The 7 Percent Solution

Accuracy in Academia ^ | May 20, 2010 | Malcolm A. Kline

[bs9021]

The 7 Percent Solution

Malcolm A. Kline, May 20, 2010

The University of Florida (UFL) is posting an online guide for employers who hire foreign guest workers even as American college students face the toughest job market in decades. Specifically, they show that guest workers are exempt from social security taxes.

The federal government government, for its part, shows that imported employees in amusement parks, where yours truly spent a quarter of his college employment, fall into this category as well. Call it the 7 percent solution for such employers, already facing declining profits and exorbitant overhead during troubled times and anxious to cut costs wherever possible.

What it portends for the native-born labor force at the entry-level, whom institutions such as UFL claim to care about deeply, is another story. By law, employers have to go to the extra expense of paying the social security taxes of entry-level employees born in the USA. (By the way, this is about the largest tax paid by and for the poor.)

“More than 900,000 H-2B guest worker visas for season al non-agricultural work were issued between 1994 and 2009,” Steven A. Camerota and Karen Jensenius write in a backgrounder from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). “Created in 1990, the annual number of H-2B visas rose from 10,400 in 1994 to a peak of 129,547 in 2007.”

“In addition, nearly four million J visas (excluding family members) were issued to exchange visitors between 1994 and 2009 in 12 different programs,” they report. “About two-thirds of all exchange visitors in the United States are working, rather than studying or doing research.”...

[Frantzie]

This is insane.