People are desperate for someone to represent their views and many are turning to Ron Paul. He sounds good, but you have an awful feeling underneath, something is wrong with this picture. 
But, wait, is he really representing positions you want? I don’t think so! Look at this voting record and position on labor arbitraging guest worker Visas!
Ron Paul is for massive H-1B Visa increases. Conservatives who think Ron Paul is the cats meow, think again, please. This is a corporate lobbyist driven issue. It’s all about globalization, forced migration under corporate control.
Ron Paul cosponsored more guest worker Visas.
Cosponsoring legislation to increase H-2B workers who are present in the U.S. at any one time in 2005-2006..
Rep. Paul is a cosponsor of H.R. 793, the Save Our Small and Seasonal Business Act of 2005, to amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to limit the timing of issuance of H-2B visas during a fiscal year.Specifically, H.R. 793 would split the H-2B visa cap so no more than 33,000 visas are made available for the first six months the fiscal year, and another 33,000 visas would be available in the second half of the year.
HOWEVER, H.R. 793 exempts from the annual cap aliens granted an H-2B visa within three years prior to approval of an H-2B petition, thus potentially TRIPLING the number of H-2B workers in the United States at any one time.Although timing the issuance of H-2B visas is a common-sense approach that would help prevent the situation that occurred in FY 2004 and FY 2005 when the 66,000 annual cap on H-2B (low-skill) nonimmigrant visas was hit within the first quarter of the year, H.R. 793 would ultimately harm American workers by creating exemptions which potentially could triple the number of H-2B workers in the U.S. at any given time.
Pardon the reference, but this is after all an article exposing a GOP candidate, so look at this interview:
Q: What do you think of the H1-B program?
Ron Paul: I’ve supported that because it’s legal. I know some people say they don’t follow the law….
Q: The argument is that it’s a form of corporate subsidy—powerful interest groups have arranged to break down their workers’ wages by bringing in temporary workers.
Ron Paul: the market always works to put pressure on the businessman to spend the least amount of money to provide product. So what some may call a corporate subsidy is also a subsidy to the consumer. The consumer is the one protected in the free market. The object of labor is to push wages up as high as possible. The object of business is to get the most efficient labor at the best price. In the free market, that works out. But the problem is we have too much welfare and we have a currency that’s losing value.
Q: If you’re President, various interest groups are going to come to you and say, there’s a shortage of nurses or teachers or (goodness!) possibly journalists; therefore we have to have these temporary work programs to bring in labor in this area. If the labor is organized, it’s going to say to you, look, the problem isn’t that there’s a shortage, the problem is business doesn’t want to pay higher wages. What will you do?
Ron Paul: Well, whatever we do will be legal. Congress has to have a say, they have to pass a law, and the President has to decide to sign it or not. And I would lean in the direction of saying, if there is indeed a shortage, and this is a legal process, this shouldn’t be threatening to us.
Q: How would you determine that there was a shortage?
Ron Paul: Well, I don’t think it would be easy but if there’s a need and immigrants can get a job, that means there’s a shortage. If there was no shortage, they wouldn’t have jobs. Obviously the companies can’t fill some of these jobs and they’re looking for people to fill them.
Q: Well, the counter-argument is that they can’t fill them at the price that they’re offering.
Ron Paul: That’s right, but the market has to set the price. Set the product and set the price of labor.
Q: But the argument of the displaced software engineers is that the government is colluding with the business owners to break down the price by importing temporary workers.
Ron Paul: I don’t think we should have minimum wages to protect the price of labor. I want the market to determine this. At the upper level as well.
Q: It’s really a question of defining the rules, isn’t it? Is it fair for corporations to increase supply by bringing in temporary workers?
Ron Paul: Which, means they’re going to fill a need for a certain time at a certain price, by people who have come here voluntarily. Otherwise, you have to be anti-immigrant and I don’t think our country is anti-immigrant. I think its anti-illegal immigrant. I think the problem you identify is occurring because we don’t have a healthy free market economy and we reward people for not getting training and becoming the type of individual who might get a job in a software company.
Oh really? U.S. citizens with education from the best universities in the world, with patents and skills are magically now just lazy and stupid? Isn’t the consumer also a worker? Isn’t the real consumer here the multinational corporations seeking their global cheap labor supply? How about the freedom to work without labor arbitrage?
cartoon from CorpWatch
Now Ron Paul sounds good on trade, but what is his policy answer? Well, claiming that free trade is for the consumer however that is defined, probably should tell you that a policy based on the United States National interest, the middle class probably is outside the scope of this philosophy.
