What’s the real American sentiment on immigration?

On Thursday, the New York Times published an opinion piece by the billionaire trio of Sheldon Adelson, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, calling for a large boost in H1-B and similar visas for prospective highly-skilled immigrants.  The comments were largely skeptical, believing that these men are motivated by the desire to obtain cheap labor for high-tech and low-skilled jobs alike.

Were these particular pieces simply linked to by conservative sites, attracting a lot of anti-immigration comments?  The first of these clearly was — I followed a National Review link — but the second received wide coverage.

What do the majority of Americans think about immigration?  So many polls present false choices and straw men (“would you like to provide a path to citizenship or deport everyone?”) that I just don’t trust the polling data.

But the NYT comments?  They’re surprising, at least to me.  Remember, these are the readers who enthused about the “mincome” proposal, as reported on in the fall.

Here’s the top “reader’s pick”:

I have one of those high-tech STEM jobs that everyone exhorts us to pursue, but I wonder how long the authors, and the President for that matter, are going to let me keep it: 

In 2012 I returned to a company for whom I had worked from 2007 to 2008 to discover that most of the people with whom I had previously worked had been replaced when most IT functions were outsourced to one of those global companies everyone knows by its initials 

That company replaced the existing staff with approximately 40 IT professionals it imported from India –in 2009, when unemployment was over 10% and would stay that high for another year! 

I know of two occasions when another well-known two-initial corporation brought Chinese “specialists” to the country to oversee data center moves –a complicated task to be sure, but one that many Americans have performed. (In fact we spent a lot of time cleaning up their efforts for one of these moves.) 

I have an experienced colleague who spent 18 months looking for work before recently finding a contract position. 

When employers claim there’s a shortage of high tech workers they really mean there’s a shortage of personnel willing to work for what they want to pay. 

They also make this claim to justify bringing in someone with experience in the newest version of a system instead of spending money to train an existing resource who has expertly managed the previous version for them. 

Shortage indeed! Just an excuse to render us redundant.

Pick #2 is a support of the Gang of 8 bill.

Pick #3 is a call for more government spending on “job creating” activities.

Pick #4:  “I truly can’t think of anything more egregious than a group of mega-millionaires lecturing me on the need for immigration reform. These corporate honchos are the very people who will hire people for lower salaries so they can make more money.”

Same message in Pick #5.

And so on.