Hire America

I've just read that the banks receiving the biggest bailout money have been applying for the most visas to bring in foreign workers to their employ. This has been going on for at least six years and probably longer. The foreign workers are filling top spots and earning more than $90,000 a year on average. That's more than twice the earnings of an average American household. And those are the very people who got those outrageously large bonuses, that President Obama spoke out against.

This is just wrong in so many ways. At a time when so many Americans are out of work, why are we allowing this to go on? If outsourcing to other countries is something the President wants to see discouraged, then surely "insourcing" of foreigners into the country for the express purpose of snapping up American jobs should be firmly discouraged as well.

The ironic part of this is that the reason these foreigners are being hired is not that they are more competent than American workers, but that these companies find ways to pay them less than what they would have to pay their U.S. born and bred counterparts. Now, I personally can't find myself weeping for the unfairness of earning "only" $90K, but there it is: we're spending our taxpayer money bailing out these banks that have mishandled the trust we put in them, and they are returning the favor by putting Americans out of work, every which way they can.

I want to see a law, plain and simple. No more outsourcing. No more favoring foreign workers over Americans. If two people apply for a job and have equal qualifications, the American citizen gets the job. Period, end of story. Why should people who have worked here and paid taxes their whole lives be put out of work and maybe out on the street, so that companies can pay foreigners less?

Oh, and those equal qualifications must NOT have anything to do with bilingualism. That should no longer be permitted to be a job qualification. Yes, I'm in favor of our next generation, the little ones, learning a second language. But which language are they going to learn? Here where I live, you can't get a job unless you speak Russian, or Chinese (Mandarin or Cantonese...maybe both), or Korean, or....you get the picture. And once they learn a second language thoroughly, meaning from pre-kindergarten onward, then it might be fair and equitable to allow bilingualism to be a job qualification.

But not now. No young adult of working age today who was born to English-speaking, American parents and educated in our public schools can possibly compete with a native born speaker or a child of native speakers. We have to level the playing field here, and the only way to do it is to abolish bilingualism for at least the next 18 years, and then institute foreign language as a subject taught from pre-kindergarten forward.

Otherwise, the foreigners will pour in, destroy our standard of living by accepting lower wages, and take away all our jobs because they are "bilingual" (some of them marginally able to speak English still get jobs requiring them to speak on the telephone) and we, victimized by our school systems, are not.

In England, workers are striking and demanding that jobs be given to native Englishmen and Englishwomen before foreigners. Good for them! We need a similar outcry here.

So here's my battle cry: buy American, as much as possible, hire Americans first, and take bilingualism out of the job descriptions!