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Utah Senator Mike Lee succeeded in passing legislation in the Senate that would eliminate per-country-caps on recipients of H-1B visas on Wednesday, a policy change that would effectively monopolize the visa system for nationals of large countries such as India. The Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act has been called the greatest corporate welfare program for Big Tech in recent memory. Lee has persistently sought to pass the corporate giveaway, with previous attempts to eliminate per-country-caps being blocked by Democrat Dick Durbin and Republican Rick Scott. Neither Senator objected to the unanimous passage of the modified S386 legislation on Wednesday afternoon....

Update 12/3/20: A unanimous consent (UC) agreement for S.386 was reached and the bill was passed as amended. Congress.gov has updated H.R.1044 as "Passed/agreed to in Senate" and has made the text of the Senate amendment available.Jessica Vaughan, the Center's Director of Policy Studies, stated:This would make a very significant change to the employment green card system, and moves us farther away from a merit-based process. It rewards the companies that replaced Americans with guest workers. Will the President sign it? https://t.co/b1VlB5VKkx— Jessica Vaughan (@JessicaV_CIS) December 3, 2020View the passage of the UC agreement on the Senate floor in the...

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) is expected to seek Senate passage of his S.386 job-outsourcing bill Wednesday evening. If no Republican or Democrat objects to Lee’s actions, his bill will pass the Senate by so-called “Unanimous Consent,” (UC), setting the stage for a joint House-Senate conference to draft a final bill. Lee’s aggressive effort to pass the bill by UC is a threat to the GOP Senators and their slim majority, an immigration activist told Breitbart News. “They have to give Georgia Republicans a reason to vote [in January] — and UC for this bill ain’t that,” the activist said. Lee...

A federal judge in California on Tuesday blocked badly needed reforms in the H-1B program, seemingly largely on the grounds that the new rules were rushed through, in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, according to articles in Law360 and Politico.The administration, after not making these changes for more than three and a half years, argued that the Covid-19 crisis gave them the opportunity to issue the new regulations without going through the normal comment and review process. U.S. district court judge Jeffrey White, a Bush II appointee, did not buy that argument.Two different sets of new regulations were involved....

Apart from the fact that an Indian-origin woman will step inside the White House as the Vice President for the first time ever, the Biden-Harris election is good news for Indian professionals for another reason. The new administration is expected to reverse some of the decisions of the outgoing Trump rule, including that of the H-1B. Tens of thousands of Indian professionals will be benefitted if the new rule plans to increase the number of high-skilled visas. This was a part of the comprehensive immigration reform that the Biden administration plans to work on, either in one go or in...

President Donald Trump has launched a fundamental reform of the H-1B visa system to protect American graduates from outsourcing — despite furious opposition from donors and leaders from Silicon Valley, Fortune 500 companies, and coastal investors. The reform will end the annual award of 85,000 H-1B visas by lottery, which has been gamed by companies to import foreign workers at wages far below the salaries needed by American professionals. Instead, the visas will be offered to the companies that compete to offer the highest salaries, preventing employers from undercutting American graduates.

As companies grow and become more valuable, they’re able to hire and invest in new products and technologies. But they need skilled workers to grow.This is the Tech Dilemma: Too many jobs, not enough workers. Not exactly what you’d expect with the country walking a pandemic tightrope with over 8.4% unemployment (according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics).For instance, many of the FAANGs, or five of the most prominent American tech companies – Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Alphabet (formerly known as Google) – are collectively adding employees to handle the influx of demand attributed to eCommerce.Amazon recently announced that...

President Donald Trump’s H-1B reforms will shrink the Fortune 500’s large-scale use of cheap Indian gig-workers, say opponents and supporters.The immediate beneficiaries may include thousands of middle-class Americans at the Vanguard Group, Ascension Healthcare, and other companies who have been told they will soon lose their jobs to Indian contract-workers imported by Indian-run staffing companies, such as HCL and Infosys. The staffing H-1B gig-workers comprise seven-in-ten of the more than 600,000 H-1Bs in the United States.Industry representatives and lawyers are objecting to the new rules, which will dramatically raise the cost of hiring foreign workers and reduce the CEOs’ incentives...

