Foreign nationals and American firms
By Andrew Eastman, The Dartmouth Staff
Published on Wednesday, April 25, 2007
I read Chris Chan '07's op-ed ("Lady Liberty's Lottery," April 24) and was generally sympathetic until one paragraph: "The United States may be protecting its workers from international competition but it is also crippling its own economy by keeping intelligent, capable workers out... and placing a cap on the value that its firms can produce." This implies that there aren't enough native-born Americans to fill these "intelligent" positions; are there not "intelligent, capable" workers born in the States? Clearly, there are.
Along the same lines, capping visas hardly caps "the value... firms can produce," because workers born in the United States are equally capable of producing as those foreign-born, just as they are equally "intelligent" and "capable."
While Chan's situation is certainly regrettable, an American company will not suffer for hiring Americans. While a foreign national may do a job at an American company just as well as an American, I would point out that an American can do a job at an American company just as well as a foreign national.