Believe In America.com

butterbean · Joined: 21 Jun 2006 Posts: 2269

8/13/06
Visa program hurts U.S. workers

Re "Understaffed firms hurt by visa curbs": Corporations want cheap labor. The H-1B non-immigrant work visa allows them to have it.

Like the majority of Americans, I used to believe it was illegal to import cheaper labor to take American jobs. Then my husband and his co-workers lost their computer programming jobs to programmers brought in from India on H-1B. The Americans had to train their replacements in order to receive severance.

We discovered that the Indian programmers were earning about half what the Americans had been earning.

I called Washington. The collective response to my contacts was "Americans need training and education." In other words, corporations get what they pay for while Americans are sold out to the highest bidder.

My husband has training and education. He still lost his job to cheaper imported labor.

Our president, completely ignorant of the law of supply and demand, insists that outsourcing and importation of cheaper workers on work visas create jobs for Americans. The truth is, Americans cannot afford to study for jobs in tech fields (racking up huge student loans) when they can't get jobs in their chosen fields.

Our daughter is a high school graduate of the North Carolina School of Science and Math. When she went to college and chose to study in a field other than tech, my husband and I were pleased. After what happened with his job, and after learning of mass layoffs of American tech workers nationwide in favor of cheaper imported labor, we agreed with her that she had little chance of a great career in tech.

Last year, I read an article about a former American programmer who lost his job, couldn't find another, and is now in the dog waste removal business. I suppose former programmers and engineers could always get jobs removing the waste from dogs owned by the H-1Bs who took their jobs.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/opinion/letters/sfl-pbmail647aug13,0,1455937.story?coll=sfla-news-letters

Patriot · Site Admin Joined: 10 Jan 2006 Posts: 471

Training and education seems to be the mantra of the Bush administration, and also of the big corporations that are shipping these jobs over seas. The problem is a lot of Americans had training and education but the jobs got shipped out. No job is safe. The white collar jobs are going as fast as the blue collar jobs did.

How many Universitys, colleges and tech schools does this country have? Tens of thousands? How can anyone say that what Americans need is education and training?

What we need are companies that are not willing to sell out their countrymen for the bottom line. The rest of the responsibility is on the American consumer to buy American made products. Paying $1.50 more for an item made in America will not bankrupt you. But it will keep money and jobs in this country so we can all benefit.

Besides the harm it does to American jobs, buying foriegn made products often supports companies who treat their workers as slaves. Americans would never tolerate buying products from a company that treated American workers the same way the foriegn ones are treated.

If an American company was hanging women from a basket ball hoop by handcuffing them to it, all because they have missed their production quota, would you buy their products. NO! So whay do Americans buy chinese made products?

Here is a book written by a Chinese dissedent called Buying The Dragons Teeth You can read the full text here http://www.boycottmadeinchina.org/downloads/dragontext.pdf

You can see what your money supports by buying made in China.

Please make the effort to buy American.

Patriot