@ Alexei: How am I an exception? I am a US citizen. If someone were to immigrate to the US when they were 4 years old, live here for 15-20 years and get naturalized along the way, I have no complaints.
My issue is with employers just enlarging the labor pool they can select from via work visas. Here's an example:
Employer A: has an application from a scientist with a decade of research experience who can add a million dollars or more in revenue. Sponsoring him for an extra $50,000 is a no brainer.
Employer B: is recruiting a class of analysts/entry-level positions. If they had to pay an extra $50,000 for each foreign national, then they'd be far more incentivized to hire as many American citizens as possible, including ones which may not be as good as foreign nationals, but who can very much be value adds if trained properly. This gets young people in America (read: American citizens) working, I suppose at the expense of young people elsewhere in the world. Oh well. It's a big world, and clearly, we're filled to capacity here.
Yes, I am an immigrant. I also hold US citizenship. I suppose I am "lucky" in that regard.
Edit @ Katrina: you also need contacts/references and experience in today's economy in addition to an education. And believe me, I am looking in many other fields besides finance.
And once again, to get *back* to the OWS discussion, if someone such as myself (quantitative degreeS, US citizenship) is not having a walk in the park finding work, what about all of the rest of the people my age, who may not have known that they wanted to be number crunchers, and got some not-as-marketable major? Are they just supposed to eat a blueberry muffin, and work at Starbucks the rest of their lives as a coffee server?
People say to the OWS protesters to get a job, well, as Ari Gelber said on the Dylan Ratigan show, those people need to get a clue!
Frankly, our lawmakers in Washington, as inept as they are, need to realize that hey, the OWs protesters are protesting economic inequality--so find a way to get people back to work, doing good, meaningful jobs. Once that happens, the protests will go away. Before then, if people have nothing better to do, then they sure as heck are justified being there.
