So the news has arrived from the heavenly land of paradise of Facebook Green. High Tech and Silicon Valley have walked the halls of Congress and have parted the aisle, both left and right and soon the path to the chosen land will be laid clear for a whole new generation of deserving tribes. Immigration law will be turned upside down and computer engineers will be allowed to swarm here from around the world. Today, April 12th, 2013, the Washington Post is announcing

The best-known names in technology, including Microsoft, Google and Intel, are poised to be winners in the latest round of bipartisan immigration talks as a group of senators prepare to unveil a bill next week.

This hasn't been easy to accomplish. Silicon Valley has been begging for years to lift restrictions on importing brain power from overseas, especially India and China, to fill what they perceive as critical gap in needed engineering muscle for the future of American Industry. Along the way, Mark Zuckerberg got so excited about sinking his teeth into the foreign labor market pie that forgot to tell Mark Andersen and Bill Gates that they had already signed on to the political effort. According to Reid J. Epstein on Politico (4/4/13), Facebook's boy wonder passed the entire project to his college roommate who screwed the whole thing up:

That plan, sent to board members and staff, was written by Joe Green — one of Zuckerberg’s Harvard roommates and the man the young billionaire tapped to lead his group. But before the group’s unveiling, Green has apologized for the plan’s phrasing and several claims which he now says aren’t right....

[For one thing] Gates and Andreessen, however, are not yet signed on to the Zuckerberg group, according to a source familiar with its operation. The group will also not be operating under the name “Human Capital,” as Green advertised in the prospectus. And they’re now denying that the high-tech executives involved will use their companies to promote their message, which could have run them into trouble with broadcasting and campaign finance laws.

Problems aside, the press seems to think that Congress is already signed up to unlimited importation of foreign educated help. Forget picking cantaloupe, it is the electrical engineers who are to get the free pass.

And while we are reviewing this effort, it seems that North Korean Dictator Kim Jong Il has released Secret Joker Laughing Gas across the Facebook Green, if not across the consciousness of then entirely of Western Civilization. As sure as the Young Jong Il will prepare his rockets!, the Young Zuckerman has declared:

“1: We control massive distribution channels, both as companies and individuals. We saw the tip of the iceberg with SOPA/PIPA.

“2: “Our voice carries a lot of weight because we are broadly popular with Americans.

“3. We have individuals with a lot of money. If deployed properly this can have huge influence in the current campaign finance environment.”

The news would be entertaining if it wasn't so scarey and depressing.

So what's the problem? Aside from deceitful practice of tacking their lobbying effort onto the legitimate discussions over illegal immigration, and despite that they color this request for corporate pork as a human rights issue, going as far as invoking the Statue of Liberty and Superman, there is yet the real policy problem which the nation still needs to tackle, that is affordable higher education.

Over the last 30 years these captains of industry have spent their long nights with foreign engineering students from the highest levels of third world aristocracy the world over. They have seen first hand the value that our great schools, like Harvard, MIT and Stamford have afforded these 'immigrants' from India, Bangladesh, the Persian Gulf, Russia and China. Jong Zuckerberg has seen the quality of the education that has been dispensed to our foreign students. To lose these students, upon their graduation from MIT, is a waste. The Zuckerman's of the world want to keep them. If we don't have the talent here, we can just import it.

And that is also the problem. That is the policy problem. Why invest in the education of a kid out of Wingate HS in Brooklyn when you can just import talent from overseas that was educated here with foreign money.

Zuckerman can go fuck himself. How is that for a Young Jong Il'ism...

Its not like we don't have talent here. Its that we have been pulling the educational opportunity out from under out Urban lower classes for DECADES. Even the middle class suburbanites can't afford to send their children to graduate schools anymore. Instead, the schools support themselves themselves on a feast of foreign students. The NYU's of the world, have been aware of cash paying foreign students for decades and using them to prop up university graduate schools since the mid-1970's. And now, low and behold, we have an inexcusable education gap, while spoiled brats like Gates and Zuckerman will now part the red sea to get their hands of the educated minds these schools have been pushing out the door. We don't have an immigration problem, Jong Zuckerman problem. We have an education policy problem, one that consigns our own youth to poverty and suffering. That is the problem.

