Free Republic

Since 1990, the H-1B visa program has let companies temporarily employ foreign workers in occupations requiring specialized skills and a bachelor’s degree — when they struggle to find a U.S. worker to do the job. [That's a lie; the truth is they actively avoid U.S. workers in favor of cheap indentured foreign labor.] The sensible program has faced intermittent controversies over the years because some companies used the visas to replace higher-paid Americans with lower-paid foreign workers. Some economists argue that H-1B visa holders help suppress wages in fields like computer science. But with 700,000 tech jobs unfilled in the...

SOUTH RIDING, Va. — Not long ago, this rolling green stretch of Northern Virginia was farmland. Most people who could vote had grown up here...they usually chose Republicans. The fields of Loudoun County are disappearing. In their place is row upon row of cookie-cutter townhouses, clipped lawns and cul-de-sacs — a suburban landscape for as far as the eye can see. Unlike three decades ago, the residents are often from other places, like India and Korea. And when they vote, it is often for Democrats. “Guns, that is the most pressing issue for me,” said Vijay Katkuri, 38, a software...

In general, non-US citizens employed in the United States are required to pay FICA taxes. However, those with single intent (i.e. expected to return back to their home country post their intended purpose in the US), or non-immigrant status (or F1 visa holders) are exempt from FICA taxes. IRS guidelines confirm that F-visas, J-visas, M-visas, Q-visas, Nonresident Alien students, scholars, professors, teachers, trainees, researchers, physicians, au pairs, summer camp workers, and other aliens temporarily present in the United States in F-1, J-1, M-1, or Q-1/Q-2 nonimmigrant status are exempt from FICA taxes on wages paid to them for services performed...

Michelle Malkin, a former Fox News contributor and the founder of Twitchy and Hot Air, tore into Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, Wednesday, in a scathing article for American Greatness, after Kirk claimed America “should staple a green card behind your diploma” during a university speech last week. “I was flabbergasted to hear Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk telling students at a university campus lecture last week that ‘We should staple a green card behind your diploma,'” Malkin declared. “He repeated this nonsense at Ohio State University during a ‘Culture War’ tour stop this week, asserting that any...

GOP Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) is championing legislation to reward Indian workers who take jobs sought by American college graduates. [...] Tillis championed Sen. Mike Lee’s S.386 bill — which would give many more green cards to India’s contract workers — while he blocked the passage of Sen. Dick Durbin’s RELIEF Act giveaway to India’s workers [...] The rival Lee and Durbin bills would remove the so-called “country cap” on the annual award of green cards to foreign nationals. Under that law, the roughly 800,000 Indian workers in the United States can get about 10,000 green cards each year. The...

Utah GOP Sen. Mike Lee is expected to try again on Thursday to pass his S.386 bill, which helps India’s graduates grab hundreds of thousands of college level jobs from American graduates. All GOP Senators are expected to stay silent while Lee pushes his bill that rewards roughly 300,000 of India’s contract workers in the United States with a fast track to citizenship. Silicon Valley investors back his bill, which also allows companies to annually pay 60,000 of India’s contract workers — plus 60,000 family members — with government-provided green cards after they take jobs from American graduates. Existing “country...

America's September unemployment rate fell to 3.5 percent, the lowest level since 1969, according to the most recent Department of Labor report.The tight labor market is forcing companies to hire disadvantaged Americans. For example, New Seasons Market, a West Coast grocery chain, is actively recruiting people with disabilities and prior criminal records. Similarly, Custom Equipment, a Wisconsin manufacturing firm, recently hired several prison inmates through a work-release program and intends to employ them full-time upon their release.For the first time in decades, these disadvantaged Americans are finally winning significant pay increases. Over the past year, the lowest-paid 25 percent of...

A GOP Senator met with more than 100 Indian contract workers in Congress and publicly urged them to lobby U.S. Senators for passage of his legislation to give citizenship to more Indian workers who push middle-class Americans out of college-graduate jobs. Utah Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) made the request on Thursday, shortly his fourth bid to pass his S.286 green-card giveaway bill. The bill was quickly blocked by an objection from a Democratic Senator — while the other 52 GOP Senators did not speak out. “We’re now down to one objector, just one,” Lee claimed, adding:

Lousiana GOP Sen. John Kennedy has blocked a bill drafted by a top Democratic Senator that would accelerate the flow of Indian visa workers and immigrants into Americans’ office jobs. “The American people deserve an immigration system that looks like somebody designed it on purpose,” Kennedy told Democrat Sen. Dick Durbin during a polite conversation on the Senate floor. He said: I am rising to object [to Durbin’s bill] because a number of my colleagues … would like a little additional time to study this bill. But equally important, if not more important, many of my colleagues’ sentiment is that...

We keep hearing, from the industry and from the Indian press, that denial rates in the H-1B program are rising sharply, that more and more of the dreaded questions about applications (the Request for Evidence (RFE) process) are being asked by DHS staff, and that the post-RFE approval rate in the H-1B program is falling.So there must be a smaller number of H-1B approvals, right?Well, no. The number of initial approvals of H-1B applications has risen over the last five years by more than 100,000.In FY 2015, based on a dataset used both by the Times of India and by...

