RUSH: Curt in White Bear Lake, Minnesota. Welcome to the EIB.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. It’s quite an honor to talk to the great one, as a new time caller.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: My comment is on the H1B visas. I think that’s kind of shot under the radar here and I think we kind of need to get the word out that this really is detrimental to our computer industry, not to mention or national security.
RUSH: We have talked about this. We talked about this a lot during the immigration — well, I couldn’t say we talked about it a lot, because the amnesty provisions were what were front and center. But the number of legal immigrants that we’re allowing in on the H1B visa of skilled and highly educated workers is really insufficient. Now, there’s another side to this, though. I’ve talked to a number of people that have businesses out in Silicon Valley and they’re making the same case you do, that they can’t find the kind of talent homegrown in this country.
CALLER: That’s baloney.
RUSH: Pardon? Well, I know it is.
CALLER: That’s baloney. We’ve got the finest educational institutions in the world.
RUSH: I know. Most of these that want to become H1B visa immigrants are coming here to be educated. We all know this. The other side of it is that they’re like anybody else that runs a business, they get the best labor they can for the cheapest price.
CALLER: Oh, I agree with that.
RUSH: And so that’s why some of these guys want the H1B visas in the computer business.
CALLER: Well, yeah, they do, but it’s destroying the rest of us that are trying to make a decent living out of it. I mean we’re having to compete with wages that are a third of what we’re normally used to getting, and, you know, I believe in the marketplace as much as anybody else, but how about America’s marketplace and not worry about the world marketplace?
RUSH: Well, you can’t — the genie is out of the bottle on global economies and things, global markets, the genie’s out of the bottle.
CALLER: Okay, look at it from a national defense standpoint.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: National security.
RUSH: I understand.
CALLER: You want people from another country writing code that’s running your financial institutions and your government defense systems, especially in light of China’s continual cyberattacks on us?
RUSH: Excuse me, but they don’t care, apparently. You could look at the immigration bill as a whole, you could ask that about the illegals. They don’t care. By the way, the H1B visas, I think I misunderstood you. I thought you said we need more of them.
CALLER: Oh, God no.
RUSH: Oh, then I misunderstood you because there aren’t that many.
CALLER: 50,000 a year, and everybody in the industry is pressing for more.
RUSH: Well, yeah, but even this bill didn’t increase it very much. 50,000 a year is nothing. It’s chump change.
CALLER: Yes, it is. But it adds up over time. And, like I say, all it takes is just a few of these people to come in there and write malicious code, and we’ve got trouble.
RUSH: Well, look, you could have a homegrown lunatic write malicious code. I mean you’re talking about odds here, but anybody could do that.
CALLER: That’s true, but —
RUSH: In fact, people do. We’ve got homegrown Americans that are hacking all over the place out there and trying to hack into Pentagon computers. You got people trying to hack into the iPhone, tear it apart.
CALLER: Well, that’s true.
RUSH: Yes. You know, they’re not using H1B visas to do it.
CALLER: China is the biggest source for viruses and hacking into Pentagon systems, and it’s happening every day. And all we’re doing is by letting these people in on an H1B visa we’re giving them more access to more of our systems, and it’s just going to be a matter of time.
RUSH: Well, you can say that about anything. It’s only going to be a matter of time before some idiot tries to set off a firebomb and it doesn’t work. It’s only going to be a matter of time before they fly another airplane into a building. It’s only going to be a matter of time before every American agrees with me.
CALLER: Well, let’s hope so.
RUSH: (Laughing.) Look, these concerns are all valid. I try to be sensitive to it. I know that they could not grant anybody an H1B visa who could do my job. So sometimes I don’t take these things seriously enough. I’m just joking. I know that there’s serious concern every time it’s come up. In fact, we had T.J. Rogers of a semiconductor company out in California, he called, and he was making the case for these things. He couldn’t get the talent he said that he needed. Boy, did we get a barrage of phone calls like Curt here following that, so I’m sensitive to the problem. Well, we do more background checks on the H1B visas than you would believe. We do. It is tough. The H1B visa is one of the toughest things. That’s why everybody says, ‘If we can do it on the H1B visa, why can’t we do it on the border? Why can’t we do it on any other area of immigration?’ I think there is a lot of scrutiny already out there, Curt.
