California Proposition 211 would have made it easier for shareholders to sue their companies. It was strongly opposed by corporate chief executive officers who raised $35 million to oppose the proposition, and it drowned. I put the following letter out on e-mail to the CEOs of six global corporations that had lobbied the U.S. Congress against immigration reform.

Re: Proposition 211

Greetings:

The CEOs in general lobbied Congress to defeat immigration reform and reduction. Now they are asking California voters to defeat Prop 211. But where were the CEOs when the American workers at all levels needed protection against unending immigration competition?

This competition, as you know, produces a loose labor market with downward pressure on wages. It also increases job insecurity and unemployment. The CEOs manage to send American jobs overseas and import aliens to take jobs that rightfully belong to Americans.

I have to question the CEOs' loyalty to the American workers and to the American people. The CEOs oppose the protection of U.S. markets against low-wage Third World competition. Higher profits and cheaper prices cannot justify the continuing decline of real wages.

CEOs advocate global economics but not American patriotism. Even the lip-service to patriotism is rare. The fact is that CEOs are loyal "citizens" of the world but not of this country - loyal to the "bottom line" but not to our people.

It's a shame that America's CEOs , who would be successful and profitable and wealthy under any system, national or global, betray their responsibilities to the people and the nation that made their success possible. The CEOs say they move the jobs abroad and bring in immigrants to remain competitive. This is disingenuous. The CEOs have arranged with Congress the rules of competition which guarantee this result. The CEOs then plead helplessness before the competition of the market. Conveniently ignored is the fact that 80 percent of the world economy is in the industrial nations. Protecting American markets and jobs against Third World wage competition while maintaining access to 80 percent of the world market is consistent.

The biggest shame is the CEOs' role in immigration policy and the consequent conversion of a once-European America into a land of Third World people. The magnitude of this betrayal of the American people will bring suffering to our people for centuries to come.

And now you ask us to support you and oppose Proposition 211? The damage that trial lawyers do to this country is trivial to what the CEOs are doing.

- PERRY LORENZ

I received a brief reply by regular mail from T.J. Rodgers, CEO of the Cypress Semiconductor Corporation of San Jose, California:

You are dead wrong on immigration. See my attached Wall Street Journal editorial. Immigrants create jobs for native-born Americans.

Though I never met him, I hand-delivered a reply to Mr. Rodgers in which I responded to specific claims in his Wall Street Journal article.

Dear Mr. T.J. Rodgers:

Thank you for your response to my letter criticizing CEOs who oppose immigration reform.

Immigrants create no jobs that would not have been created by Americans if they had not been displaced by immigrants. In other words, the job of creating jobs can be done by Americans in the absence of immigrants. The Japanese do it.

Your Wall Street Journal editorial of March 12, 1996 said, "[W]e can't find all the skilled people we need to build our company." That may be a problem for you, but it is not a problem for America. My people, the Americans, want a tight labor market so that we can maintain and advance our standard of living in a secure job market. We want a single paycheck to do what it did in the 1960s: finance a family. We want to know that there will be a job waiting for our children when they graduate from college.

"We want a single paycheck to do what it did in the 1960s: finance a family. We want to know that there will be a job waiting for our children when they graduate from college."

But whether the market is tight or loose, without the immigrants it would be that much tighter and it would pull Americans into skilled fields who are not now in them. Those on the bottom rungs of the job ladder get pulled up by employers who cannot find an easy immigrant alternative.

We would like to believe that our country is run for the benefit of our people - not your company or any other company, especially those that are so proud of boasting that they are global and therefore not American companies. And "our people" does not include every foreigner who wants to move to our country. Unfortunately, the CEOs lobby Congress for the benefit of their own global companies, not for the American people. Some CEOs cannot distinguish the difference. Most are indifferent to America's fate except as it impacts their company. Washington is simply a game CEOs play for their own benefit. But if I'm wrong, please give me an example of a CEO who lobbied Congress in the national interest to the direct disadvantage of his own company.

Cypress Semiconductor has 230 open requisitions for employment.

America has a hundred engineering colleges turning out tens of thousands of engineers every year. According to IEEE-USA, more than 146,000 engineers lost their jobs between 1990 and 1994. If you have trouble filling your requisitions, I recommend an experienced recruiting firm to do the job. Your implicit view, that America must be transformed by tens of millions of Third Worlders who do not share our culture, so as to make hiring easier for you, is backwards.

I would suggest that you lobby colleges and high schools as vigorously as you do Congress to turn out more engineers. American students would welcome the encouragement to enter high-skilled careers. Americans can do any job, and can be trained in any career. I would encourage you to do your patriotic duty to build America as you build your company.

One major misconception inherent in the Simpson immigration bill is that any immigrant who takes a job in the States takes that job away from an American. That assertion does not stand up.

You say that three of your vice-presidents arrived as children and one was brought in by another company, therefore they do not displace Americans. If they left the country and you replaced them with Americans, then four Americans would have those jobs. Therefore they did replace Americans. That three of them arrived as children does not win your argument. Everybody starts life as a child! The question is whether America should be loyal to its own children, jealously guarding our precious heritage and land for their sake. Or should we open the borders and let in the aliens to remake our border states into their image? If it doesn't matter to you whether aliens or Americans work for you, if it doesn't matter to you whether aliens or Americans occupy this land, if it doesn't matter to you whether our heritage is passed on to America's descendants or the descendants of aliens, if it doesn't matter to you that our descendants are going to become a minority that must struggle to keep our ethnicity and culture alive while immersed in alien cultures and surrounded by alien peoples, then America is nothing more to you than a marketplace.

