You will find no end to the reporting, spinning and hand wringing going on over the February jobs report. Expect even more spinning and wire fraud to happen over the next few months as bottom feeding employers start spouting they need the visa cap raised because they can’t hire the skills they need. It’s not the skills which are lacking. The only “skill” they are talking about is illegal alien wages. The phrase you will find in most of the news reports, usually buried is “rising wages” or “wage increases.” This means employers are starting to have to pay actual market rate and compete for talent. Before that they could offer wages dramatically below market with few benefits and find takers. The mortgage fraud committed by Wall Street bankers put a lot of people out of work and none of the bankers went to prison. That last part is going to end up being the Obama legacy recorded in history books. It mentally and financially scarred every demographic. A scar which will not go away. Even today some ten years after the bottom fell out we are finding financial news running segments about why nobody went to prison. Any good things he did won’t matter, eventually this will be the legacy history records, what his administration didn’t do.

I’m not the only one who believes the jobs numbers were low because only the pure criminals have openings left to fill. The pure criminal nature of this has been documented from 2011 forward and perhaps even earlier. The visa program was the new legalized slavery.

The first flaw allows employers to legally bring in foreign workers at below-market wages. How do we know that employers exploit this loophole? Employers have told the U.S. Government Accountability Office that they use the H-1B program because they are able to pay H-1Bs less than an Americans. The practice of exploiting the H-1B program for cheaper labor appears to be widespread. The GAO found that 54 percent of the H-1B visa applications were for the lowest wage level, approximately the 17th percentile. The wage differentials can be very significant, providing up to a 60 percent discount over American workers in some cases. The L-1 program has no wage floor, so workers are often paid home country wages. By far the largest sending country is India, where typical wages for engineers is a mere $10,000 per year. With this kind wage arbitrage, it’s no wonder that the firms exploiting this loophole are extraordinarily profitable and lobbying to expand the programs.

The remaining employers are looking to hire a high tech worker for $10,000/year, get them an L-1 and bring them here, especially to California and New York and New Jersey where they will have to try and live on $10,000/year. They could make more stocking shelves at Walmart but they can’t leave their employer.

In all of the political fighting going on over the stupidest wall to ever be thought of (Why don’t you ask Russia how the Berlin Wall worked out for them?) the campaign promise to crack down in visa abuse President Trump made has been swept under the rug. It’s really ironic that he’s willing to throw the easy win out with the bath water for that stupid ineffective wall. He could actually get the visa reform done. There are bi-partisan bills pending. I haven’t read through Dick Durbin’s bill. I’ve read some of the analysis. The fact it creates a floor for the L-1 wages might be a good thing. If it is the same floor as the $60,000/year H1-B has it won’t do much. The floor for all visas needs to be the prevailing wage as determined by the IRS. The IRS gets the W-2 forms. They know where you work and what you were paid. They probably even know the job classification or title. They can publish aggregated data. A programmer in Silicon Valley makes $X-thousand, programmer analyst $Y-thousand, etc. The department processing visa applications can then use these numbers. Any application paying below that range gets rejected. Granted the numbers will be a year behind, but they won’t be $100,000+ dollars behind like they are now.

Of course, could take it one step further. They could take those IRS published numbers and mandate visa workers be paid twice that. This would prove the lie. If companies really are desperate for skills they will page the wage. If all they are doing is buying slaves, the visa worker program won’t see any new applications.

This is why the jobs report tanked. Even if it is later revised upwards it won’t be revised to the anticipated 200,000 range. Employers have cherry picked all of the cheap talent out of the labor market. Now they have to pay more and they would rather buy slaves.