You brought up the ChiComs. We got a funny story, interesting story here about the Chi-Coms, and this is the San Francisco Chronicle today. ‘United States is pressured to help China curb emissions.’ Well, I thought we were failures at it, too. I thought that’s why we had to do Live Earth. I thought the United States was destroying the planet. ‘Now that China has surged past the United States to become the world’s leading source of greenhouse gases, pressure is growing on U.S. policymakers to cast aside longtime anti-Beijing sentiment and help China clean up its emissions-spewing coal power industry. The argument for aiding China is being made in the most urgent terms. While scientists agree that the United States and other wealthy nations caused the greenhouse gas buildup that has brought the planet close to a ‘tipping point’ of irreversible warming, there’s also growing consensus that the growth of China’s emissions could push the world over the edge.’ (Laughing) Who said this?
Representative Steve Israel, Democrat, New York, said, ”With China surpassing the United States as the No. 1 producer of carbon dioxide emissions, we’re missing an historic opportunity to create a global alliance with China on clean energy.’ … New data released last month confirmed that China has become the No. 1 greenhouse gas producer, with its emissions rising at a rate…’ By the way, the ChiComs are denying, Mr. Snerdley, that story in the Financial Times last week. The Financial Times had a story saying that the ChiComs convinced the World Health Organization to eliminate from its latest pollution report that 750,000 ChiCom citizens die from pollution every year. The ChiComs are denying this. They said they did not demand that it be taken out and it just somehow happened, but that they didn’t demand it be taken out. Anyway, the new data show the ChiComs are just polluting like crazy out there.
‘Buried in these data, released by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, as well as in reports by other international agencies and the Chinese government, is the fact that China’s coal-fired power plants are increasing their emissions by an annual amount that is twice as large as the total emissions growth of all the world’s industrialized economies combined.’ So the emissions that the ChiComs are putting out there dwarf the rest of the industrialized world’s emissions. And, by the way, reiterate here, there’s no scientific proof that these emissions cause warming. At any rate, when the headline says, ‘US is pressured to help China curb emissions,’ what is meant, and it is detailed later in the story, they want us to pay the ChiComs to build the equipment necessary to clean up their coal plants and so forth.
‘Kelly Gallagher, director of the Energy Technology Innovation Policy Project at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, proposed a multibillion-dollar, multinational fund with a ‘major U.S. contribution’ that would give loans and grants for construction of low-emission power plants,’ to the ChiComs. I’m not kidding you. China has $1.2 trillion in reserves. They also are beneficiaries of a huge trade imbalance with us. So all this is is the same old thing. Every liberal proposal designed to save somebody or something is genuinely a disguised attempt to fleece the US taxpayer. Why should we be paying the ChiComs? They’ve got $1.2 trillion in reserves, plus the trade imbalance. I know the ChiCom currency is undervalued, but one of the things that people don’t understand, the ChiComs don’t care.
They don’t care whether they’re polluting, they don’t care. They’ve got a billion people they got — 750,000 of them die in a year, it’s good news for them. That’s 750,000 people they don’t have to feed. They’ve got huge problems over there. But they’re growing. They’re trying to manage a communist state-run government with a just breaking-out free market. But they also — and this is what people don’t understand. They are communists, and we are the enemy, and they love the fact our trade deficit imbalance with them is in their favor. They love the fact that their currency is being undervalued because it screws everything. They’re fighting a war. They haven’t launched any missiles yet, but the ChiComs are siding up with the Iranians. They got deals going with Hugo Chavez, and we’re supposed to spend taxpayer money to build these people new power plants that put out fewer emissions? Give me a break!