David Broder admits mistakes on H-1B

Date: Wednesday, January 03, 2007 10:21 AM

<<<<< JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER No. 1616 -- 1/03/2007 >>>>>

In March of 2006 David Broder, the internationally famous columnist for the
Washington Post, wrote a stinker of a column about H-1B. He bought some of
the worst of Bill Gates' propaganda and never questioned it. In the
newsletter "2006-03-19 Bill Gates Goes to Washington" I wrote, "Broder of
the Washington Post got snookered".

That Broder column is still online and can be viewed at:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/17/AR2006031701798.html
For Gates, A Visa Charge

Since then Broder seems to have had an epiphany! He has even made a public
admission of his mistakes. Now Broder sees that there are two sides to the
H-1B story. He never actually says that Bill Gates was wrong, but this must
be considered a strong reversal by such a well-known columnist:

The letter-writers, many of whom identified themselves as
unemployed or underemployed people with similar skills, claimed
that the H-1B workers were taking their jobs and working at lower
wages. I waded through a mass of testimony and evidence, supplied
by both sides in the controversy, without being able to resolve
the issue.

Many of us to are trying to stop the insanity of H-1B feel that we aren't
being heard; but that Broder comment proves otherwise. I hope this
encourages more of you to speak up in 2007. We are going to need a lot of
activism to stop the cheap labor lobby from raising the H-1B cap.

Broder's new column has appeared many newspapers.

Here are just a few of the links. Sometimes the title varies.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/29/AR2006122901420.html
Pratfalls and Prophesies

http://news.cincypost.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2007701020315
Time to admit mistakes

http://www.cjonline.com/stories/122806/opi_brodercol.shtml
New year will bring new insights, right and wrong

http://www.newsobserver.com/559/story/525583.html
Corrections and objections

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Go to this link to read my movie review of Happy Feet:
http://www.vdare.com/letters/tl_010207.htm

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

http://news.cincypost.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2007701020315

Time to admit mistakes

Tuesday, January 2, 2007
Time to admit mistakes

Column by David Broder

WASHINGTON - The controversies of the year past - Iraq, immigration,
domestic surveillance and the rest, plus the political battles that
climaxed in the Democratic victories in November - all contributed to an
exceptionally heavy load of reader-generated corrections and objections.
Thanks to e-mail, many more of you are now contributing to this annual
"goofs" column, where I review (and repent) some of the judgments and
misjudgments of the past year.

To start with the simplest, in an August piece about Ohio politics, I wrote
that Ted Strickland was trying to become the first congressman since
Rutherford B. Hayes to be elected governor of Ohio. Several of you pointed
out that I had ignored two subsequent figures who moved from Congress to
that governorship, James M. Cox and Frank B. Willis.

An interview with Bill Gates produced a wave of protests. The Microsoft
billionaire was in Washington to lobby for an expansion of the H-1B visa
program, which provides entry for foreign-born scientists and engineers who
hold job offers in the United States. Gates said the limit on their numbers
was hurting America's competitive position.

The letter-writers, many of whom identified themselves as unemployed or
underemployed people with similar skills, claimed that the H-1B workers
were taking their jobs and working at lower wages. I waded through a mass
of testimony and evidence, supplied by both sides in the controversy,
without being able to resolve the issue. It will likely come up again when
the next Congress tackles immigration reform, and this time, I promise I'll
look at both sides before I write about it.

I had a similar experience when I wrote about Sen. Joe Biden's proposal for
decentralizing the government of Iraq, allowing more authority for separate
Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish regions. I commended the Biden proposal as a step
forward from what was already, last May, a seriously stalemated and
deteriorating situation in Iraq.

But after the column appeared, I received several communications from
people with as much knowledge of Iraq as Biden possesses. They argued that
such a step toward federalism had serious dangers. It would be difficult to
apply in urban areas such as Baghdad, where populations are mixed, and it
risked, the correspondents said, inviting other countries such as Iran and
Turkey to spread their influence into a partitioned Iraq.

Those same objections have blocked adoption of the Biden plan, but
meantime, Iraqis fleeing violence have increasingly separated themselves
into Shiite or Sunni strongholds, leaving the situation even worse than if
there had been an orderly and legal division of authority.

Another column that drew great protest was one where I took my colleagues
in the media to task for their treatment of Karl Rove in the Valerie Plame
leak investigation. When the special prosecutor announced he was not
charging Rove with anything, I reviewed some of the many articles which had
accused the White House aide of masterminding the "outing" of Plame and
said that an apology was in order.

The e-mail and letter-writers argued that the simple fact that Rove had
escaped prosecution did not mean that he was innocent of using his position
to harass and frustrate critics of the administration. He had, after all,
confirmed Plame's identity to at least two reporters working on the story.
Even if the original leak came from elsewhere, these letter-writers said,
Rove was no innocent.

But I still believe there is an important cautionary tale for the press in
the Rove-Plame story. Too many of us got way ahead of the facts and let our
suspicions grow into assumptions and assertions for which we had no
evidence.

Turning again to politics, I'm embarrassed to say that the one state I
wrote about that I got wrong was Michigan, where I spent enough time to
have known better. I thought Gov. Jennifer Granholm was going to be sunk by
the auto industry unemployment, but she put on a great campaign and won.

On the other hand, I saw both stages of the Connecticut race correctly -
Joe Lieberman losing the primary but winning as an independent in November.
And the downfall of the Republican Congress and rise of an independent
breed of Democrats was forecast here from early March onward.

Bring on 2007.

David Broder writes for the Washington Post. His e-mail address is
davidbroder@washpost.com.

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