Increase Immigration’s Quotas: We need more slaves!

This week the congress held hearings on the HB1 Visa quota. They heard Bill Gates say, “There is a tremendous shortage of qualified workers in the US market.” Later the CEO of JP Morgan added his voice, “America’s dominance in the world will fail! We must have access to more educated workers.” Bush sat silently by as Mexico’s President ranked on the US for enforcing some of immigration and labor laws for those poor immigrants who are “doing jobs Americans will not do.”

This is scandalous but I had an experience that greatly disturbed me this week. I met a gentleman in his early 50s. After 20 years of marriage he had just gone through a divorce. In the settlement, his cleaning business was assigned to the wife. He is out of a job. As he told me his story of how he was willing to take any job at any price I could offer him no comfort. His final thoughts deeply disturbed me, “I have no future, I see no way out. The only thing left to do is to end it all.”


I was tremendously taken back. I knew, from my own experience, that his prospects were null. A man who had worked all his life, paid his taxes, paid social security and done the dirty jobs, has no future. I have not been able to write about this until today. Only today my sensibilities became numbed enough to express my thoughts.

There is no shortage of workers. There may be a shortage of slave labor. Companies still ask for credit reports for store clerks. Companies still hire consultants (read freed slaves immediately post Civil War) for jobs that are part of their core business. Companies still respond, “due to the immense volume of resumes we receive we cannot respond to each applicant.” While employment conditions remain at current levels we can safely say that the labor market is flush with untapped capacity. In other words, unemployment is high.

Further evidence of the disastrous condition of the US employment market is that while jobs are being lost, unemployment figures are not moving. Further evidence is that unemployment claims are diminishing. The reason for this anomaly is that there is an underground job market that does not show up in the data. The loss of jobs is not increasing unemployment figures because these workers were not counted in the official data. Government watchdogs estimate that real unemployment is from 8.9% to as high as 12%. This does not include the underemployed workers. These facts are corroborated by the fact that 1% of Americans are homeless and that 33% of the US population is “food insecure!”

While I knew the problem in the US was bad this gentleman and his desperation brought home the concept. The US prides itself on its moral backbone. Religion is about hope, empathy and compassion. Every person needs to look inside their soul and determine if they are ok with the way our government and our duly elected representatives are conducting business. The government is the face of a people. Corruption, greed and lack of ethics in government indicate that WE THE PEOPLE are corrupt, greedy and ethically challenged.