Buchanan on Foreign Workers

Pat Buchanan, in “GOP’s Foreign Labor Stance Is Suicide” (Column Right, Sept. 6), is wrong again, dead wrong. The fact that foreign-born scientists, artists and athletes keep coming to the U.S. is what makes America the greatest country in the world.

During the Reagan years, there was no quota for temporary visas and U.S. employers were free to compete for international talent. Among the new influx of students taking computer studies as their majors at MIT, Caltech, Stanford and other top universities, many thousands were born in Asia, Europe, Canada and other countries. Commanding salaries of $60,000 to over $100,000, they are not “computer braceros.”

Americans are tired of big government, Pat. Next you’ll want the feds to tell the Chicago Cubs to send Sammy Sosa, that “baseball bracero,” back to the Dominican Republic to free up a job for a U.S.-born outfielder.

CARL SHUSTERMAN

Los Angeles

* Buchanan strongly argued against increasing H1-B working visas from 65,000 annually to 115,000, for computer programmers and other foreign-born professionals. It is important that policy-makers and readers realize that aside from H1-B visas allowing foreign-born professionals to work in the U.S., hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants enter the U.S. annually under family-based, employment-based and other categories. Many of the legal immigrants also seek professional jobs and will compete with existing legal immigrant and U.S.-born workers for work.

The impact of high immigration is not only fiscal and economic but educational and environmental as well. Our schools and freeways are overflowing. The solution is not to pour tax dollars into schools or build more freeways but to adopt sustainable population and immigration policies.

YEH LING-LING

Exec. Dir., Diversity Alliance

for a Sustainable America

Berkeley