Dear Editor,

The State Department J-1 program should not be used to bring temporary workers from foreign countries to work in Alaska canneries as advocated by Senator Murkowski. (J-1 Visa extension? Ketchikan Daily News, July 11-12, 2015.)

This widely discredited program that each summer under the guise of cultural exchange brings over 350,000 foreign students to the U.S. to work is nothing but a thinly disguised temporary worker program that displaces American workers, immigrant and U.S. citizen alike.

I spent the last fifteen of my 35-year career in the United States Immigration Service enforcing immigration laws in Southeast. When I arrived in Ketchikan, foreign students holding tourist visas took a sizable percentage of cannery jobs. In 1987 the practice was stopped and cannery wages rose from $4.35 to $6 an hour.

Thereafter, Petersburg Fisheries fully paid a year-around health plan for employees who worked 90 days in the summer. E.C. Phillips increased the hourly wages of local students one dollar an hour each year they returned.

To attract domestic workers, the canneries built housing, and the Visqueen cities that totally lacked sanitation, which once graced the slope above the cemetery, disappeared. No one went broke.

According to the Census Bureau, the percent of foreign-born living in the U.S. has increased almost three-fold from 5% in 1970 to 14% today. Millions came illegally, but the majority entered under laws that allow over one million new immigrants and refugees to come to the U.S. annually. Most are low or unskilled and their families; among them are Ketchikan’s summer cannery workers.

Advocates argue that increased immigration grows our economy, but wage stagnation, unemployment, and underemployment endemic among today’s low and semi-skilled workers shows that’s not the whole story.

Most of the workers whose variously hued faces we see in the vicinity of the canneries on North Tongass and South Stedman are not local but travel here annually seeking their livelihood. Many have a family elsewhere to support. Their jobs deserve to be protected.

Every J-1 foreign student worker brought to Ketchikan means one less job for citizen and immigrant workers.

Sincerely,

Mike Harpold

The writer is the author of Jumping The Line, a novel about American farmworkers and Mexican immigrants.