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Fresno Republican News Archive

Tuesday May 19, 1998

Notice to California
High School students

By Amy Williams, Fresno Daily Republican Staff Writer

SACRAMENTO DESK - The Senate approved legislation Tuesday that would allow U.S. employers to hire 460,000 skilled foreign workers admitted under what is known as the H1-B visa program.

Foreigners are being hired to work in the computer industry and for related tech jobs that the present crop of public school and college graduates in California are unqualified.

Under the legislation, the current annual limit of 65,000 visas would be upgraded to 95,000 this year and to a maximum of 115,000 in each of the next four years.Nearly all of these jobs are in Northern California.

The new law was not authored by a California legislator. Senator Spencer Abraham(R)put his name on it. 'Until we can find Americans to fill these positions, we need to be able to attract and bring skilled workers here from anywhere on the globe...' he said.

California Bay-Area high-tech companies have long complained about a lack of qualified high school and college workers for the good paying jobs in Silicon Valley.

Because American workers do not have the necessary technical skills, hiring of foreign workers is the alternative de-jure, another popular alternative has been to move U.S. factories overseas. Staying put and hiring foreign workers puts them at a competitive disadvantage in the global marketplace.

There are so many high paying jobs going begging in Silicon Valley that immigration authorities report that they have already exhausted their supply of visas -- five months before the fiscal year ends September 30, 1998.

Senator Dianne Feinstein(D) who voted for the bill,appeared on C-SPAN Tuesday and said she had 'misgivings' about the new law, 'These are exactly the jobs that graduates from our schools all over the United States should be taking,' she said.

The Office of Management and Budget analysis released last week found that the new law does not ensure that U.S. workers do not lose their jobs to temporary foreign workers...'

The expense of public education to the taxpayer has long been justified by public policy makers as an investment strategy in the future.

The essence of the public school mission has been a human-capital model of investment. That is, we spend public funds on public education believing that will lead to reducing public and private sector cost that leads to the overall improvement of U.S. productivity.

Now, we are finding that the human capital model is broken. Tax money spent on public education was actually based on a continuing public policy experiment founded in a set of unproven labor economics assumptions.

In a surprising turn-around, we are now actually experiencing the unintended consequences of our faulty educational theories. The reality is that we are hiring foreign workers for a half-million good paying U. S. jobs and the California public school product is of considerably less economic value on the open market than are the human capital endowments of just about any foreign worker from the Third World.

The Congress has been aware of this human tragedy for some time. In fact, U.S. Labor Laws have been modified by Congress several times in order to permit American employers to import foreign nationals when it has been proven to the Labor Department that there are no U.S. citizens qualified for available jobs. Placing the nation's continuing need for economic productivity well ahead of an untrained and under-educated high school or college student's need for employment, the Congress has consistently favored the importation of foreign workers to fill job vacancies in the private sector.

Given the dismal basic skills performance by California pupils in the past generation, it should come as no surprise to learn that the state's public schools formula for federal funds received by each school is based not upon the numbers of high achieving students on the rolls. It is derived from the numbers of under achieving students in each school.

Need we say more?

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