The American Spectator

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8.14.08 @ 12:01AM

(Page 3 of 4)

This is pretty dishonest. The truth is that they can't quit. As a practical matter, people who are working under the H1-B visa program cannot change jobs.

The truth about H1-B is that the immigrants take the view that, if you come to America and either work for half price or take a job teaching somewhere that Americans refuse to work, then, after 6 years, you will get a Green Card.

While I have mixed feelings about such a program when it is used to supply teachers in inner-city schools, there can be little doubt that the use of H1-B by corporations like Microsoft is simply a subsidy.

The practical effect of H1-B on the American labor force, however, has been corrosive. Enrollment in U.S. Computer Science classes is one-half of what it was ten years ago. False claims of a shortage, followed by the importation of H1-B workers who drive down wages and eliminate job security for US workers, has had the (ironic) effect of causing a shortage.

Anyway, the question which has to be asked is this: Was this article written in ignorance, or are you deliberately engaged in propaganda?
-- Dave Chapman

RiShawn Biddle has done us a service by bringing an interesting trend in education to our attention. However, like most Americans who have never tried to make a living as an engineer or scientist, RiShawn refuses to accept that the H1-B visa program is more the cause than the solution to the shortage of technically literate Americans. Not only do young Americans (especially the minorities and women the establishment actually tries to encourage) shun professions which take considerable effort to enter and are flooded with practically unlimited cheap competition from all over the world. But also, our public schools are under very little real pressure to improve when our captains of industry and academia would rather import cheap, docile talent. And, of course, only paranoid xenophobes would worry about security problems when 40% of our physics students are from Communist China.
-- D.M. Duggan

HISTORIOGRAPHY
Re: Jeffrey Lord's Democrats: the Missing Years:

Another item that I find interesting, this due to the liberal influence on education: when I was in school in the 1960s, all history books referred (correctly) to the party founded by Thomas Jefferson -- the party of Andrew Jackson and Jefferson Davis -- as the "Democratic-Republicans" -- that is the party that believed, at least nominally, in a democratic republic. This same party is now referred to in every book I read as the "Republicans" -- my daughter came home from school telling me about how "the Republicans" had been historically supporters of slavery and secession -- it took my a while to figure out why she was saying this, and then to explain the history of the GOP. Not only do liberals skip over their own history, but then they try to hang it on us!
-- Bill Shoemaker
Malvern, Pennsylvania

CRINGE AND BEAR IT
Re: George H. Wittman's Showdown in Georgia:

The ultimate question, as George H. Wittman points out in his article "is whether the Russians will be satisfied with the return of South Ossetia and all of Abkhazia in northwest Georgia to Russian sovereignty." The answer is of course no. Putin is trying to restore the old Soviet Union, and by extension its military might and threat to all those areas no longer under the oppressive control of the former Soviet tyranny.

The timing is of course obvious. The world is focused on the Olympics, the Dems are focused on proper inflation of our tires and we're in a Presidential election cycle that gives the communist Putin the view that he can move as he wants without reprisals. Europe is impotent and the United States is tied up in a war in Iraq with a stretched military capacity. The United Nations is nothing more than a political debating squad with no troops, navy or air force to enforce any of its idiotic resolutions the convention of diplomats may come up with in the next few days.

Meanwhile, the Russians go back to being what the Russians have always been, paranoid imperialists seizing territories on pretexts. Russia hasn't changed in five hundred years! The Russians are heading back to the Cold War, and this time they have a resource to hold over the heads of the west! Perhaps now people will realize what the "environmental movement" was really about? And the people in the Baltics should once again be very aware of the pending military movements against them. The world will of course sit by as usual.
-- Valdis Gailitis
Newbury Park, California

I have read your article and you seem to get few facts completely wrong. Namely:

1) "Insiders in Moscow's think tank world spoke openly about the Kremlin's willingness to drop their objection to Georgia's joining NATO if they would accede to South Ossetia and Abkhazia rejoining Russia." You got this one 100% upside down. Nobody in Kremlin really cares about an extremely poor unpopulated hard-to-defend place called
South Ossetia, while everyone is genuinely scared of NATO. The reverse might have been true (although not necessarily): that Moscow might have helped Georgia to regain its provinces in exchange for military neutrality. Now, of course, this chance is lost. If your insiders indeed were spinning this fairy tale for you, you might want to look next time for more credible insider impersonators in Moscow.

2) "The Russians were ready with hundreds of tanks and armored vehicles." Does not seem credible to me. The Russian forces get into the battle about 48 hours after the initial assault after a long travel on winding mountain roads. If Russia indeed were planning an aggression, it would have pre-assembled forces on the southern side of the multi-mile Roksky tunnel thus excluding a chance of a small equipment mishap inside the tunnel bringing the supply operation to a complete halt. Do you have any source to your claim that Russian forces were waiting for an attack? Where?

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Taxes, Education, John McCain, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Bill Clinton, Television, Environment, Books, Law, Military, Iraq, Russia, United Nations, NATO