America's genius glut: Don't expand H-1B program

[JDPriestly]

26. Think of the huge bureaucracy and expense that would be required to review all those

applications and check them.

It just isn't worth it. And it would not solve the problem which is that the companies who are willing to spend money to recruit and hire people from other countries are unwilling to hire and add to the training of American citizens who are capable of doing these jobs.

We have a serious unemployment problem here and it will affect our education system and the quality of life in our country. Our government should be concerned about the employment of Americans and not quite so concerned about importing cheap labor for wealthy corporations.

Rest assured, foreign governments are not so ready to give work visas to Americans. Years ago, we could go abroad and work, and even now, there are occasional jobs for teachers of English as a Second Language, but I don't know of any guest worker programs that send Americans to work abroad other than things like the Peace Corps and other volunteer agencies.

The reality is that "free trade" means that corporations get the freedom to shop around for cheap labor while hard-working people from countries with completely different economies have to compete for the same jobs.

Everything that our ancestors here worked so hard to build: water systems, electricity grids, sewers that work well, medical care, our education system, everything is being jeopardized by declining wages, lower tax revenues (due to the ever lower wages paid) and the replacement of jobs by automation.

Regrettably, one of the factors that is contributing to our decline is the H1-B visa which brings a worker from a country in which education is, in American dollars, relatively cheap to compete with an American worker who is struggling to pay back the loans he had to take in order to pay for his education.

We have a crisis in this country due to the fact that American graduates who owe huge amounts in many cases for student loans cannot get jobs and repay their loans. We just don't have the job demand to allow for H1-B visas. If we are going to permit those visas, we should grant a loan amnesty for students who can't get jobs to repay their loans.