Call the Ripley's Believe It or Not people. Have smelling salts available. What follows will surely be one of the more unusual things you've seen or heard this year.
In the midst of his otherwise odious Silicon Valley race-hustling shakedown effort, Jesse Jackson said something that made sense — so much sense that the rest of the press, which usually hangs on every word of his nonsensical pronouncements, has virtually ignored it, and will probably continue to.
In a brief December 20 interview found at Forbes, while making a couple of other mistakes serious enough that the magazine felt compelled to correct them, Jackson said something quite against the PC grain (minor typos relating to a government program have been corrected; bolds are mine):
Jesse Jackson talks diversity in Silicon Valley
Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, 73, has done everything from run for president to negotiating with Saddam Hussein for the release of American hostages (Both miserably — Ed.). His latest challenge is tackling diversity at notoriously homogenous Silicon Valley companies.
... What can companies do to increase diversity?
The most important thing is to want to create inclusion and diversity to invent new verticals and horizontals for employees to join. The lack of diversity isn’t because people don’t have the genetics, it’s because of old social patterns that don’t let new people in.
We need to get rid of H-1B workers. There are Americans who can do that work, and H-1B workers are cheaper and undercut wages. We need more computer science scholarships. When I was a kid, I remember being mortified by Sputnik, but in a few months everything was STEM [science, technology engineering and math]. You took STEM classes and you got a scholarship. We trained people, we gave them jobs, we became the best in the world.
We need to put pressure on the system to open up.
... (In an earlier version of this story, Jackson misspoke about the number of the companies that have released demographic information about their employees. The correct number is 25, not six. He also implied that Intel recently started publishing its workforce demographics. In fact, Intel has been doing so for a decade).
As to the corrections, well, no one should have expected perfection, or anything close to it.
But on H1-B visas, it looks like we have a far-left and sensible right area of agreement on which to build.
Here is Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions on that same topic in September (bolds are mine):
One of the things the (Senate immigration) bill did was double the supply of low-wage (H-1B visa) foreign workers brought into the United States for companies such as Facebook.
Many of us have heard for a long time the claim that there is a shortage of STEM and IT workers. This has been the central sales pitch used by those making demands for massive increases in foreign-worker programs across the board — programs that bring in workers for every sector in the U.S. economy. But we know otherwise from the nation’s leading academics, people who studied this issue and are professionals in it. I have a recent op-ed here from USA Today which reports that there is actually not a shortage but a surplus of Americans who have been trained in the STEM and IT fields and that this is why wages for these fields have not increased since 1999.
If you have a shortage of workers in a field such as information technology or science and mathematics, wages go up, do they not? If wages are not up, we don’t have a shortage.
So rich high-tech companies are using the H-1B visa program to keep wages down and to hire less expensive workers from abroad. Indeed, the same companies demanding more guest workers are laying off American workers in droves.
Though the press clearly isn't interested in promulgating the H-1B positions of Sessions or Jackson, the fact that the two agree on anything which has the potential to protect good jobs for American workers indicates that maybe there is a smidgen of justification for being hopeful as we head into the New Year.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
