Denver Post`s Al Lewis Falsely Flogs Immigrants As The Key To Capitalism`s Success.

Recently I was in one of
my favorite cities, Denver. My eye was caught by the
lead Business Section column by Al Lewis
[send
him mail] in the December
3rd Denver Post “Capitalism
thrives with immigration” caught my eye. Lewis`
selective citing of statistics proves once again that
"figures don`t lie, but liars can figure."

Mr. Lewis begins with

familiar open border canards,

“Immigrants don`t just take
jobs. They create them. Of U.S. publicly traded
companies that got their start with venture capital
financing over the past 15 years, one out of every four
boasted an immigrant founder,

according to a recent study by the National Venture
Capital Association, based in Arlington, Va.

“Today, these companies are
valued at more than $500 billion. Many are among the
world`s most technologically sophisticated, and some are
household names.

“Imagine life without Intel,
founded by Hungarian Andy Grove; or Google, founded by
Russian Sergey Brin; or Yahoo, founded by Jerry Yang of
Taiwan; or eBay, founded by Pierre Omidyar of France; or
Sun Microsystems, founded by Andreas Bechtolsheim of
Germany and

Vinod Khosla of India.”

Mr. Lewis apparently wants
us to believe that Mr. Grove and the others cited above
are in the same group as the vast majority of the

30-million plus uneducated masses who have come here
since our immigration laws were reformed in 1965.  To be
sure, many of these immigrants are employed by

American businesses, but often at the

slave wage level.

Traipsing around the world
and around the US as I

frequently do can be tiring, but also enlightening.
The conditions I see in so many places around the planet
demand serious efforts at restraint. Developing nations
are often doing better, but are still sending vast
numbers of their excess populations to developed
countries. The Mexican government, not doing that well
for its lower classes, has become hooked on the symbolic
drugs of illegal alien export and

illegal alien remittances, as well as overlooking
real drug trafficking.

Lewis is correct in citing
the economic value to the US of these inventive,
educated, entrepreneurial souls. But these folks for the
most part are here legally.  For example, Lewis
cites a local Denver immigrant`s wonderful history:

"`People who immigrate, by
their very nature, are risk takers……..They`ve given
up what they`ve known to go somewhere totally unknown.
It`s not a big leap for them to put it all on the line
and say, `I`m going to create a company on my own and
this is how I`m going to do it.`

“Martha Rubi-Byers came as an
exchange student from Mexico. She graduated from
Denver`s Metropolitan State College with a degree in
marketing in 1994 and became a naturalized citizen in
2002. Her father had his own engineering firm. Her
mother had a dentistry practice. Starting a business was
something she was brought up to do. America was the
place to do it. After graduation, she received a new
visa for an extended stay, went to work for a bilingual
newspaper and started her own business by 1996. With a
partner, Peruvian-born

Monica Vega-Christie, she founded `Paginas Amarillas
de Colorado` or `The Colorado Yellow Pages` in Spanish.”

Folks, this woman is not
an illegal border crosser with no education or talent
beyond that of strong physical limbs. And, as Lewis`
prime example of local Denver success, Ms. Rubi-Byers
became a US citizen and presumably came here legally
with her

student visa which permitted her to commit to
further education and the success she earned. Note her
parents were

successful business people already, folks who could
afford to send her to college. Not quite an ascent from
hard scrabble poverty!

Let`s look at Lewis`s
prime example of an immigrant who made it spectacularly,
Andy Grove.

As CNN`s Richard S. Tedlow
wrote in his 12/1/05 essay,

“The Education of Andy Grove,”

“To be born a Hungarian Jew
in 1936 was to be born on the wrong side of history.
Grove was forced to adapt to a succession of threatening
realities from the very beginning.

“Transformations were the
story of Grove`s young life. When the Nazis invaded
Hungary in 1944, his mother changed his name from Andras
Grof to the Slavic Andras Malesevics. When the
communists arrived the following year, he once again
became Andras Grof. As a young man, he switched from
journalism to chemistry after publishers started
rejecting his articles for political reasons.

