A while ago, a reader sent along this story on J-1 “foreign exchange” workers in southeastern Virginia. This isn’t the focus of the story, but until this year, Colonial Williamsburg imported foreign workers during the summer — apparently, portraying colonial-era Americans was a job Americans wouldn’t do. What’s next, using foreign contract workers as tour guides at Mount Vernon and the Capitol?

I loved this bit:

The purpose of the program is to bring promising students from foreign countries here to expose them to American people and culture. That’s not happening. “Where we work, everybody speaks Spanish,” said Shuyi Guo, to a round of giggles. “They don’t understand us.”

As anyone who’s been to a beach resort this summer knows, the eastern Europeans and Irish and others manning the french-fry shacks and ice-cream shops are here to work, not be “exposed to American people and culture.” In fact, between 50 and 80 percent of the hundreds of thousands of J-1 visa holders, supposedly here as “exchange visitors,” are workers.