BE AMERICAN, HIRE AMERICAN, BUY AMERICAN
1. Get off your butt and DO something about the offshoring problem. Contact your Congresscritter frequently and complain about it. If enough of us do this frequently enough, it might actually do some good.
2. Whenever you buy some Chinese-made crap in Walmart, you are hurting Americans and the American economy. You are also supporting a repressive Communist state that you will see competing more and more with us, especially for energy and raw materials like aluminum and steel, as their economy grows dramatically, fed by our dollars. Look at labels closely (of course, the manufacturers try as hard as they can to hide the source when something is made in China). If it says "made in China", DON'T BUY IT - I DON'T!
FEB, 2009 UPDATE: With the current economic crisis, more people are starting to "get" the above that I've been saying since the mid-1990s.
see HERE for one of the MANY reasons to avoid buying crap from China - this is addition to the poisoned food, lead-painted toys, etc
Click HERE to see what you can do about the ever-increasing US overpopulation threat.
FEB, 2009 UPDATE - I've also been bitching about H-1Bs since the late 1990s. The subject is getting more publicity now, especially in the current economic situation. See HERE for detailed info on current status.
Join NumbersUSA today "for lower immigration levels" (and sensible immigration laws)
=> note my comments below about corporate greed screwing all Americans (except the elite 1%) - from the high vantage point of 2009, it looks like I knew what I was talking about!
Have you ever heard of H-1B visas? It is not about immigration; it is about temporary foreign workers brought to this country to alleviate hi tech "worker shortages". In practice, it usually means hiring foreign workers at lower wages than American workers. The program is pushed by the usual mix of greedy, crooked corporations, the politicians in their pockets, and sleazy lawyer groups like the American Immigration Lawyers Association. The law says these temporary workers are to be paid full American wages, but most of them are not. The law also says the H-1B workers are not to displace American workers. I know of many cases where companies have had their IT employees train H-1B workers, then the Americans get laid off, while the H-1Bs remain.
The sole reason the corporations try so hard (including millions in campaign contributions) to bring the H-1Bs in is so they can pay lower wages. Even though pay rates are shrouded in maximum secrecy, I have personally seen evidence of H-1B workers in my field getting paid as little as 25% of the going rate for Americans doing the same job. The corporations are too short-sighted and greedy to invest the same effort into training Americans.
Even though we were in a deepening recession throughout 2001, and hundreds of thousands of Americans lost their jobs in 2001, especially after Sept 11, the government and their special interest supporters continue to bring in more H-1B foreign workers. Get more details on this shameful screwing of the American worker at the H-1B web site.
2002 was even worse than 2001, and unemployment, particularly unemployment in the IT field, continues to rise in 2003. The H-1B program, and its even worse relative - the L-1 program, continue to bring in more and more foreign nationals as high tech workers to displace American workers. See these important links for more details:
National Association for the Employment of Americans
TORAW - The Organization for the Rights of American Workers
American Workers Coalition/H-1B Protest
Federation for American Immigration Reform
Oct, 2003 - after years of me complaining fruitlessly to my Congressman, who's firmly in the pocket of the big corporate donors, and no one giving a damn about the H1-B situation, the news media is finally starting to mention this. Time did a story on it Aug 4, 2003. My local paper did a story about it a couple weeks ago. The CBS Evening News featured it on Oct 22, 2003. It's pretty ironic that the story on CBS News' web site is sponsored by an array of sleazy immigration lawyers. Now, if only LAWYERS were being supplanted by cheap foreign labor, then we might have something!
2004 update = "Outsourcing" has become as big a problem as the H-1B situation. More and more companies are outsourcing all their IT needs to India. And from everything I read, it's getting exponentially worse every day. Time did a cover story March 1, 2004 about all the tech jobs going to India. It's time we did something about this. The solution is so simple that even the stupid politicians should be able to figure it out. Just stop allowing companies to deduct overseas labor costs. That'll put an immediate stop to it.
Time magazine reported 6/28/04 that 1.3 million new jobs were created between Q1'03 and Q1'04, and that TWENTY SIX PERCENT of those jobs went to NON-CITIZENS. We've really got to wake up and end this. Call or write your Congressman regularly.
12/01/04 - see articles in USA Today and Technology Review about how the H-1B program is being increased again. The USA Today article included a chart showing the number of H-1B visas issued each year. In 1999, they ramped it up from 65,000 to 100,000. Then, in typical government bungling and poor planning, they jumped it up to 200,000 in 2001, just in time for the dotcom meltdown and the economy going to hell. Then they left it there through the period of our worst economy, and dropped it back to 65,000 just a few months ago, as the economy is picking up a bit. This story, reported in BizReport, also mentions the large number of foreign graduate students as a reason for increasing the H-1B quotas. That in itself is outrageous; each foreign student at a US college is displacing an American student. Then, the greedy, corrupt corporations and their lackeys in Congress have the audacity to turn around and use that as a reason why we should hire the foreign graduate students here.
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this page last revised February 27, 2009