The Big, Fat "American Worker Recruitment First" Lie of H-1B

You've heard it from Big Government lobbyists. You've heard it from Big Business lackeys in both political parties. And you've heard it from journalists, pundits and think-tankers ad nauseam:

The H-1B foreign guest worker program, they claim, requires American employers to first show that they searched for and tried to recruit American workers before tapping an ever-growing government-rigged pipeline of cheap foreign workers.

The foot soldiers of the open-borders brigade are lying, deluded, ignorant or bought-off.

On Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee brought top independent academics and informed whistleblowers to Washington to expose the truth. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, hosted Howard University associate professor of public policy Ron Hira, Rutgers University professor Hal Salzman, Infosys whistleblower Jay Palmer and former computer programmer-turned-lawyer John Miano, who brought much-needed reality checks on the systemic betrayal of American workers to the Beltway table.

Miano's testimony was particularly important because he explained how the little known "OPT" (Optical Training Program) for foreign students is being used to circumvent H-1B and supply large corporations with cheap foreign labor. President Obama has expanded this regulatory program by unfettered administrative fiat. As Miano noted: "OPT has no labor protections of any kind. Aliens on OPT do not even have to be paid at all. While DHS requires aliens to work in an area related to their major area of study, DHS has no ability to ensure that this happens. Under OPT, over 125,000 foreign workers a year are simply turned loose in America with no supervision or restrictions."

Also on hand at the hearing: a few Big Tech shills toeing the Zuckerberg/Gates/Chamber of Commerce line that there's a catastrophic American tech worker shortage, even as thousands upon thousands of American workers are being laid off in favor of underpaid, easily exploited H-1Bs. (Just use H-1B-promoter Google's search engine and type in "Southern California Edison" and "layoffs.")

Grassley put it plainly: "Most people believe that employers are supposed to recruit Americans before they petition for an H-1B worker. Yet, under the law, most employers are not required to prove to the Department of Labor that they tried to find an American to fill the job first."

He added, "And, if there is an equally or even better qualified U.S. worker available, the company does not have to offer him or her the job. Over the years, the program has become a government-assisted way for employers to bring in cheaper foreign labor, and now it appears these foreign workers take over -- rather than complement -- the U.S. workforce."

Hira affirmed: "It's absolutely not true" that employers seeking H-1Bs must put American workers first, either by "law or regulations."

How did this myth gain such traction? Many commentators and journalists confuse the labor certification process required for companies applying to obtain green cards (lawful permanent residency status) for H-1B workers with the Labor Condition Application (LCA) process for H-1Bs. Labor certification in the green card process "exists to protect U.S. workers and the U.S. labor market by ensuring that foreign workers seeking immigrant visa classifications are not displacing equally qualified U.S. workers." Only in extremely narrow and exceptional circumstances do these nominal protections exist in the H-1B LCA process. (Companies must be classified as "H-1B dependent" for the requirements to apply. Big Tech giants like Facebook have been lobbying mightily to avoid the classification.) And even those narrow exceptions are easily and often circumvented by H-1B foreign worker traffickers.

Conservative journalist W. James Antle gets to the heart of the matter: "If the government has discretion in how it exercises its legitimate authority over who comes and who goes, a prerequisite for national sovereignty, then shouldn't it exercise such discretion in a way that minimizes the impoverishment of Americans?"

For a very brief window, Grassley and, yes, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., a small group of H-1B-employing banks and other financial institutions that accepted federal bailout money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) did have to demonstrate that they had taken "good-faith steps to recruit U.S. workers" and offer them wages "at least as high" as those offered to H-1B workers. In addition, the targeted employers had to show that they "must not have laid off, and will not lay off, any U.S. worker in a job essentially equivalent to the H-1B position in the area of intended employment of the H-1B worker" within a narrow time frame.

But this American worker-first provision, vociferously opposed by Big Business and Big Government, expired in 2011. The refusal of the vast majority of politicians and the White House to embrace these protections for all U.S. workers tells you everything you need to know about H-1B's big, fat lies.

