I get it; I really do get it. Americans of every stripe don't want to hear that corporations are openly discriminating against Americans and green card holders right in their job ads.
I've been quoted in Businessweek, Computerworld, CIO Magazine even the New York Times. I've now appeared on Dan Rather. But I've never been able to get progressives on board with the central tenet of the American Dream: the freedom to compete for job openings in our own country.
Now we finally have print coverage on this from an American, living in India but it's published in an Indian business daily! If you were reading my weekly diary, you'd have already seen the brazen posting of want ads with the unmistakable message: No Americans Need Apply.
The Department of Justice is reaching out to our members for an unprecedented direct conference call, so why are my phone calls ignored by progressives, despite my stellar left credentials and the urgent necessity to put Americans back to work?
I'm old enough to remember when American Black men weren't allowed this freedom. Growing up in Springfield, IL, the city-owned bus company wouldn't hire local black men, saying "they couldn't find any qualified Blacks" when they only hired unqualified White men--and trained the hell out of them!
Senator Dick Durbin grew up in Springfield too. I am sure he remembers how Black Springfieldians (sp.) successfully mobilized to stop this open discrimination; in our small town, you couldn't not take sides. My guess is that's why he responded so forcefully when we showed his aides a bunch of discriminatory want ads we found on an American tech job board.
"Donna Conroy, founder of Chicago-based Bright Future Jobs, a lobbying group dedicated to “counter claims that Americans can’t cut it in science and technology”, has gotten the attention of US Senator Dick Durbin—who included a prohibition against such ads in bipartisan legislation to reform H-1B and L-1 visas he introduced with Senator Chuck Grassley in 2009—and the Department of Justice with such job postings. “It’s an open secret in the US tech industry that companies are using these visas to avoid hiring Americans,” Conroy said.
So can't everybody just understand what the DOJ and Durbin understands--that tech firms have digitally re-mastered employment discrimination?
That our nation’s promise—that we would make a better life by working hard and playing by the rules—has been broken?
The Easy Button
We can put American back to work and stop the offshoring of our nation's future jobs by fixing corporate visa programs that assure companies they can conduct segregated recruiting drives for their US job openings. And it won't add to the deficit!
Durbin's bill will do so. It will be re-introduced in August. It's bi-partisan. To my mind, it's is a jobs bill we can get passed. And unite a divided nation.
Donna Conroy
Bright Future Jobs
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