The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines propaganda as, ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one’s cause or to damage an opposing cause. And today, we are going to take deep dive into the very slick and if I may say, even artful propaganda techniques and methods employed in a recent PBS article by Hanna Grabenstein titled, Trump says skilled foreign workers take jobs away from Americans. It’s not that simple, experts say.
What makes the article so artful is that there are no lies, per se. But what we have is an entire architecture of omissions, selective sourcing and selective emphasis. In this article, saying “reality is more complicated” is much more difficult for the reader to counter than more crude forms of propaganda. “Card stacking” appears to be the technique of choice for Ms. Grabenstein. Card stacking embodies the following:
- Cherry-picking and being selective with the evidence presented. It is also referred to as the suppressed evidence fallacy.
- False balance or manufactured balance which is specifically about the sourcing content. The propagandist will quote a narrow slice of expert opinion and imply it represents a range of thought.
- Framing is the how selection, emphasis, and exclusion are employed to shape an audiences interpretation without asserting anything false.
- Agenda-setting and gatekeeping is the creation of broad framework in which editorial choices about what to include and how much prominence to give it are used in an article so that an audience is steered toward a false conclusion without presenting a single false statement.
The “experts” Grabenstein cited in her article were all complimentary if not fanatical open border labor economists. For instance, Britta Glennon, a professor at Wharton School of Business is quoted as saying, “while there’s no evidence that H-1B workers take jobs away from Americans, there is a nuance to the question. . . Economists have studied the impact of H-1B workers have within individual companies and at the local labor market level, reaching similar conclusions.”
What Professor Glennon stated is not an accurate characterization of what is found in the published data. And one look at her publications and you can quickly come to the conclusion she has a serious bias that defies crticial thinkking. The published data on the assessment of the H-1B visa program is stark, to say the least. At best, Glennon is describing one school thought within many studies that are out there. Professor George Borjas of Harvard University published a paper in the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) that was updated earlier this year that found that after matching administrative H-1B petition data to Census data and controlling for education, age, gender, occupation, industry, and metro area, H-1B workers in fact earn 15-17% less than Americans in comparable jobs in the same geographic area. Understand that the wage gap functions as a direct labor-cost subsidy for hiring H-1B over native workers. And the Richmond Fed study cited in the article found tenured, native-born tech workers have experienced a 5% wage cut and 3.6% higher odds of leaving their firm when H-1B visa holders show up.
Interestingly, the 2025 Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond study didn’t get a lot of emphasis and was discounted by saying “they’re a small percent of employees. Question: When you take out the American workers that are prone to displacement which includes the “high tenure, young, college-educated, and native born”, what exactly does that leave you with? The Richmond study measured the impact of the displacement in the very article that claims there is no displacement or at least, very little.
And it gets better. Another economist cited in the article, Jennifer Hunt who teaches at Rutgers, stated, “it’s possible that some native-born workers might have been deterred from going into computer science because wages may be suppressed industry-wide as a result of companies paying foreigners less. But that’s a relatively small group of people, Hunt said. A much larger group—those not in the computer sciences—are likely helped by the arrival of foreign computer programmers whose work makes other people’s jobs more productive.” Really? Well, knock me over with a feather. How exactly are those “other people” being made more productive? I guess getting fired and seeing your wages and benefits shrink is a new measure of productivity. Any reporter worth their salt would have demanded more detail from the good Professor Hunt. But not when you’re crafting a narrative.
Perhaps someone should remind Professor Hunt what is going on in the real economy. Computer science graduates of 2024 experienced a 7.0% unemployment rate. 19% of computer science majors are underemployed, that is not working non-college degree jobs. Moreover, 74% of STEM Graduates are not employed in STEM occupations.
But Hunt has always been terrible on this issue. And that is why she was chosen.
A statement by David Bier of the Koch Brothers funded Cato Institute appears in the article if only for a legal fact about the rule’s structure, not the labor-market debate, which lets Cato’s name do reputational work without representing the actual opposing empirical position. My question to Ms. Grabenstein is simply, why did you not place quotes in the article from economists with opposing views such as George Borjas, Daniel Costa and/or Ron Hira? Granted, there was a link to a 2025 PBS News Hour debate between Professor Hira and pro-H-1B economist, Justin Wolfers who Ron wiped the floor with. But it was just an innocuous link in your article and nothing more. (Emphasis?)
Understand, this isn’t balance; it’s the appearance of it.
In the second paragraph, Grabenstein states, “overall, H-1B visa holders make a median income of $133,000 per year, though their median initial pay is lower, at $103,000, according to USCIS.” My question is simply, is this a little or a lot? Are these good wages or not so good wages? When presented alone, the above figures may sound like a lot of money. And that is by design.
Of America’s 163 million workers, only 10.3 million are employed in STEM fields, and of those, roughly 5.1 million are computer jobs and 1.8 million are engineering. To the roughly 150 million Americans not employed in STEM, those salaries on their own may sound like good money.
However, absolute dollar figures without occupation and metro context are meaningless in this debate. When accounting for the job and geographic area, we have found that sixty percent of H-1B jobs are certified at the two lowest of DOL’s four prevailing wage categories.
Ultimately, the value of what Grabenstein has written will have nothing to do with the topic of employment visas. Rather, it will be a window into the sophisticated propaganda techniques and methodologies PBS is happy to employ in the furtherance of the “narrative” and how to spot those techniques.
At this point you have seen how selection and sequencing bias can be weighted to produce a certain point of view that seeks to complicate and muddy the waters to the extent that make it far harder for the average person to counter. This is how mainstream media suprresses the truth. This is the sorry state of journalism these days.
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