By Joe Guzzardi, CAPS Senior Writing Fellow. Guzzardi's Op-eds about California social issues have appeared in newspapers throughout California and elsewhere for 15 years., August 30, 2012
Like many of her Democratic Congressional colleagues, this summer Senator Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) trailed in re-election polling. McCaskill lagged several points behind challenger U.S. Rep. Todd Akin until he made his outrageous remark that ?legitimate? rape rarely causes pregnancy. Despite his offensive, crude and inaccurate comment, Akin steadfastly refuses to withdraw.? Akin?s support has dramatically eroded. In July Akin led McCaskill by 11 points; today, he?s 17 points behind. [McCaskill Leads Akin in Missouri Senate Race, New Poll Shows, by Sean Sullivan, Washington Post, August 25, 2012]
From a patriotic immigration reform perspective, the race between McCaskill and Akin is unusual. McCaskill has shown signs of understanding the correlation between over-immigration and American job loss; Akin is one of the highest rated on the NumbersUSA grade card system.
Recently, McCaskill spoke out forcefully to urge Congress to take immediate steps to end sham universities. As an example, California?s Tri-Valley University enrolled more than 1,500 foreign students until a federal investigation exposed the school as a fraud. At the direction of President Susan Xiao-Ping Su, school officials unsuspectingly gave F-1 student visas to undercover agents, posing as foreign nationals, who as part of the sting said they had no intention of attending school. Tri Valley students, mostly from India and China, paid $5,400 per semester in tuition to obtain the visas until the school was shut down. [Read my March, 2011 CAPS column about the Tri Valley scandal here.]
Acting on a July 24th Government Accountability Office report indicating that Department of Homeland Security oversight failures have allowed unqualified students and possible terrorists to enter the country, McCaskill announced her intention to beef up the Student and Visitor Exchange Program (SEVP). Read the GAO report here.
McCaskill, along with Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), plan to introduce the Student Visa Integrity Act which would criminalize materially false statements or providing incorrect information when petitioning foreign students. The bill would also limit the SEVP program to accredited schools, a status that Tri Valley didn?t have.
In her July 25 statement, McCaskill said:
?Sham universities knowingly commit fraud, jeopardize our nation?s security and abuse an otherwise worthy visa program. For too long these institutions have broken the law and gotten away with it, but it?s time to put the proper safeguards in place to ensure their schemes have consequences. This bipartisan legislation is another step in working to fully secure our nation?s borders and keep our communities safe.?
Whether McCaskill?s effort is sincere or a vote-getting maneuver isn?t clear. But either way, more diligence in exposing bogus universities and their craven owners is welcome. Ditto for the students who mock U.S. immigration law and cheat the system. They should be banned from attending any other university, deported and forfeit whatever money they have invested schemes that are obviously fraudulent.
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AppFog has acquired Nodester, the most recognized platform as a service (PaaS) for the fast growing Node.js community. The move is one of the first signs of consolidation and proof that multi-language?platforms?are increasingly becoming the standard for this emerging cloud market. AppFog, also a PaaS, is based out of Portland and considered one of the up-and-coming players in the PaaS space that has made its mark by offering developers the means to build and deploy apps without tbe burden of building their own infrastructure. AppFofg offers multi-language support for app developers. Node.js is a very popular server side Javascript development language that has been embraced and validated by the likes of Microsoft and Joyent, a cloud service most often associated with the Node.js movement. According to a leaked memo to customers, AppFog will now run and maintain the Nodester service as it is, but makes a point that it will provide Node support in its AppFog.com service. ?The company will incorporate Nodester technology into the AppFog.com Node service, and once completed, will provide a migration path from the Nodester service into AppFog. The transition will be completed by January 15, 2013. Nodester Founder Chris Mathieu said the following in the memo: Nodester was the first 100% open source Node.JS PaaS solution available for developers and it’s still one of the few Node.JS platforms that supports native WebSockets! The Nodester community is passionate about open source public, private, and hybrid cloud PaaS services. I looked at the various leading PaaS providers out there and it became clear that the only one with our vision and mission was AppFog. This partnership will give our Node.JS developers the very best PaaS solution as Node.JS continues to grow and extend into the enterprise. AppFog prides itself on its interoperability with multiple clouds. The company’s service extends across different infrastructure services. It does this?by using CloudFoundry, VMware?s PaaS, as the universal API to multiple infrastructure environments. That allows the service to exist on any infrastructure without the complexity that usually burdens the customer. It competes with major services such as Google App Engine. Other players in the PaaS space include Apprenda, Heroku, Engine Yard and Tier3. The market is quickly becoming defined by the flexibility in language support. AppFog now has an advantage to some degree by offering Node.js support capabilities. Founder Lucas Carlson is banking on the need for corporate wide need for using
