Save our jobs.

Tue Feb 26 12:39:04 PST 2002

On Tue, Feb 26, 2002 at 11:38:50AM -0800, Leslie Devlin wrote:
> On Tue, 26 Feb 2002, Danny Howard wrote:
> > Here in California, we are ALL immigrants.  If I can't make it out here,
> > I can always go back to the midwest.  I've got a far better deal as a
> > citizen than those coming over here on H1Bs, and the last thing I want
> > to do is turn on those even less fortunate than myself.
> 
> Though I mostly agree with you, California's not *all* first-generation
> immigrants -- there really are some of us whose family, friends and roots
> are all here, and in hard times we don't have a cheap farmhouse in Iowa to
> retreat to.  I'm just sayin'.

<rant>
	I think his point here was that, originally, all of California's residents
	were immigrants - the gold rush was just a bit over 150 years ago.
	So nobody's roots here are very deep, anyway.
	(If you don't count those lucky Indians which weren't killed.)

	I started working in California on H1-B visa myself,
	and I know probably 50 people who did the same.
	Being paid below-market wage, paying social security tax yet not being eligible
	for its benefits sure does not add to the sense of self-respect.

	Now, `just' 5 years down the road, with a green card (only it's pink), I can say
	that this country would not survive without good immigration policy.
	And `good' does not mean `present'.  But I'd leave that to my fellow U.S.
	citizens to decide - of course permanent residents do not have right to vote,
	even in county elections.

	Just one hint: portable work visas with employment authorization for spouses.s
	(Not all of them think of housewive's career as a good idea.)
</rant>

Now, back to regularly-scheduled Perl/BSD/Apache hacking...