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Virtually all illegal aliens and the majority of legal immigrants are low skilled workers. Moreover, the skills of many workers on high skilled H-1B visas are often limited to a tech degree from a community college overseas. They are brought here not because they have truly advanced abilities needed by American businesses, but because they will work for far less than Americans. As Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) recently stated about H-1B visas “it is clear they are not working as intended, and the programs are having a detrimental effect on American workers.”
Last October, the Rakesh Kochar of the Pew Hispanic Center reported that since the “official end of the Great Recession in June 2009, foreign-born workers gained 656,000 jobs while native-born workers lost 1.2 million.” He updated his finding in March and found some small job creation for native born Americans, but that foreign workers were still finding new jobs at six times the American rate.
How should we solve this problem? Former National Review editor and George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum recently called for a simple solution to help reduce unemployment, an Immigration Moratorium. He argued, “You hear it often said that the US must create X number of jobs per month simply to stay even with the increase in the working population. It’s not stressed often enough that much of this increase is artificially created by immigration. In a time of high unemployment, why make the challenge larger?”
I don’t always agree with David Frum, but this is common sense. Until Americans are working, we should make across the board cuts on worker visas, while cracking down on employers of illegal aliens. In the meantime, whenever you hear a politician or pundit heads talking about “putting Americans back to work”, remember that many of those workers aren’t Americans.
Virgil Goode represented Virginia’s 5th Congressional District from 1997-2009.
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