A salute to the skipper of the USS Lassen

Only in America...Anchors Aweigh! The day after I was discharged from the Marines I landed in Saigon almost exactly 20 years from the day I left in April 1975. You can't go home again but it was nice to visit without having 122-mm rockets land around you.

With tens of millions of Americans out of work, it is an outrage that our nation continues "guest worker" programs, including the H-1B program, for skilled workers, who are usually used to replace older and more highly paid American workers. Most military officers use insurance from USAA, and they were outraged a few years ago when management secretly began to replace its IT workers in Texas with lower-paid H-1B workers from India.

Our nation has no limits on its guest worker program, but few know about it because corporate media like the WashPost refuse to report on it. Any business can sponsor all the guest workers they want on two conditions. First they must prove they are unable to find American workers by stating they have advertised the positions and register the need with the local unemployment office. Second, they must provide workers with health care, lest the local county hospital gets left with the bill.

There are millions of legal aliens here with such work visas, but some greedy corporations don't want to pay for health care, so they hire illegals. They prefer illegals since they don't demand rest breaks or that the employer abide by wage laws (like overtime) and safety laws.

I hope no one here makes a fool of themselves here by parroting the corporate talking point that illegals do jobs that Americans don't want to do. Americans will do anything, its just a matter of wages vs the type of job. Two decades ago, meat packers were well-paid for their dangerous work, but their unions and workforce were gradually replaced by illegals and visa workers who make just above the minimum wage.

Back to my point, Mr. Dobbs has nothing but admiration for a legal immigrant who becomes a Navy officer, so Mr. Ricks should delete that inaccurate smear, or change it to reflect what he now admits he thinks.

there are thousands of Brazilian 'illegals' doing everything from cleaning houses to raking leaves to pumping my gas...almost without exception they are well-mannered, intelligent and grateful for any opportunity they have....i have never gotten one flyer from an American company that wanted to clean my house. The real problem here was the lack of imagination on the part of American industry going back to the 1970s when the Japanese began eating our lunch. The response from Detroit and elsewhere was anemic and wrong-headed and we have now paid the price ....ironically we adopted Japanese manufacturing principles without their regard for their work-forces....the we turned the whole economy over to the money guys....and we see where that got us. To blame poor illegal housekeepers and fruit pickers for what ails America is so intellectually bankrupt its hard to even respond. But the guilty will always keep quiet when a scapegoat is sitting in the front yard.