<p>The Trump administration announced plans Tuesday to sharply limit visas for skilled workers from overseas, a move officials said was a priority amid job losses caused by the coronavirus pandemic.</p> <p>Department of Homeland Security and Department of Labor officials said new rules for what’s known as the H1-B program will restrict who can obtain a work visa and will impose additional salary requirements on companies seeking to hire foreign workers.</p>

The Trump administration is set to publish additional immigration reforms on Tuesday aimed at making it more difficult for skilled foreign workers to acquire visas. The changes are the latest effort by the Trump administration in recent months to crack down on the use of visas as part of its broader attempt to limit the flow of foreign workers. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is expected to publish regulations targeting H-1B visas that are granted to skilled workers and are common in the tech industry. Recipients can typically stay in the United States for multiple years. The rules, which...

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) has just introduced a bill that would seriously shrink the H-1B program and, at the same time, suspend the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program, which currently bribes American employers with a tax break when they hire recent college graduates here on foreign student visas rather than those who are citizens or legal permanent residents.If it passes (unlikely this late in the session), it would probably open up hundreds of thousands of well-paid jobs for U.S. citizens and green card holders. Whether it passes or not, it is a useful addition to the ongoing conversation about the...

Once again, the Deep State has set out to undermine President Trump. And in the process, career bureaucrats and entrenched Capitol Hill never-Trumpers are attempting to put the skids to U.S. tech workers. The issue, as per usual, is well-paying, white-collar jobs that Department of Homeland Security and Department of State want to give away to foreign nationals. As first reported by Breitbart’s Neil Munro, DHS and State have concocted a complex scheme that would, unless President Trump intervenes to scotch the plan, result in 400,000 work permits being issued to foreign nationals, almost exclusively Indians and Chinese. Jumping for...

President Donald Trump’s deputies at the departments of state and homeland security are offering a huge giveaway to at least 400,000 foreign visa workers and their Fortune 500 employers just before the November election. The simultaneous giveaway by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is a “crazy [good] thing,” he said on September 24. But he warned that agency officials may quickly suspend their action once they see how many Indian visa workers will claim the surprise benefit. “Good times,” he tweeted. “The people who are getting screwed are likely Trump voters,” said Jessica Vaughan, policy director at the Center...

Lauren Witzke @LaurenWitzkeDE US Senate candidate, DE Mass immigration into the United States has resulted in low wages, low birth rates, and a drug epidemic. America needs an #ImmigrationMoratorium NOW! Check out my interview with @michellemalkin ! https://mobile.twitter.com/LaurenWitzkeDE/status/1310327715417923584

The two dozen tech geniuses who endorsed Joe Biden in a recent New York Times letter showed an obliviousness all too typical of the industry. Biden and running mate Kamala Harris “listen to experts before setting public policy,” they claim — which evidently means they’ll favor the tech industry’s preferences when it comes to immigration policy. The 24 winners of the Turing Award, aka the Nobel Prize of programming, don’t run the Big Tech companies. But they clearly join in the industry’s upset over H-1B visas, which normally allow for the recruitment of immigrants with specialized skills — until President...

For over 20 years, H1B, L1, etc. replaced local s/w workers for cheaper pay (actual pay divided by hours worked). We trained them because their resumes were stuffed with lies and exaggerated skills, which by the way allowed HR and placement agencies to get H1Bs slots. Last 10 years or more, they are replacing entire systems with products built overseas with a few local sales/support/migration/managers (often H1Bs to boot). These products were quickly written spaghetti code javascript and unstructured backend that were full of bugs, performance and security issues. As it grew over time, the codebase would be hard to...

link only - Bloomberg

As we've noted here before, big banks and big technology firms have been big users of H1B visas, which enabled them to hire-in global talent and that were temporarily banned by President Trump in June 2020. Despite protestations that the ban will lead to pay inflation for the "finite pool of super-smart folks" that have U.S. citizenship, the ban also has plenty of supporters. Key among them is Hal Salzman, a professor of planning and public policy at Rutgers University. There's absolutely no reason why banks and tech firms should complain about the lack of H1B visa talent, Salzman tells...

Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden “devoted his career to offshoring” American jobs, President Donald Trump said during a rally in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. “Joe Biden devoted his career to offshoring new jobs, throwing open your borders and dragging us into endless foreign wars and surrendering our children’s future to countries like China,” Trump told the crowd on Tuesday evening.

It's an appalling reality that in the entire U.S. Senate not one single member is willing to stand up for American workers. From appointed Arizona Republican Martha McSally to Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders, possibly the world's only avowed socialist who won't defend his nation's workers, none stood up against the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act, S. 386, and its continuum of foreign national tech workers, mostly Indian. S. 386 would eliminate the 7 percent country cap provision that controls Green Card issuance to ensure that one country, or just a few countries, do not dominate the program. The current system...