On April 11th, 2013, David Brooks of the New York Times nicely outlines just how severely radical our domesticated priorities have been. He points out in his op-ed piece that:

We’re living in a country where 53 percent of children born to women under 30 are born out of wedlock, according to government data. Millions of people, especially men, are dropping out of the labor force. Nearly half the students who begin college are unable to graduate within six years. The social fabric for people without college degrees is in shambles....

The president is increasing total revenues to a historically high 20 percent of G.D.P. by 2023. Federal spending would remain at a way-above-average 22 percent of G.D.P. But Washington still can’t seem to devote enough money to address the challenges faced by the less-educated and ease the segmentation of America. That’s true even after you account for the domestic programs that are outside the discretionary budget category and have their own funding stream, like the new early childhood initiative.

Now, in the US the states are the primary providers of educational funding, and the states have passed much of that effort to local governments who depend on property taxes to support their schools. On the college level, states established universities and help fund students. Higher education also get Federal support from a multitude of programs including direct student grants, program grands, research grants and crippling student loans. The results stand on their own. Not only have we nearly run our lower and working class Americans out of the educational system, but even in those professions where we still graduate students, such as in Medicine and Law, the loan burden of these students is so high that we are pushing these students into poverty to repay loans that dwarf even what most people believe would be a large mortgage. They are paying for these loans for the rest of their lives, pushing the costs of healthcare and legal services, along with advanced education, way past the ability of middle America to pay. And now they have no one to help Facebook Green stay watered... my heart BLEEDS.

Let Zuckerman take facebook to India. Good riddance. And the same for Google, and Microsoft and any other silicon valley company who wants to move from Palo Alto to Calcutta.

What we need is education reform. And we've needed it for 30 years. The Economist is telling us that these immigrants are starting new businesses here and hiring locals. They argue we need this law. The give fancy charts on immigrants and business. And then they forget to tell you that they have defined immigrants differently than the immigration law is addressing, or what Zuckerman is proposing. There is nothing deceitful from the Economist. Here is something for the Economist editors to consider. All the damn tech jobs in the world haven't helped US citizens stuck in urban isolation to break out and join the high tech party at all. The families dependent on public school education still suffer from lack of education, lack of opportunity, and certainly can not be the high tech entrepreneurs of the future. They will have to keep coming from India.

AND YOU KNOW these people who have been left out: The Haitian immigrant who fled to save their lives from political repression, the Cuban immigrants who fled Castro and settled here, the children of Irish migrants from 2 generations ago, the children of Holocaust survivors, the Central Americans migrants escaping petty tyrants from banana republics, and all the other US residents who are being frozen out of the educational system. It was the higher education system in the 1920's to 1950's that acted as the engine of social and economic growth for generations of immigrants that arrived here. Today there is no graduate school for these children. They don't have the core education coming out of primary school, they struggle to catch up in undergraduate college, and they certainly don't have the money for graduate school. Hell, Hunter College of CUNY has classes with 800 students in a single biology class and then flunk out the majority of the students. Yah think we have a problem here?

Yes, I think we do. Maybe one should read what has been commonly known as “The Classes are too big” report ¹

Written by Joe Cusoe at Marymount College, to sum up it says, “large classes for poor students sucks”:

Placing college neophytes in large, lecture-laden classes that are conducive to passive spectating may initiate maladaptive mental habits or predispositions to learning that linger beyond the first year of college year. In his book, Rejuvenating Introductory Courses, Kenneth Spear artfully expresses the potentially dangerous consequence of subjecting new students to large lecture classes: “In these normative experiences, [students] learn what it is to be a student, what is required to get by. If students are taught to be passive seekers and transcribers of information, that is what they become. Further, they set their sights accordingly in subsequent courses, often actively resisting our

attempts in upper-division courses to get them to go beyond the information we give them” (1984,

pp. 6-7)

Here is a deal for Zuckerman and his merry band of privileged upper middle class children. For every foreign Computer Engineer you bring into the US, you give me 20 million dollars to spend on the school programs of MY choice. Otherwise, to hell with your free lunch. Pony up and pay the education bill for our families so we can also produce nice educated Comp Sci graduates who can make facebook while lounging around and eating Doritos in the Harvard Dorms.