[...] Many Indians have been imported to take high-tech jobs throughout Durbin’s home state of Illinois. On October 10, roughly 600 of these imported workers turned out to demand passage of Lee’s green card giveaway bill, which is dubbed by advocates the “Fairness for High Skilled Immigrants Act.” Advocates claimed a turnout of 5,000, but the video shows roughly 600 marchers [...] Companies have imported roughly 35,000 H-1B workers into Durbin’s Illinois, along with thousands of additional L-1, OPT, and H4EAD workers. Roughly 75 percent of these visa workers are hired in India for a wide variety of U.S. jobs,...

Larsen & Toubro Infotech Ltd. an Indian provider of information technology services, discriminates against people who aren’t South Asian when hiring workers at its U.S. facilities, according to a lawsuit filed by two former employees. The ex-employees, both white Americans, allege that the Mumbai-based company’s U.S. workforce of 7,500 is 95% of South Asian decent and is mostly made up of visa holders from India. The complaint filed Wednesday in New York is one of several similar cases accusing India’s big IT firms of hiring bias in the U.S. The first to go to trial ended last year in a...

The Indian visa workers who helped Sen. Mike Lee come close to passing his Indian green card giveaway bill are now portraying Democrat Sen. Dick Durbin as a racist for blocking the bill. “Senator Durbin’s argument against the bill is no different from the arguments presented by those against removing segregation and discrimination,” said an October 2 message by the group, titled Immigration Voice (IV). [...] The bill would put roughly 300,000 Indian workers and 300,000 family members at the head of the line for green cards by discarding the decades-old, pro-diversity “country caps” rule. The large population of Indians...

SEATTLE - The former CEO of two Bellevue tech firms was sentenced Friday to more than seven years in federal prison for a sophisticated visa fraud scheme that cheated workers out of their wages and cheated the government out of over $1 million in taxes. Pradyumna Kumar Samal, 50, a citizen of India, then used the illegally obtained cash to enrich himself and fund a luxurious lifestyle, court records show. Samal was arrested in August 2018 when he arrived on an international flight at Sea-Tac Airport and has been in custody ever since his arrest. At the sentencing hearing U.S....

[...] After the interview, [Bhavendra] Matta discouraged the hiring of Ryu. Matta made a statement to [John] Cuder to the effect that Intel should not hire Ryu because he was “Korean, married, and had a child.” Matta further made a statement to Cuder to the effect of “It would be easier to hire a younger, unmarried Indian man.” … 19. Former Senior Firmware Engineer Ravi Gopalan, who is of Indian descent and was a member of the management of Ryu’s team, openly favored the hiring and promotion of only employees from India. Gopalan’s stated rationale was that “Indians work hard”...

Stephen Miller doesn’t think the new immigration bill addressing H-1B visas will be passed by the Senate “anytime soon.” “The administration has made clear that our view on [H-1B visas] is that you cannot displace or replace American workers,” the White House senior policy adviser told FOX Business’ Lou Dobbs Tuesday. “And the president has taken unprecedented action in the immigration space to do exactly that, including most recently with the public charge regulation to keep newcomers from taking advantage of our welfare system.” Senate bill 386, which is known as the “Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act of 2019,” would...

Proposals to curb immigration will weigh on economic growth in the United States where the existing workforce is growing more slowly as the population ages, Dallas Federal Reserve president Robert Kaplan said on Thursday. "If you think you are actually going to cut the number of immigrants and grow GDP, those two things do not go together ... You need to grow the workforce," Kaplan said. He suggested the United States consider reforms that would allow more immigration based on surveys of needed skills. "Trade and immigration loom very large as opportunities for the U.S. to grow faster as opposed...

The H1B visa scheme that the Unites States introduced in 1990 to allow companies to bring in highly skilled foreign workers who were otherwise unavailable in the domestic labor market, has become a very controversial political topic.Originally, companies could bring in up to 65,000 workers from abroad – most of them computer and engineering talent, but in 2013, this limit was raised to 300,000.The stated goal was to allow the US to attract the best and the brightest – but the way the program has since been implemented has drawn criticism on multiple grounds. Companies hiring in this way were...

Democrat Sen. Dick Durbin has temporarily delayed Sen. Mike Lee’s green-card giveaway bill to Indian graduates because it does not give away enough green cards to foreign graduates from many countries. Durbin’s block sends Lee’s business-funded bill back into closed-door negotiations where business lobbyists will keep trying to redesign the nation’s immigration system. The lobbyists are seeking to boost their corporate revenues and profits by steering well-paid jobs away from expert American graduates and their college-graduate children. So far, no GOP or Democrat senator has spoken up to protect millions of American college-graduate voters from this joint effort by the...

Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) now supports Sen. Mike Lee’s (R-UT) green card giveaway bill, which will allow investors to reward many more Indian graduates for taking middle-class jobs from American college graduates. Perdue’s decision to end his opposition to the bill clears the way for Lee to rush his bill through the Senate on Thursday. If no other senators object, Lee’s bill will move through the Senate, putting it much closer to becoming law.