Posted on 08/03/2015 5:28:55 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
In 2013, when it was revealed that a developer was planning to purchase one of the four properties next to Mark Zuckerbergs Palo Alto, Calif., home, and pitch potential buyers on the idea of living next-door to the founder of Facebook, the 29-year-old multi-billionaire purchased all four residential properties and leased them back to their current occupants, whose neighborly discretion he valued.
Businessmen do business to make money. But occasionally, as Mr. Zuckerberg found out firsthand, business ventures have human costs.
In a 2013 letter to President Obama and congressional leaders, more than 100 tech executives, Zuckerberg among them, complained: One of the biggest economic challenges facing our nation is the need for more qualified, highly-skilled professionals, domestic and foreign, who can create jobs and immediately contribute to and improve our economy. The executives were petitioning on behalf of the 2013 I-Squared bill, which would have raised the cap on the number of H-1B visas distributed yearly to select highly skilled foreign workers.
But is there really a dearth of STEM-proficient American workers? Qualcomm, the San Diego-based cellphone smart-chip producer, announced last week that it plans to lay off 4,500 employees. But just four months ago, Qualcomm was scrambling to hire H-1B applicants. Likewise with Microsoft, which announced last year that it would be laying off 18,000 workers and introduced plans for another 7,800 cuts three weeks ago, even as it remains an enthusiastic supporter of the resurrected I-Squared bill co-authored by Marco Rubio earlier this year. That bill would triple the number of H-1B visas to 195,000.
Its not hard to imagine that Qualcomm, Microsoft, and others hope to follow the Disney model. Late last year, Disney, a company with significant IT interests, laid off 250 workers. They were replaced by H-1B recipients. And, like some 400 workers laid off from Southern California Edison last year, the Disney employees were required to participate in a knowledge transfer i.e., they were forced to train the foreign workers who took their jobs.
What is happening? Ron Hira, of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, reports that in 2013 Infosys and Tata, two leading offshoring firms, paid computer-systems analysts on H-1B visas $20,000 less than the average annual wage ($91,990) for analysts in Los Angeles that year despite the legal requirement to pay H-1B employees the prevailing wage in an area for their given occupation. Summarizing the findings of a group of economists studying the impact of H-1B employees on companies, my colleague Reihan Salam wrote in National Reviews June 22 issue: H-1Bs dont appear to make firms more innovative, but they do lead them to hire fewer U.S. workers than they would have otherwise, and they do make them more profitable. The evidence indicates that the chief motivation of employers seeking H-1Bs is to restrain growth in labor costs.
Its for this reason that ten senators (five Republicans, four Democrats, and Bernie Sanders) have called on the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Labor to investigate the use of the H-1B visa program at Southern California Edison, and another senator, Bill Nelson (D., Fla.), has called on DHS to investigate Disney on the same grounds.
The H-1B program has become an arrangement through which well-connected companies can save cash by betraying qualified American workers.
The H-1B program accounts for a fraction of all legal immigration to the United States every year which is about a million people. But the program highlights the question that should be at the heart of Americas larger immigration debate: For whom does our immigration system exist?
For tech executives, guest workers would immediately contribute to and improve our economy. But even if that were true and a lot of evidence suggests its not it would still leave unaddressed the issue with which Mr. Zuckerberg, in his real-estate dealings, was so concerned: the human cost. Something more than the Palo Alto developers bottom line was at issue.
Likewise, bringing more and more foreign workers to the United States is not just an economic prospect. People are more than contributors to an economy, and nations are more than markets. I just couldnt believe they could fly people in to sit at our desks and take over our jobs, one worker replaced at Disney told the Times. It was so humiliating to train somebody else to take over your job. The idea that big companies and the government are conspiring against American workers breeds contempt and threatens social cohesion. And its these non-economic problems that are the most intractable.
The American immigration system must work, first and foremost, for Americans. Certainly there are foreigners we would be lucky to welcome to our shores; as is often noted, the labors of immigrants have been imperative to our nations success, economic and otherwise. But a nation that refuses to prioritize the interests of its own citizens over the interests of foreigners is not much of a nation and is sure not to last as one for long.
The H-1B program has become an arrangement through which well-connected companies can save cash by betraying qualified American workers. An immigration system and a government that facilitates such a scheme is broken, indeed.
Ian Tuttle is a William F. Buckley Fellow in Political Journalism at the National Review Institute.
The H-1B program has become an arrangement through which well-connected companies can save cash by betraying qualified American workers. An immigration system and a government that facilitates such a scheme is broken, indeed.
Well summarized.
Bernie Sanders and DU libs agree
They wear shoes, too - does that mean conservatives shouldn't?
Its none of business if you want to vote for Sanders.
What a feeble dodge.
Something about Marxists running for office turns me off, even if they talk loud.
oh- thank you!
If it is IT department then sell their stock now..
I have made a career out of fixing software that was previously outsource to overseas
I agree with you 100%
It USED TO BE productive, when we obtained their best and brightest. But the brain drain is long since complete.
Now they give out degrees with cereal boz tops over there. I would not even go to a younger doctor that came from there.
When you plant them they grow.
Bernie Sanders and DU libs agree
Bernie Sanders opposes TPP - does that mean conservatives must support it?
On this issue Ted is like every other politician. He has to thread the needle to satisfy his big money donors who support H-1B visas and pacify the conservative base who is against it. In other words he’ll occupy the “middle” ground here.
When Cruz and Sanders take opposite sides on an issue, its time do a sanity check when you side with Sanders,
Why The Donald is on top of the polls - people are genuinely sick of 'like every other politician.'
Although the political sympathies of the author should be praised, he has failed to do even the most basic research on the subject of immigration.
First, he does not seem to understand that “legal immigration” is not the same thing as a H-1B temporary work visa.
Second, he has been tricked, like tens of millions of other Americans, into believing that the H-1B visa quota is 65,000.
Actually, the quota is 85,000 - per year. Automatically renewable for six years! So that's 510,000 H-1Bs right there.
Plus, universities, government agencies, and non-profit labs can hire an unlimited number of H-1Bs that do not count against the quota. And those visas can be renewable up to 10 years. How many H-1Bs do they employ? No one knows, because there are no centralized records!
Plus, there are at least 100,000 more work visas disguised as “Student” or “Travel” or “Training” visas.
Anyway - I'm still glad this guy wrote the article.
He works for National Review, which has been quietly pro-Amnesty, pro-massive legal immigration, and pro-massive work visas for the last ten years, so this is a little good news, for a change.
Prior to the H-1B, there was the H-1 visa (1952) which was mandated to be temporary.
When the H-1B visa was created in 1990, the 1952 requirement that the visa was temporary was removed. H-1B became a dual-intent visa which allowed the foreign worker to remain in the U.S. while applying for permanent residency (green card). Politicians and pundits said that H-1B was temporary their intent to make it a permanent visa was very clear
A Legislative History of H-1B and Other Immigrant Work Visas
http://web.archive.org/web/20140116160804/http://www.zazona.com/shameh1b/H1BHistory.htm
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