Cypress's four immigrant vice-presidents have 1,500 people working for them. These immigrants created jobs and made our company and U.S. industry stronger, not weaker.

What if the parents of these four had never met and they had not been born? Would Cypress now be operating with 1,500 fewer employees? Not likely. American vice-presidents are fully capable of doing the job. Adding aliens to U.S. industry doesn't make it stronger - it makes it less American.

That's common here in Silicon Valley; just ask Andy Grove, the Hungarian refugee, Intel founder, and CEO of the world's largest semi-conductor company.

"The CEOs' objection to employment verification undermines a necessary element in the control of illegal immigration."

Mr. Grove certainly deserves credit for his accomplishments. But let's not exaggerate. Had he not been born, the microprocessor would still be manufactured by one or more companies, most likely American. Inventiveness and entrepreneurial activity are very much a product of the culture, and not very dependent on any one, or even a few, individuals. Do you think the telephone would not have been invented if Alexander Graham Bell's parents had not met? The irony is that culture is our culture - American... and Western. That is the culture that should be preserved, not transformed by bringing in the Third World cultures. American culture is good enough as is. We do not need or want a CEO experimenting to see what happens if European Americans are made into a minority in our own country.

If we believe that letting the best and brightest into America will make all of us better off, then we should not tell them, "You can come to America, but you must leave your family behind," as does the Simpson bill.

This is misleading. I work with alien engineers. They are not "the best and the brightest" engineers. They are ordinary engineers just like the American engineers they displaced. They may be the "best and the brightest" compared to the general population of their home country, but that is not the relevant measure. This is twice-misleading since the Simpson bill did not ban the admission of the immediate family. Instead it attempted to eliminate chain migration which ultimately extends to the entire population of the sending nation.

Pat Buchanan has taken up "Jose" as a euphemism for immigrants.

Mr. Buchanan is pointing out the obvious: immigrants are not Americans and "Jose" is not an American name. But now that 20 percent of Mexicans live in the U.S. - and 50 years from now 25 percent of the U.S. population will be Latino due to CEO-approved immigration policy - "Jose" will be a very common "American" name. Mr. Buchanan is a patriot. No doubt he believes that the world would be better off if Mexico remains Mexican and America remains American. There is no doubt that the CEOs don't care what America is transformed into: Mexican, Asian, whatever.

Companies will be required to run identity verification systems that would use personalized birth certificates with a finger print Who believes that yet another monstrous government bureaucracy would be prompt, or even accurate? (650,000 jobs a year would be denied if there were only a one percent error rate in the national employment data base.)

This too is misleading. The Simpson bill would allow the applicant to start work while verification is done and any inaccurate data is straightened out, so no jobs would be denied. You characterize the government's feeble attempt to control illegals as "monstrous." Yet verification systems are common in Europe. The entire credit card industry is a verification system that verifies that the cardholder has access to credit. It is many times bigger than the federal employment verification system would be, and it works nicely, so why try to scare your readers?

California has a bureaucracy to administer driver's licenses with thumb prints and pictures. Your reasoning would suggest that it be abolished. A bureaucracy controls over 20,000 nuclear warheads, each of which could obliterate a city. Are you worried about an unauthorized release? No, because the establishment wants warhead security and the establishment gets what it wants. If it wanted border security we would have that also. The CEOs' objection to employment verification undermines a necessary element in the control of illegal immigration. The CEOs' objection undermines our border, our laws, our sovereignty, and our nationhood.

Today, the foreign-born population of the U.S. is about 8 percent. Immigrants add only 0.4 percent to our population each year. Is America so weak that we are hurting from this insignificant number of additions, or do demagogue politicians simply not like "Jose"?

"America, like all nations, has a right to preserve its ethnic composition and its culture. The CEOs are leading an alien invasion and foreign occupation that any other country would repel with every soldier it could muster."

Once again, this is extremely misleading. Because of immigration, non-Hispanic whites are a minority in the schools of California, New Mexico and Texas. European-Americans are now becoming a minority in California, and in 50 years we will be a minority in the U.S. if our current immigration policy is maintained. Yet you characterize this unprecedented and massive transformation as an "insignificant number of additions"? If the Chinese became a minority in China, would you call that insignificant? Why do all peoples of the world have a right to have a country except the Americans? America has to be given to the aliens and we have to become a minority. Why?

You can multiply your economic evidence by one million and even then it would not be worth the obliteration of the European American culture, the only one we know, the only one we want, the only one we love! I don't care how good and wonderful the Asian and Mexican cultures are. I wish them well in their home lands. America, like all nations, has a right to preserve its ethnic composition and its culture. The CEOs are leading an alien invasion and foreign occupation that any other country would repel with every soldier it could muster.

Jim Rogers, Wall Street legend and founder of the Quantum Fund, teacher of finance at Columbia University, and a regular on CNBC cable network, wrote in Investment Biker, "Multiculturalism - the philosophical, political, pedagogical movement - will lead to the destruction of the United States as its borders are drawn today We think we are exempt from universal laws, but we are not. People who think they are exempt from universal laws have a moral disease called ‘hubris', frequently fatal. I am not trying to be clever or outrageous; this is simply history, the way the world has been ever since we've been recording it. Separatism is a fact of history at all times of economic distress."1

And the blame for this belongs to CEOs who derailed a very modest congressional attempt at reform.

1 Jim Rogers, Investment Biker, Adams Publishing, Holbrook, Massachusetts, 1994, pp.303-4