democrats to vote on it because they can just not bring it up and it will die in January.

Also, while this is framed as an immigration bill, the Democrats won't take too much bad PR in important (Hispanic) immigrant communities because the vast majority of those aren't the tech job type.

Holding out for a comprehensive plan is probably a good move for Obama because he can include this as an incentive to vote for it. If they don't get some sort of comprehensive plan, it's still good because the Democrats could basically just introduce this without the zero-sum part and then the Republicans will be the ones against both skilled and unskilled immigrants.

This, exactly. If congressional republicans actually wanted the additional STEM visas, they could pass a clean bill doing only that and Obama would probably sign it, based on the statement above.

And if they vote for it, Democrats can be accused of being hypocritical when it comes to diversity. It's a no-lose situation for the GOP.

without "cannibalizing" the diversity visas.

Well, the diversity visas were the most brutal possible attack on sanity ever passed by a legislature. "Oh, you came from XYZ wretched backwater, here's your VISA...on the basis of your wretchedness." Sad, sad, sad, to live in such dismal times.

"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." - a certain statue's impossibly brutal attack on sanity

It is, of course, totally insane to let people voluntarily choose to work here and make voluntary economic transactions with other adults who voluntarily want to pay them money to provide goods and services for Americans to voluntarily purchase.

Well, yes, when you are making the decision based on someone being from a poor country. There are better measures on which visas could be distributed. I strongly support increasing the number of total visas, but that is separate.

> Well, yes, when you are making the decision based on someone being from a poor country.

But that's not the case.

> There are better measures on which visas could be distributed.

Better for who?

Isn't that a sensible humanitarian policy?

Actually a lot of poor countries don't qualify because there are already too many of their citizens living in the US, legally or illegally.

That's the "diversity" part, and the list includes many rich countries too.

Can't tell if serious? A datapoint: I moved to California, from France, on a diversity visa. I have randomly met 3 other french engineers who have done the same in my first couple months here.

In the worst case it's a tiny drop wrt. to general immigration, and I'm ready to bet it tends to in fact attract highly motivated people.

Are you calling most of Western Europe (including Germany, France, all the Scandinavian countries) "wretched backwaters"? What country DOESN'T count as a wretched backwater, aside from the U.S. of course?

If this is the case, the title of the article strikes me as poorly chosen.

The title of the article strikes me as one written by a Republican. This is a terrible bill, that's why it's not being signed.

Declan McCullough's reporting on legal issues frequently seems completely off base to me.

Yes. He also recently reported Patrick Leahy supporting a measure to liberalize law enforcement access to email without a warrant; Leahy supported a measure that was effectively the opposite, which is no surprise as Leahy is one of the most liberal members of the Senate, with a very strong ACLU scorecard.

But fact checking this stuff would cost CNet rageviews.

rageviews

Given the number of articles that have been as poorly chosen it would not surprise me if this was the case.

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