"60 Minutes" IIT Infomercial Shows Again

Date: Saturday, March 01, 2003 12:35 PM

H-1B and JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER

www.ZaZona.com

"60 Minutes" must be very proud of the show they did on Bombay
University (IIT) because they are it airing again. Most people on the
East Coast didn't get to see it the first time so CBS wants to make
sure everyone has a chance to see those geniuses from IIT.

Leslie Stahl's pandering during the interview of Marayana Murthy,
founder of the Indian owned bodyshop Infosys, has to be seen to be
believed. She is in awe of this shyster. Murthy makes bigoted comments
about American students, WASPs, and Cornell university while Stahl just
listens with a dreamy look on her face. Murthy made the statement that
almost all their students are young men and even that didn't jolt Stahl
out of her awe induced trance.

The 50th anniversary of Bombay U celebration at Silicon Valley and the
"60 Minutes" story are carefully choreographed events to launch the
campaign to raise the yearly quota on H-1B visas. The lobbyists, aided
by Bill Gates, want to show that American techies are poorly educated
and they don't have the will to work as hard as the new breed of
geniuses from India. They will use this to justify why more H-1Bs must
be imported. The rationale will be that Americans cannot compete
against the excellence of those hard working geniuses from Bombay U.

The show is a propaganda victory for the lobbyists who want to import
cheap labor by using H-1B and L-1 visas. "60 Minutes" played right into
their hand by running a cheap informercial to promote these Indian
schools. Stahl never once asked Murthy a tough question and didn't even
interview anyone that might disagree with his assessment that IIT is
the best technical school in the universe.

I include Joe Guzzardi's analysis of the show. I recommend going to the
VDare site because the article has a lot of links.

Many people wrote to "60 Minutes" and complained about their lack of
objectivity. Some of them actually got responses back from the
producers that claimed that the show wasn't biased. Watch it this
Sunday and you be the judge.

Stahl can be contacted at LesleyStahl@cbsnews.com
There is an online form for comments to 60 Minutes:
http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/60minutes/main3415.shtml

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/1998/07/08/60minutes/main13502.shtml

(CBS) Up Next: March 2, 7 p.m.

IMPORTED FROM INDIA - The best and brightest engineers come from what
may be the most competitive school in the world - and one most
Americans have never heard of: the Indian Institute of Technology.
Lesley Stahl reports. Please note: This is a re-broadcast of the
segment seen on the West Coast only, on January 12th.

http://www.vdare.com/guzzardi/imported.htm

CBS 60 Minutes Fires First Shot In New H-1B Battle
By Joe Guzzardi

Break the bad news to your children gently.

Tell them the way 60 Minutes sees things:

Abandon all hope of working in Silicon Valley. Those jobs are reserved
for the best and the brightest; the graduates of the Indian Institute
of Technology.

Thats the gospel according to Lesley Stahls January 12th piece
Imported from India. According to Stahl, I.I.T. is the most demanding
university on the planet and its graduates the most talented, hardest
working people on the face of the earth.

What do we import from India? asks Stahl. Really smart people! Imagine,
gushed Stahl, Harvard, Princeton and M.I.T. all rolled into one.

American companies, Stahl continued, love I.I.T. graduates.

No one from Harvard, Princeton or M.I.T. was interviewed. But 60
Minutes assured viewers that the curriculum from I.I.T. is the most
rigorous in the world.

Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems [send him mail] and I.I.T.
graduate made this observation: If you are a WASP walking in for a job,
you wouldn't have as much pre-assigned credibility as you do if you're
an engineer from I.I.T.

And, stop the presses! We are blessed that so many of those doors are
right here in the U.S! More than two-thirds of I.I.T. graduates migrate
to America most of them on H-1B visas.

The 60 Minutes segment represents the first cannon shot in what looms
as a bitter battle over H-1B visa legislation set for October.

Consider this salvo from Khosla: the American consumer and the American
business in the end is the beneficiary

The industry is lobbying for an increase in the 195,000 level
established in 2000; weary, displaced American software workers who
want their jobs back want the total to revert to its original
65,000---or less.

Seasoned immigration observers recall that originally H-1B visas were
intended to temporarily satisfy a supposed shortage of qualified
American software engineers.

But, as always, temporary became permanent. Soon after the original
H-1B legislation was enacted, fully qualified American workers found
themselves on the outside looking in.

So the stage is set for a tough fight: the money grubbers who must
argue that they need more imported workers even though Silicon Valley
has laid off hundreds of thousands of workers against disgusted
Americans who want less immigration across the board.

But this time around wont be a cakewalk for billionaire moguls who
love cheap, indentured overseas labor. According to University of
California at Davis Professor Norm Matloff, an H-1B expert, there are a
lot of reasons why.

Matloff thinks that the industry may have been lucky to get its
increases in 1998 and luckier still in 2000. Now, with the
well-publicized lay-offs in Silicon Valley and a high public skepticism
about immigration and visa abuses, slipping an H-1B visa increase
through Congress will be harder.

Too, Matloff points to an increased level of anger and activism among
U.S. programmers. Internet websites like www.zazona.com;
www.nomoreh1b.com and www.programmersguild.org have unified the
unemployed.

Oddly, a decade ago, when 60 Minutes produced North of the Border, the
same Lesley Stahl pointed to the H-1B visa as a graveyard for American
software workers.

What a difference ten years can make!

Stahl in 1993: You're actually saying, I think, that--that there are
computer companies that are firing Americans in order to bring the
lower-wage foreigners in

And: that there is a deliberate attempt here to--to take the Americans
off the payroll and bring in someone who they'll pay half or less than
half.

Stahl wasnt the only one who got the drift then.

Demetrious Papademetriou, former Immigration Official and now an open
borders champion, [send him mail] told Stahl in 1993:

These are basically run-of-the-mill people with a degree and some
skills, and it seems to me that it is important that we distinguish
between people who are truly skilled--who have unique, specialized
skills--and people who simply provide labor.

Stahls report reflects an astonishingly arrogant We are the best, we
are the brightest attitude on the part of I.I.T. graduates. We
Americans are simply inferior. Heres what Suns Khosla thinks of
American universities:

When I finished IIT-Delhi and went to Carnegie Mellon for my Masters, I
thought I was cruising all the way through Carnegie-Mellon because it
was so easy relative to the education I had gotten at IIT-Delhi.

Remember, this lecture comes from one of the most backward nations in
the world and is delivered to one of the most progressive.

Immediately after Imported from India aired my e-mail in box filled up
with correspondence from offended VDARE.COM readers.

Wrote one:

The majority of H-1B's that have come here over the last 2 decades are
from well-to-do families that put their kids through private schools
and that eschew contact with lower-caste Indians.

The state of public education in India is in crisis and many of the
communities where we work do not have adequate or functioning primary
schools. In addition to ongoing pressure to improve the public school
system, the WLC program provides children with modest access to daily
learning, either in complement to their existing schooling or in its
absence."

Why have they all come here if they are so brilliant? Why aren't they
staying and building India into a world-class society?

Whom and what is the H-1B program subsidizing?

Basically, what I am saying is that the 60 Minutes presentation is a
front for another assault on America and Americans.

Joe Guzzardi [email him], an instructor in English at the Lodi Adult
School, has been writing a weekly column since 1988. It currently
appears in the Lodi News-Sentinel.

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