Thread 7120

The latest New York Times disgrace, which VDARE.COM reveals today, is how unethically it handled a sensitive reporting assignment about impact of the H-1B/L-1 visas on American workers.

The story, titled “Special Visa’s Use for Tech Workers is Challenged,” (May 30) was written by Katie Hafner and an intern from Dartmouth College, Daniel Preysman.

But Preysman is not just any intern. His father, Vladimir Preysman, is the C.E.O. of Datasweep, a San Jose-based company that employs, according to the database Rob Sanchez maintains at www.zazona.com, eight H-1B visa holders. Their salaries range from $55,000 to $100,000.

That is not all about Daniel Preysman. By plugging “Preysman family Daniel” into Google, I learned that the aspiring journalist is the beneficiary of a trust set up from an Oni Systems Corp stock sale. Sources suggest that Oni Systems at one time employed Daniel’s mother, Irene.

Oni Systems uses plenty of H-1Bs. The company applied for 135 Labor Condition Applications (LCAs) for software engineers at $60,000 a piece, a salary well below existing market levels.

If you guessed that there is little likelihood of fair reporting about H-1B issues from an inexperienced intern whose family has a vested interest keeping the visas rolling, then you are correct. The story’s thrust is clearly exculpatory.

When I called University of California at Davis Professor Norm Matloff—a leading critic of the H-1B visa program—he said, “One would think that one does not assign a story about a controversial software industry hiring practice to the son of one of the CEO of a software company, especially in wake of the recent ethics scandals at the Times. Yet that is exactly what the Times did.”

Matloff found the story sadly misleading. For example, regarding the “legality” of staffing American companies with H-1B visa holders, Hafner and Preysman wrote:

“The legal questions, however, remain murky. Steve Yale-Loehr, who teaches immigration law at Cornell, said that strictly speaking, what these companies are doing is legal, though perhaps not what Congress intended. However, Mr. Yale-Loehr added, ‘If Congress is upset about this, then Congress will act on it.’’

But Yale-Loehr is only an Adjunct Professor at Cornell. His full-time job is practicing immigration law at True, Walsh and Miller, LLP in Ithaca, New York.

Yale-Loehr is also an active H-1B lobbyist who has presented testimony to Congress on behalf of the American Immigration Lawyer’s Association. He knows—better than anyone—that the AILA heavily influences Congress to increase the number of visas issued annually.

Hafner and Preysman love to quote immigration lawyers. Thus Daryl Buffenstein, [send him email] general counsel for the American Immigration Lawyers Association is allowed to claim

“ Even if this brouhaha [American worker job loss] is about a real problem, I think when you look at the number of workers involved, it is a totally insignificant drop in a massive labor market.”

This is an outrageous and unsupportable statement. Anyone who watches CNN Moneyline with Lou Dobbs knows better:

I wanted ask New York Times editors about the wisdom of assigning a delicate story to an inexperienced reporter whose family has profited by using H-1B visa holders.

But efforts to reach them failed—as such efforts always do.

Although I wasn’t able to reach the Times, the newspaper has left no doubts about its enthusiasm for the H-1B visa with a June 1st Op-ed (“Why Ban Offshore Services?” by Arjun Saxena and Douglas Lavin) and a story (“Fees from Visas Now Train Americans” by Anthony De Palma).

Saxena and Lavin are consultants at Inductis , a multinational (offices in New York, New Jersey, and New Delhi) company which specializes in “matching demand for labor with supply on a global scale.” Moving American jobs overseas, that is.

Matloff described the Op-ed as written by two ** “industry people with a blatant vested interest.” And the story, according to Matloff, represents “industry lobbyists basically getting a free political advertisement in the Times that masquerades as a news article.”

The Preysman matter may represent a new low for the * New York Times. **

And that, given what has gone on lately, is quite a statement.

Joe Guzzardi [email him], an instructor in English at the Lodi Adult School, has been writing a weekly newspaper column since 1988. This column is exclusive to VDARE.COM.