Top ‘O the Mornin’ to Ya – The case for increasing high-skilled immigration

“What do Albert Einstein and Andrew Carnegie have in common? Both were immigrants. How about the companies Intel, eBay, Google, Yahoo! and Sun Microsystems? All have been incredibly successful and all were founded by immigrants.” (Larry Sumney, president and CEO of the Semiconductor Research Corporation, May 18, 2007) Based on the fact that “Nationwide these immigrants founded companies that produced $452 billion in sales and employed 450,000 workers in 2005,” (The National Foundation for American Policy, March 2008) and “For firms with fewer than 5,000 employees, each H-1B position requested in labor condition applications was associated with an increase of employment of 7.5 workers compared to 4.7 additional workers at firms employing between 5,000 and 10,000 workers,” (National Foundation For American Policy, March 2008) one would assume that our country is doing all it can to welcome brilliant foreign nationals into the United States and encourage them to stay and work for us. Sadly, this is not the case and instead immigrants are met with a yearly cap on visas that is used up the second day that the applications are released, and the yearly allotment of 65,000 visas is distributed via random lottery to the more than 100,000 applicants who applied on day one. After overcoming this first incredible obstacle, the vast majority of applicants are faced with 6-10 year backlogs after having their application accepted to the time they receive their visa.

While many people would like to think that the high-skilled visa cap of 65,000 is a carefully calculated number designed to reflect the free market, this is unfortunately not true. This cap is completely arbitrary, and this restriction on the avaliabiltiy of work visas for foreign graduates of American universities is creating brain drain, where foreign students come to the United States and are educated in our universities, only to be sent back to their home countries to create wealth for them instead of us.

Also, this cap on high-skilled visas, which sniffs of communistic restrictions placed on the flow of people by the Soviet Union, is a major factor in outsourcing of high-skilled jobs. According to the National Foundation for American Policy in March 2008, “Sixty-five percent of technology companies responding to an NFAP survey said in response to the lack of H-1B visas [Temporary work visas for high-skilled immigrants] they had "hired more people (or outsourced work) outside the United States.” This problem is most clearly demonstrated by a plant recently opened by Microsoft in Canada. Before opening this plant in Canada and moving hundreds of American jobs out of the country, Bill Gates petitioned congress to allow the workers to come here to the United States. However, his request was denied and Bill Gates moved the plant to Canada because of their less restrictive immigration laws. The people who state that bringing foreign workers to the United States is no better than outsourcing do not take into account that whenever foreign workers come to the United States, they spend money in our economy and many of them desire to ultimately settle here if they can obtain a permanent residence visa, thus allowing them to become Americans just like you and me.

So, considering the high-skilled labor shortage in America due to the lack of Americans graduating from masters or doctorate programs, an increase in the number of temporary and permanent residence visas for high skilled immigrants is definitely in order. “In electrical engineering, for example, 56% of master's and 66% of the PhD graduates of U.S. programs in 2004 were foreign students, according to Compete America.” Taking into account that many of these highly skilled foreign students will be unable to obtain a temporary work visa or a permanent resident visa, we should stop denying these highly skilled foreign students the right to stay in the United States and instead welcome to our country those who will be able to return our country to the former greatness in technology.

Comment on "Continue Supporting our Troops in Iraq"

While I agree with Marcy on part of her conclusion, that we should continue to stay in Iraq, I myself have arrived at that conclusion from a different route of logic. But before I divulge the logic behind by conclusion, let’s first look at a brief history of United States foreign policy from World War II and onward.

Just about every American agrees that we should have gotten involved in World War II. Without our economic aid, Britain might very well have been defeated by Germany, thus greatly reducing the chances of an allied victory. But as history has revealed itself, the allies emerged victorious, but at what cost?

Everyone who lived during the 50s and afterword remembers the Cold War. However, people tend to forget one reason why the Soviet Union was such of a threat. The answer: The United States of America. “What?” you might ask. However, the fact remains true, that many of the weapons and much of the technology that we gave to the Russians during World War II was used against us during the various skirmishes during the Cold War.

However, this is not the end of the story. In order to fight Russia, we decided to use the good ‘ol American tactic of making friends with our enemies to fight the worse common enemy. The new “enemy turned friend?” Iraq. Yes, we gave military supplies and weaponry to Iraq to help them fight Russia.

You might ask yourself what is the point of this history lecture. The answer lies in the reason why I believe we should remain in Iraq; in order to clean up the mess that we made. We were the ones who gave Iraq the weapons in the first place, and we were the ones who invaded Iraq (without the approval of congress, I might add, a similarity to the conflict in Vietnam.) in the first place. Also, under the JFK administration, the United States was the one who helped Saddam Hussein rise to power.

This instance with Iraq brings about a very interesting conclusion, that of the failures of the US foreign military policy. Now before you start picking up stones, I have to relate my story of how I reached this larger conclusion.

This year, the NCFCA (National Christian Forensics and Communication Association) LD (Lincoln-Douglas) debate topic is “Resolved: That the United States of America ought to more highly value isolationism.” Before hearing some of the LD debate rounds this year, I thought much like any other American. I believed that the US was the king at military interventionism and I also believed that every time the US got involved in a foreign conflict we won and greatly helped the “nation in distress,” with the exception of Vietnam.

However, after listening to a particular LD case written by my friend Paul Hastings, I came to a very important conclusion: that the majority of the “monsters” in the world today that we are facing militarily were created by the one and only United States of America.

Just look at the current situation. We are facing a possibly future war with Iran. But whose fault is it that Iran is in its current situation. Ours. First, we tried to “encourage” Iran to become more democratic by allowing their moderately democratic leader, the shah, to fall from power, hoping that a more democratic leader would replace him. The result: the current “president” of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is in power. What about Iran’s weapons that we have come to fear? Those were given to them by…you guessed it…the United States, in order to “help” them fight Russia.

Unfortunately, this isn’t an isolated event. What about the Cuba Missile Crisis during the Cold War? Regrettably, the United States had a hand in this affair, because it actively supported a young leader named Fidel Castro many years earlier.

You might wonder about the current situation in Afghanistan? Unfortunately, the US also played a role in this situation, since the United States actively supported a young Afghanistan leader by the name of Osama Bin Laden in his fight against the Soviets using Jihadist soldiers.

What these instances show us is that by leaving of foreign policy of military isolationism, we have caused evil to fix evil. We fought Germany by helping the Soviet Union, and we fought the Soviet Union by aiding Cuba, Iran, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

After examining this brief history of American military interventionism I hope you will agree with Marcy and me that we should remain in Iraq until we have finished cleaning up our own mess, but not indefinitely. However, the question still remains: how many more failed states will it take before the United States finally learns its lesson and stops creating monsters for it to destroy?


A commentary on the post "Continue supporting our troops in Iraq" by Marcy Winston http://fourmoreyears-winston.blogspot.com/2008/03/continue-supporting-our-troops-in-iraq.html