“Communism nauseated him. One
of his most vivid recollections is the May Day parade of
1950. Cheering was broadcast from loudspeakers around
Budapest. But when Andy and his schoolmates arrived at
Heroes` Square, they discovered there was no crowd at
all: The cheering was recorded. Six years later, when

the Hungarian Revolution caused the border with
Austria to be open for a brief period, Grove faced an
immediate and unanticipated decision. He had never been
outside Hungary. An only child, he would be leaving
parents he might never see again. He had little idea of
what he`d be running to. If ever there was a plunge into
the unknown, that was it.

“He arrived in the U.S. on
Jan. 7, 1957–the

same day that Time`s `Man of the Year` issue
featured THE HUNGARIAN FREEDOM FIGHTER on its cover.
Soon he would change his name for a third and final
time. At the City College of New York, where he
enrolled, Andras Istvan Grof was struck from the
transcript and above it was written Andrew Stephen
Grove. He had

left behind his home, and he needed a name people
could pronounce.

“By the late 1960s Grove had
earned a Ph.D. in chemical engineering at the University
of California at Berkeley and joined

Fairchild Semiconductor, birthplace of the
integrated circuit. When colleagues Robert Noyce and
Gordon Moore quit to start Intel, Grove declared he was
coming too. In 1968 they put their 32-year-old protégé
in charge of operations.”

These folks Lewis lionizes
in his column were committed to America and to a nation
of laws that could properly protect their work. Of
course, we need people of this caliber. But then, even
more, so do the nations from which they emigrated.

Lewis and I agree that we
need a continuing stream of legal immigrants. But
setting this policy correctly remains elusive and
complex. Lewis cavils for more H1-B`s. “[Our
policy] was too focused on illegal immigration,
ignoring American enterprises` need for more legal
immigrants.” Lewis quotes the business party line,
“stumping for bills that would allow more immigrants
to come here on

H-1B visas, which are for skilled workers.”

The problem seems often
defined by its schizophrenic nature. Silicon Valley
wants more smart Asians or others, the ones trained at
Stanford, UC Berkeley, California Institute of
Technology and MIT, to be able to stay here. No surprise
in that attitude. Lewis notes that

“After 9/11, the government
reduced the number of H-1B visas from 195,000 to 65,000
per year. New legislation would expand the number of H-lB
visas to 125,000— a drop in the sea of an estimated 12
million immigrants who are said to be here illegally.” 

But, he omits, a real
cheap way to cut out American trained engineers and
others technical types.

And, like panning for

gold, nuggets are the exception not the rule. How
many of those of million aliens coming here since 1965
are ones he cites?

Then Lewis springs the
classic non sequitur: “Meanwhile, too many other
parts of the world are becoming fertile ground for
innovation. What`s not invented here will be invented
somewhere else.” Whoa, Mr. Lewis, we know the

Chinese and many others are

just as bright or brighter than our

native stock and coming on strong. So what do you
want to do? Would you let our brightest languish in
unemployment while we train

bright ethnics who may not stay beyond the term of
their special visas?  And when they do go home, they
take knowledge of all those new advances with them.

We can`t stop that
entirely, but we can slow it down by making the granting
of these

H1-Bs a  matter of very careful scrutiny. However,
anyone who has studied the prevalence of these special
visas knows this provision and others like it have been
badly abused—especially the requirement that businesses
really look for qualified American techies to fill jobs
before bleating for more H1-B`s.

Americans now seem to
understand that the need to reform immigration policies
is great. That reform must embrace all

legal immigration laws.

Just stopping rampant
illegal immigration is only the first step toward the
complete overhaul of our immigration policies. We need
to start thinking in terms of need, real need, not just
bodies which can make particular businesses rich, partly
because these imported slaves onto the

public rolls
necessitate tax supported services of all
kinds.

If the present situation
has taught Americans anything, it is that real reform
won`t get done until the Congress and the White House
know for sure that their continuance in office is
contingent on their doing the right thing for all
Americans—not just the

paymasters who finance their reelections.

How about you, Mr. Lewis? 
If you figure we don`t get the drift of your column as a
paean for open borders, forget it! Our

broken school systems and the

mounting use by illegal aliens of all our other
public services are now well understood by the vast
majority of Americans.

Donald A. Collins [email
him], is a freelance writer living in Washington DC and a former long time member of the board of FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform. His views are his own.