CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2013 OR THEREAFTER
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2013 OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“H-1B VISAS MAY STILL HARM U.S. WORKERS”
No American immigration program draws
as mixed reviews as the H-1B plan that allows U.S. companies to import foreign
workers when there are no qualified Americans available to do the same jobs.
Large California high-tech companies
like Cisco Systems and Intel love the program, often said to allow in
65,000 workers per year, all of whom must leave immediately if they lose their
jobs. In actuality, the total imported often exceeds 90,000 and in 2010 came to
117,409.
The companies constantly pressure
Congress to increase the number of visas available, claiming they need imported
talent and have used it to fuel their well-publicized successes. They claim
America does not have enough qualified, available (read: unemployed or newly
graduated from college) workers to fill their demand.
But some U.S. workers, principally
members of engineers' organizations, many of whose members lost jobs during the
recession, say H-1Bs are used to drive salaries down at their expense. Fully 16
percent of all H-1B visas go to California companies and their immigrant
workers.
For sure, most H-1B workers who lose
their jobs whether for recession-related reasons or anything else, actually go
home quickly. Nevertheless, a large number stay in the areas to which they
were brought, often becoming off-the-books motel clerks or freelance computer
instructors paid in cash or personal checks, with income never reported to
federal authorities.
That’s a failing, for sure. But the
main problem with H-1B visas is that there has never been a test to determine
if U.S.workers are available before foreigners are hired and visas issued.
“Do not confuse H-1B demand with labor
demand – they’re not the same thing,” Jared Bernstein, author of a Brookings
Institution report on H-1B use, told a reporter. “Lot of employers,” he
suggested, seek visas despite “a climate with very high unemployment even among
skilled workers. Below-market wages are a real concern here.”
Bernstein says he found evidence of
employers using H-1Bs to force down wages. In short, American workers know that
if their salary demands get too high, they can be replaced by workers from
India, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and many other countries.
In fact, Chileans are assured 1,400
H-1B visas each year under a free trade agreement, while 5,400 visas go each
year to citizens of Singapore under another trade pact. None of those count
toward the nominal 65,000 annual limit
There is bipartisan concern in
Congress over the likelihood that H-1Bs put Americans out of work, led by
Democratic Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois and Republican Sen. Charles Grassley
of Iowa. But their efforts at a fix have gotten nowhere.
That’s partly because high-tech
firms spread campaign money around widely and liberally.
But the flaw remains. It is employers
who must file initially for H-1Bs, and they are a far cry from hiring only
persons with advanced degrees. In fact, a special category of H-1B adds 20,000
visas a year atop the purported 65,000 limit, going to workers with master’s
degrees or higher credentials earned at American universities. This effort aims
to keep in this country some of the foreign talent that’s regularly trained
here.
But relatively few in the basic 65,000
quota possess advanced degrees or credentials. Most are not high-level
researchers and software engineers, as high-tech firms often try to bill them.
Rather, they may be laboratory technicians or even assembly-line workers.
One big problem singled out by the
Brookings study was that some companies which file labor condition applications
(LCAs) where they affirm there are
shortages of qualified workers include more than one type of worker in each
such filing. Some companies are more straightforward, like Microsoft, which
files a separate LCA for each H-1B worker.
One of the most remarkable things
about the H-1B controversy is that conservative politicians who normally
inveigh loudly against illegal immigration say almost nothing about it. Neither
President Obama nor his 2012 challenger Mitt Romney ever said anything
significant on the subject.
So it remains a lingering sore point
for many highly trained, but unemployed American workers. The bottom-line fact
is that neither the Departments of Labor nor Homeland Security ever makes sure
the workers brought in on these visas are actually needed, rather than merely a
convenient, exploitative money-saver for big corporations.
-30-
Email
Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough:
The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch
It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias
columns, visit www.californiafocus.net
No comments:
Post a Comment