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Harris Miller has testified before congress dozens of times. One of those committee transcripts shows that Harris Miller was the Washington representative for the ACIP, the American Council on International Personnel.

I've seen no note on this affiliation in any of Miller's resumes.  Here's how he deals with it. From Miller's 300 word bio prepared for the 2004 Senate Democratic Policy Committee Hearing +óGé¼+ôShipping American Jobs Overseas: A Hearing on the Bush Administration+óGé¼Gäós Claim That Outsourcing is Good for the U.S. Economy:+óGé¼-¥

Prior to joining ITAA, Mr. Miller was president of Immigration Services Associates, a government relations firm based in Washington, D.C. specializing in immigration issues. Concurrently, he acted as government relations director for Fragomen, Del Rey & Bernsen, P.C., a nationwide law firm specializing in immigration, and he operated his own government relations firm, Harris Miller & Associates.

Fragomen is the largest immigration law firm in the country. We'll revisit Fragomen momentarily, but why has it been made less than obvious that ACIP is part of Harris  Miller's resume and why don't we hear about his work with that organization?  Miller is uncharacteristically quiet when it comes to his ACIP experience as well as his broader "agricultural" history. This is from ACIP's current web page. My bold.

About ACIP
Our motto: "Facilitating the international movement of personnel" has driven our mission to advocate and educate on global mobility issues since 1972.

ACIP spearheaded efforts behind many of the major immigration developments of the past thirty years -- the Blanket L visa program, H-1B cap, employer sanctions, and spousal work authorization.

Through frequent meetings with members of Congress, testimony before House and Senate subcommittees, and far-reaching communications programs, ACIP remains committed to shaping U.S. immigration law and international trade policies to meet the needs of American employers.

ACIP also offers an array of educational and networking opportunities for the in-house immigration professional and is a designated sponsor of two international exchange visitor programs, through which member companies can bring foreign employees to the United States for training.

A perusal of info_tech_guy's work will certainly make one aware of the devastating consequences such aggressive policies have had on American workers and families when "meeting the needs of American employers" is taken to extremes.

David Doolittle and Terance Antisdel also gave testimony at the same hearing. Here are their complete bios.

David Doolittle is a Condenser Operator at the Electrolux plant in his hometown of
Greenville, MI.

Mr. Antisdel was an engineering associate for Lucent Technologies in Lisle, IL. He was
recently laid off from his position after 35 years with the company.

The phrase in which ACIP takes pride, "Facilitating the international movement of personnel," is rather impersonal.  The steelworkers were recently mentioned on another a diary about endorsements.  ITG has done a wonderful job of chronicling the effects of outsourcing on those who hold - or held - IT and engineering jobs, but let's remember that those employed in other job groups are impacted as well.  And the negative consequences are not restricted to the continental U.S. This current outsourcing news is from the Steelworker's web site:

Human Trafficking in Jordan Condemned By Steelworkers and National Labor Committee
Jordan+óGé¼Gäós U.S. Ambassador Agrees to Investigate Inhumane Abuses in Sweatshops

May 4, 2006 
Washington, D.C. +óGé¼GÇ£ The United Steelworkers (USW) and the National Labor Committee (NLC) today jointly denounced human trafficking at apparel sweatshops in Jordan during a two-hour meeting with that country+óGé¼Gäós ambassador to the United States at the Steelworkers headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Foreign guest workers from Bangladesh complained to the NLC, an advocacy group supported by the USW, that they were being forced into the equivalent of modern-day slavery by labor contractors in Jordan, abuses that Gerard said are being enabled by a free-trade agreement with the United States.

In one instance, the NLC revealed, a female Bangladeshi worker hung herself in a factory after being raped by her manager.

If you don't read the entire article, here's part of what's happened to our textile trade:

Apparel exports from Jordan have risen from $52 million in 2000 to $1.2 billion last year and are sold by some of the largest retailers in the United States, including Kohl+óGé¼Gäós, L.L, Bean,  Target and Wal-Mart, among others.

+óGé¼+ôIt+óGé¼Gäós huge,+óGé¼Gäó+óGé¼Gäó said Charles Kernaghan, the NLC+óGé¼Gäós executive director. +óGé¼+ôAnd the big winner is China, which is supplying 63 percent of the textiles to the operations in Jordan, while thousands of U.S. textile workers are losing their jobs.+óGé¼-¥

The global economy is a global hemmorhage.

