The American Spectator

Reader Mail

(Page 6 of 9)

-"Many have spent more than a decade in classroom instruction, with classroom sizes of 40 or more students. Even better: They don't quit."

-"Just 11 of the Filipinos have left the district over the past four years."

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.

p>Anyway, the question which has to be asked is this: Was this article written in ignorance, or are you deliberately engaged in propaganda? br> -- Dave Chapman /p> p> 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. br> -- D.M. Duggan /p> p>

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