While we’re about trade, economics, please note, a strong anti-choice position, which is quite hypocritical when claiming he is a libertarian. Paul talks about liberty, freedom, yet wants to send women back to the stone age and remove the right over her own body. He ignores the right to life of the women, please note, he puts a woman freedoms, body, subject to the rights of a group of cells. I want to point this out for most Progressives and Populists might find this position shocking and unacceptable. Video below gives more details.
First they ignore you,
then they laugh at you,
then they fight you,
then you win.
- Mohandas Gandhi
The thing Ron Paul obviously doesn’t understand is that with the lower wages paid to Americans because of H1B employees comes less buying power and therefore less consumer purchases.
Doesn’t anyone understand that consumers only exist because decent wages allow them to purchase? DUHHHHH! As wages decrease consumers will purchase less and then wages will decrease some more and consumers will purchase less….etc. It is a never ending downward spiral.
America is a #1 consumer nation in the world. That is because of higher wages and benifits paid to the middle class in this country. That is a fact!
Corporations are cuting off their nose to spite their face by continuing to lower wages to increase profits.
Ron Paul claims to be a Constitution Purist but I ask you, Where in the Constitution is it stated that Employers have the right to replace the US citizen in the workplace with foreign workers on H1-B?
I’m a huge Ron Paul fan and plan to vote for him in the primaries and, hopefully, the general election. As a programmer, his seemingly naive (yet all too common) stance on the H1-B visa program and outsourcing is my only concern (and, obviously, a significant one). That said, I think we should consider a few things:
1) Which presidential candidate offers a clear advantage on the outsourcing and H1-B visa issue? Only Kucinich. Right now, he’s getting the same treatment as Paul by the media and his fellow Democrat presidential-hopefuls (ignore, belittle, etc.). And if he ever won in the primaries or ran as a 3rd party, he would never have a chance of winning the presidency due to his ultra-liberal social positions.
2) While we may disagree with what he’s said in this interview on the outsourcing / H1-B issue, Paul is, IMO, the most thoughtful, well-reasoned, and honest presidential hopefuls we have. He doesn’t pander to the public and has no ties to corporate interests. He says what he believes and has a voting record consistent with that. And I believe that his positions are based on carefully weighing the information. On that point, I think that he would be open to hearing well-reasoned opposing thoughts on this issue and would carefully consider the information presented, rather than simply pretending to care and then taking his orders from the corporate interests. So, personally, I think this is just a case where the otherwise-highly-intelligent Paul needs to be educated on labor arbitrage.
3) Ron Paul is against NAFTA, the WTO, and is very concerned about the falling value of the US dollar. He has publicly criticized the fact that the inflation rate does not take into account the cost of food or fuel. Consider, then, the implications on the working man of a president who cares about these things.
4) Consider Paul’s other unique positions and how, when added up, would work to the benefit of the American worker. If he had his way, we’d have no income tax, a much smaller government, and personal freedom the likes of which we’ve not seen in over a hundred years. He also wouldn’t support giving government subsidies to corporations. I don’t know about you, but I’d love to work for myself. I’m an entrepeneur at heart. A Ron Paul presidency would make this a more realistic dream.
“As a programmer, his seemingly naive (yet all too common) stance on the H1-B visa program and outsourcing is my only concern”
I am in the same boat, and there is a key consideration here. Specifically, the Indian economy relies heavily on US aid.
take a look at this article:
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-170es.html
Its my conception that pulling the plug on Indian foreign aid would have the effect of ‘evening the score’ in terms of this labor arbitrage problem. I do support Paul but think he needs to be a bit more sophisticated in his understanding of what is going on with h1-b’s specifically, because ideologically he appears to be aligned with those who are concerned about the problems surrounding these visa programs. But I think these issues are obviated by a complete elimination of foreign aid to India. India, as we currently know it, cannot continue without American financial stimulus.
I invite you all to join and participate in the Facebook group, Engineers for Ron Paul.
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6009336940
thanks,
JMZ
I’m not sure if my previous comment will make it through, but I’ll say that Paul is opposed to the supranational organisations that put America Last and Big Business First.
Paul is opposed to birth right citizenship and truly opposed to illegal immigration.
His stance on trade isn’t ideal, but which major candidate is better? Duncan Hunter is polling at around or below 1% last I checked, as is Tom Tancredo, so I’m going with Paul, the next best on trade.
Every other Republican candidate is in favor of selling America out the highest bidder. Paul is not perfect, but he has a lot to offer.
You should check out his stance on the federal reserve bank as well. It sounds strange at first, but those bankers are leaching off America’s currecy. Paul would end that.
Paul’s comments are ridiculous. He does not want to set the price of upper level labor? So he supports bringing in foreign workers? What a crock. This is corporate welfare plain and simple. This policy is decimating the American IT industry.