And Virginia Democrats are formally committed to Putting Virginia First. From The Platform Of The Democratic Party Of Virginia:

Improving Trade Policies

We support enactment of fair trade policies that reduce the U.S. trade deficit, protect U.S. trade laws, and include enforceable workers+óGé¼Gäó rights and environmental standards in trade agreements. We support the enactment of laws that penalize companies that incorporate overseas to avoid taxes and laws that deny government contracts to those companies. We support the manufacturing economy in Virginia. We support the strengthening of our country+óGé¼Gäós manufacturing base for national defense and homeland security through procurement reform, enhanced +óGé¼+ôBuy America+óGé¼-¥ requirements, and updating the assessment of critical defense manufacturing capabilities and providing a plan to improve America+óGé¼Gäós infrastructure.

In contrast, remember the article published at Center for Media and Democracy entitled A Short but Tragic History of E-voting Public Relations, in which Harris Miller was quoted as saying, "Frequently ... in a trade association, you don't want to talk about the issues as individual companies. We have that issue right now with the Buy America Act, for example, in Congress. No company wants to act like it's against Buy America - even though they're all against it - so I take all the heat for them."

So, Virginia Democrats support Buy America, and Harris Miller is (not very) secretly against it by taking heat for companies so they can pretend to be for it.

Miller carefully avoids including ACIP on his resume.  But we saw that he does mention Fragomen, Del Rey & Bernsen, P.C., the nationwide law firm specializing in immigration. And ACIP's Chairman of the Board is none other than Austin T. Fragomen, Jr. Managing Partner of Fragomen, Del Rey, Bensen & Loewy, P.C.

Dr. Norman Matloff gave testimony to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee to the Subcommittee on Immigration: Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage

In his testimony Matloff discusses both Fragomen and Harris Miller at length, in the context of their inroads into the ivory tower.  Miller's "oops, too late, gotcha" strategy for making inroads into academic territory did not achieve its usual success. I don't have a reference handy, but one of his efforts at constructing a "coalition" between academia, government, and industry (see about Iron Triangles again) was just a little too slick for consumption.  From Matloff's testimony:

Industry lobbyists know that they can count on academia to produce seemingly ``unbiased'' studies which in fact are designed from the outset to produce results supportive of industry's position. In an impressive moment of candor, prominent immigration attorney Austin Fragomen, who has lobbied Congress in favor of liberal H-1B visa policies, wrote in Workforce Magazine, March 1996. He said that when the Senate was considering scaling back the H-1B program in that year,

  ...The business community mobilized, forming American Business for Legal Immigration (ABLI), a Washington, D.C.-based lobbying group that represents a number of associations and employers, and commissions academic studies to support its position.

And in the same testimony, he describes the policy as it relates to Harris Miller.

2.3.4  H-1B and Immigration Policy Is Set by a Small Group of DC Insider Lobbyists

The ITAA's focus on immigration, so vehemently denied throughout 1997 by ITAA president Harris Miller, is illustrated by the fact that Miller is a former immigration lobbyist. Moreover, prior to Miller's lobbying career, he was a congressional staffer who specialized in immigration legislation, and thus who had the perfect Capitol Hill connections on which to base his subsequent immigration-lobbying business.

Interestingly, Miller tries to conceal his immigration-lobbyist background. In an October 16, 2000 interview with the Washington Times, he said:

    When I was hired five years ago some of the members of the ITAA said to the election committee ``What are you doing? You need to hire someone who is a techie or a trade association executive. Why would you hire a lobbyist?''

The fact is that the ITAA needed an immigration specialist like Miller. In 1995, when Miller was hired by the ITAA, both the Senate and the House had introduced measures which would have scaled back the H-1B program. The ITAA apparently reacted to this by hiring Miller, a consummate Washington insider on immigration issues.

What we have, then, is a classic example of people writing laws and then taking lucrative jobs in the private sector which benefit from those laws. As The New Republic, October 19, 1987 reported, Miller is unapologetic about this:

  ``I believe in interest groups and the right of interest groups to be represented, and if I can represent them on the Hill, well, I will do it,'' says Harris Miller, a former aide to Kentucky Democrat Romano Mazzoli's House Judiciary subcommittee on immigration who now has his own lobbying firm. Miller's first big client was the National Council of Agricultural Employers, a group of large growers who use migrant and illegal alien workers.

Interestingly, Miller used many of the same arguments for farm workers then as he is doing now in the case of H-1B visas for the high-tech workers.

These lobbyists know very well how to play the political game. They know, for example, that politicians like to use academic ``studies'' for cover. We have seen earlier immigration attorney/lobbyist Fragomen open admission that industry commissions academic studies with the understanding that the outcome of the studies will be in industry's favor. Miller, who used to work for Fragomen, has used the same tactic.

Miller's case illustrates the fact that H-1B policy is similar to immigration policy in general, which is set by a small group of Washington insiders who are unknown to the general public but who pop up repeatedly in different key roles over the years. These people who often profit from their insider status, through jobs, contracts and so on.

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