But, on the plus side, I am less than ten years from retirement.

This is the beginning of a fairly lengthy article that appeared in yesterday’s Dayton Daily News:

“Experts say Wright State University’s use of a work visa program to bring in low-cost foreign workers for jobs at area private companies typifies abuses that have occurred for years, but legislation to address the issue has gone nowhere.

“’Wright State is going to be the kind of poster child for the kinds of abuses that are occurring under the guest worker program,’ said Hal Salzman, a senior fellow at the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.

“Wright State is under federal investigation because it held H-1B work visas for foreign workers who didn’t work at the school. The university’s provost and a researcher have been demoted, WSU’s chief general counsel was forced into retirement, and another top administrator was fired.

“An investigation by this newspaper found many of the work visas WSU obtained were for IT professionals employed at area companies for less money than the companies would have to pay to employ them directly.

“David North, senior fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, said it appears Wright State essentially was acting as a ‘body shop,’ or a middleman agency that obtains skilled workers, usually from India, and rents them out to other companies for less pay than American workers.

“’It’s a pattern we’ve seen before, but I’ve never seen a university do it,’ North said. ‘All sorts of corporations are using the H-1B program to get low-market labor, indentured labor.’

“North noted that in addition to Wright State, this region had one of the only public school districts in the country found to be misusing the work visa program. And he noted that a string of local Horizon charter schools have been criticized for bringing in teachers from Turkey on work visas.

“’You’ve got a three-layer cake of inappropriate use of that one program in your city, and I’ve seen that nowhere else,’ North said. . . .

The article written by Josh Sweigart is titled “Wright State Is ‘Poster Child’ for Visa Abuses. College Allegedly Exploiting Low-Paid Foreign IT Workers.” The article, as the lead paragraph suggests, includes a detailed investigation of why legislation addressing this practice has stalled in Congress. The complete text is available at: http://www.mydaytondailynews.com/news/news/local-education/wright-state-poster-child-for-abuses-of-worker-vis/nns2P/