RE :”Also on hand at the hearing: a few Big Tech shills toeing the Zuckerberg/Gates/Chamber of Commerce line that there's a catastrophic American tech worker shortage, even as thousands upon thousands of American workers are being laid off in favor of underpaid, easily exploited H-1Bs. (Just use H-1B-promoter Google’s search engine and type in “Southern California Edison” and “layoffs.”)

Yep, our Kardashian-Beyonce-texting millennials are the smartest most skilled generation in our lifetime.

They all know who won the Grammy’s.
They all are experts at texting and facebook on their phones working at Applebees and living with mom and dad.

Who needs those math and science college educated foreigners?

Kudos to Grassley for highlighting the visa fraud and displacement of American workers for cheap, foreign labor.

*****

I believe that the H1B program is doing terrible damage to the growth and the future of the American tech field (1) by creating morale problems among highly-skilled American tech workers----"Will I have job tomorrow? Will I have to move every few years in search of a job because more and H1B workers keep popping up wherever I work and taking my job?---and (2) by discouraging smart young people from entering the tech field because they know that they could lose their jobs any day to an H1B foreign worker, so they try to enter occupations where H1B workers are not eligible.

There should be a law like this one for private companies and even for public agencies : If you lay off American tech people, you are ineligible for foreign worker programs like H1B.

1. My point is this: It is morally wrong and makes no sense for a tech company like Microsoft, Facebook, and Apple to, say, layoff 20 tech workers, then turn around and beg the federal government to let them hire more H1B foreign workers under the pretense that they can't find American citizens to do the job, referring to the same American workers who they just coldly laid off.

2. As I see it: It is morally wrong, obscene, and downright un-American for a company to layoff, say, a $80,000 a year American worker just so that the company can turn around and stab American workers in the back by hiring an H1B workers at, say, $60,000 a year to do the exact same job.

3. And to add insult to injury, the greedy company may order the fired worker to help the H1B foreign worker learn his new job before the fired worker can leave his job. Sick I tell you.

4. California Edison biggest abuser? I recently read that California Edison is one the biggest abusers of the H1B foreign worker program. (I don't live in California.)

5. California Edison's top officials: Does anyone have a list of the top officials at California Edison? Thanks.

6. Let's Email California Edison officials: Once we have the list of California Edison's top officials, we can then bombard them with letters, emails, and phone calls in which we tell them what scumbags they are for abusing the H1B program by laying off good American tech workers and cold-heartedly replacing them with H1B FOREIGN workers, simply because the foreign workers work for less money and benefits. Sick I tell you.

7. List of American companies with the most H1B workers? Anyone have a list of American tech companies with the most H1B foreign workers?

8. List of American companies who have requested the most H1B foreign workers in the past 2 years? And continue to do so?

9. List of states with the most H1B foreign workers?

10. Imagine this scene in South Korea, India, and Taiwan. Tech teachers tell their students something like this:

11. "If you get good grades, you can look forward to going to the United States under the United States H1B program.

12. "And after a few years, you can leave the company and start your own company and automatically get your green card. America is not going to send you back home after it has invested so many years in training you and letting you live comfortably in the United States."

13. To those tech companies that hire H1B workers: Your cold-hearted hiring and firing practices are contributing to the slow destruction of the American Way of life as most of us have come to know and love.

Thanks for posting - hard evidence from the inside.

Little by little ‘merican sheeple are starting to wakey-wakey,

and realize that a little profit while they’re still young, gained using practices that destroy the ‘merican economy...

will provide them with a nightmare of retirement, because the economy will be destroyed.

In a bad economy, the elderly are really hammered - it’s very, very painful, financially, medically, physically, emotionally, etc.

Want misery ? Destroy the American economy.

Thanks for posting RossA - it is important for people to be on the inside and then turn whistleblower - so the sheeple can know that there are problems and the problems are real.

As we get older, some of us learn, and repent of our former ways.

But everyone is missing the real message sent by the use of this tactic: IT work isn't really very important to American companies. It's necessary, at some level, just like janitorial and housekeeping services. But they don't consider it a core part of the business.

So if you are younger, study something else. IT is an ancillary skill - something you are supposed to be able to do with your left hand while working in areas more critical to the business.

Nicholas Carr predicted this a decade ago in his book "Does IT Matter?" and got roasted for it by industry critics. But he was exactly right.

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