Hiring Foreigners, Not Americans

By James R. Edwards, Jr. on December 9, 2011

What's the number one issue in America today? It's jobs. But we now have one more indication that U.S. employers are giving Americans desperate for work the shaft.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has reported that companies seeking to import foreign skilled workers, like in the computer industry, have exhausted the annual quota. For the third consecutive year, employers have set a new record for reaching the H-1B visa cap. The annual limit is 65,000 H-1Bs, plus 20,000 more for aliens with advanced degrees, plus as many more foreign temp workers as government or nonprofits may want.

Merry Christmas, job-starved Americans looking for good-paying skilled positions!

Meanwhile, the latest unemployment figures make it appear that the national employment situation is improving. That's hardly the case. The economy added a piddling net 120,000 jobs in November.

While on paper, the official unemployment rate fell by 0.4 percentage points to 8.6 percent in November, the main reason for the drop in unemployment was people giving up looking for work.

The 13.3 million officially unemployed Americans represent a 594,000 decrease in the government's count from the prior month. But wait. Some 487,000 people left the labor force. If you stop looking for employment, you disappear from the government's count of total available workers. And about 400,000 Americans a week are filing for unemployment insurance this year.

At any rate, it makes little sense to keep importing more than a million permanent immigrants every year, thousands more skilled and unskilled foreign workers in guestworker programs, and to continue the failed policies of the visa lottery and chain migration. That continual importation of cheap foreign labor only worsens the job situation for the 23 million Americans who can't find full-time work.