It’s gotten way out of hand. Now the Indians are claming that they are naturally “smarter” than Americans and that they are superior. Right.
I just got back from two months in India and I can tell you what this policy has done for them. They are BOOMING like you can’t believe. An apartment in Bangalore is reaching NYC levels. The number of new cars is fantastic. Land prices are skyrocketing as is the number of software engineers. There are tech schools teaching Java, C#, Open Source, Oracle etc on every corner.
This is what this had brought us.
I worked at NBC/GE for years as a contractor. When I left it was all Indian labor. No more American programmers. This was in NYC. When you went in it looked like you were working in India because of the sheer number of them. I won’t even get into the problems with working with them due to cultural differences. Without exception they were mediocre. I know there are a few good ones out there but I have yet to meet them.
Ironically the solution may not be political but economic. If the rupee continues to get stronger vs the dollar the big Indian IT companies e.g. InfoSys, Tata, Wipro etc. will start losing money big time. Soon hiring American programmers will be cheaper.
The efficiency in transportation as increased the value of labor to the point where labor is the #1 most important factor to consider.
200 years ago sailing ships with lousy cargo capacity and buggies pulled by horses were awefully inneficient. 200 years ago the cost of transportation added so much to the price of goods, it was highly prohibitive to trade.
I read somewhere, that long ago, in some parts of the world salt traded for gold on a pound for pound basis.
Now with very low cost transportation, the most important factor in determining the price of goods is labor cost. So business will naturally migrate to the lowest labor cost. This is all fine and dandy when it is between the 50 states, but when trading with corrupt and Communist nations it is bad for Americans. Between the 50 states when a job is lost it is picked up somewhere else. There is no net loss between the 50 states.
Duncan Hunter votes for free trade agreements with 1st world countries, but votes against free trade agreements with dirt poor corrupt and/or communist countries. The reason they are dirt poor is because they are corrupt and/or Communist. The United States has no control over foreign governments, and it is not the United State’s fault they are dirt poor.
Ron Paul is far from a perfect candidate on immigration issues. However, Paul has the best legislative voting record of anyone with any measurable chance of getting the GOP nomination. The only GOP candidates that have a stronger record on immigration issues are Tancredo and Hunter-and neither of them have any real chance of getting the nomination-or anywhere near Paul’s fund raising potential.
I think that Paul greatly underestimates how tough it will be to solve the immigration problem. I disagree with the idea that corporations should be provided with work visas at anything less than a “market price”-which would be pretty dang high in a world where there are 10 million folks that want into the US each year-and only 1 million legal immigration slots.
Huckabee and Romney are both trying to pay lip service to immigration restriction-basically by making the lives of Mexican illegals as miserable as possible. However they are both clearly going to dramatically increase the level of guest worker visas if elected-as will McCain or Giuliani. Thompson has a far worse legislative record than Paul-though he is starting to talk tough on the immigration issue recently, his sincerity is rather questionable.
That said, I think it is VERY important that folks give Dennis Kucinich strong support because of his stand on H-1b. Kucinich is the only candidate who has consistently voted against preferential immigration rights diven by corporate needs.
I too am a Ron Paul supporter, but I find flaw in Dr. Paul’s understanding of the complexities of importing cheap labor into a high-cost economy.
For instance:
Dr. Paul’s first profession (OBGYN) is protected by American Law.
After my Son was born, my wife and I explored the option of home-birth with a mid-wife for our second child. We were not interested in incurring another $12,000.00 debt for something as natural as birthing a child.
While researching the topic, I was told, in no uncertain terms, that if any complications arose I — the father — would be open to prosecution.
Our third child only took 45 minutes maternity room time — the Nurse freaked out and ran off to find a Doctor while my wife and I delivered the baby alone.
I wonder how Dr. Paul will justify his position on H- visa consumer benifit, while the medical profession provides deeply discounted services to insurance companies, but cash paying customers are billed @ 100% inflated rates?
I once asked my Dentist for a discount because I was paying cash, therefore eliminating paper work and reimbursement time. I was told that the Dentist’s agreement with the PPO did not allow him to reduce his billing rate for cash payments.
Exhorbanent sustenance costs (such as housing, medical and secondary education) are built into the American economy, dumping third-world labor into our economy is suicide for the consumer class. I’m surprised that Dr. Paul does not recognize this fact.
Folks, its time to get all of these anti-offshoring groups together on one page and go after the Goliath that would take your jobs and send them to India or China. We just lost TORAW this week due to apathy and frankly unless we all get together we can’t fight the big boys.
Please visit http://www.madnamerica.com and get copies of the song to send around to everyone - get this thing heard and just maybe enough people will ask why and began to shake up the candidates a little.
Another quote on H-1B Visas from Ron Paul: