Stop The Foreign Work Program

As they once said in the before-we-got-here years, it is time to take pen in hand and write your congressional representative and senators. Tell them to kill the foreign employment visa programs (H-1B and L-1).

These programs allow foreigners to take American jobs while millions of Americans are unemployed. The whole idea was a fraud to begin with. Big business claimed there was such a shortage back in 1990 that it needed to recruit foreign workers (these are skilled laborers, not stoop labor).

No such shortage ever existed, but Congress passed it anyway. Initially, it allowed 65,000 temporary visas good for six years, and then it was expanded to 115,000 in 1999 and to 195,000 foreign workers admitted annually through this year.

Outrageous. Even more outrageous is that local, state and federal governments are hiring foreigners, too. Perhaps you have wondered why you run into so many people with foreign names and accents when you deal with government these days. This is the reason.

I suspect the motivation in both private and public sectors is the same. Foreign workers under this program are docile. They don't cause trouble. They work for less pay. After all, if they lose their jobs, it's back to the old country.

In the meantime, millions of freshly laid-off Americans are in unemployment lines. How stupid can Congress be? It has a big argument about tax cuts and extending unemployment insurance when it can create hundreds of thousands of vacant jobs overnight. Kill the damned program. Send the guest workers back home.

I have nothing against foreigners. In fact, I've been called an ethnic junkie because I hang out with so many immigrants. The guest workers, however, are not immigrants. They are foreigners here on temporary visas to fill jobs that tens of thousands of Americans are qualified to fill. It is utterly inexcusable to keep this fraudulent program alive. It is a fraud because there are plenty of qualified Americans, including immigrants, who could handle these jobs. There is not now — and there never was — a shortage of Americans willing and able to work.

For more information you can check out www.zazona.com, www.thesocialcontract.com, www.fairus.org and www.numbersusa.com.

Sometimes, I swear, you can easily get the idea that the government deliberately works against the interests of the American people. Do you think the government can really keep terrorists out of the United States with our open-borders policy?

Look at these numbers: On a typical day, according to government statistics, U.S. customs processes more than 1.1 million passengers, more than 57,000 trucks/containers, 580 vessels, 2,459 aircraft and more than 323,000 vehicles. There are 301 ports of entry, and the officials who are expected to detain, medically examine or conditionally release people or animals suspected of carrying infectious diseases consist of 43 people in an Atlanta office and 39 in the field. A little understaffed, don't you think? Another question: How do you suspect someone or some critter is carrying an infectious disease if there are no visible symptoms?

The U.S. government, with its open-borders policy, is going to turn the United States into a Third World country, with a few rich people at the top and lots of poor people at the bottom. But not just poor people — poor people of quite different ethnic and racial backgrounds who will be scrambling and clawing to get at the few crumbs that get brushed off the tables at the top. It won't be a pleasant place to live. It's a formula for conflict and social upheaval.

Heifer dust about diversity notwithstanding, the most stable countries in the world are those with homogenous or nearly homogenous populations. Diversity breeds conflict. Ask American blacks and Native Americans, and while you're at it, ask Native Americans to remind you what unlimited immigration can do to a resident population.

Those statistics about customs and disease control, by the way, I gleaned from the latest issue of The Social Contract. This is an excellent quarterly and is always chock-full of useful information you won't find in the daily news. I've already given you its Web address. Try it.