Free Republic

Business groups are training young Americans for jobs and careers because President Donald Trump temporarily blocked the inflow of foreign contract-workers, according to multiple press reports. In Tennessee, the Gatlinburg-area tourist industry was denied many J-1 workers, so it “responded by developing a hospitality internship program that seeks to bring more U.S. college-age workers to the area,” according to a September 6 report in the Wall Street Journal. “We’ve tried to get creative,” said Allen Newton, the director of the Sevier County Economic Development Council. In Kentucky, the horseracing industry is hiring and training Americans because Trump blocked the inflow...

A federal judge on Friday rejected a lawsuit by business groups and is allowing President Donald Trump to temporarily bar the entry of foreign contract workers who are hired to take the U.S. jobs needed by Americans. The decision is a big labor rights win for American employees because it recognizes a president can use his authority under section 212(f) of federal law to block the inflow of foreign workers if they have a damaging impact on Americans’ economic circumstances. “The court expands executive authority under 212(f) to previously unknown limits,” said a tweeted complaint from one of the lawyers...

The long-awaited reform of the H-1B outsourcing program that was promised by Donald Trump in 2016 has been sent to the White House for approval, according to a chorus of concerned corporate immigration lawyers. The news was praised by advocates for U.S. professionals but slammed by the immigration lawyers who guide foreign workers into hundreds of thousands of jobs that would otherwise go to young and old American graduates.

Indian recruiters have developed a terrible reputation in the US in a very short time. But one issue that is little discussed is what Indian recruiters tend to do with the resumes of domestic workers. These resumes are solicited by Indian recruiters under the false impression that the individual will be considered for a potential role. However, the most common feature, as explained by numerous accounts and first-hand experience, is that the resumes are mined for information. This issue is described in the following quotation. I have been warned for years that Indian recruiters harvest resumes and that one should...

Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., announced his strong opposition to Utah Sen. Mike Lee’s S.386 outsourcing bill, likely sinking the Utah Republican’s bill for the rest of the year. Lee’s S.386 bill aids the tech industry and visa workers from India and China “at the expense of American workers, highly skilled immigrants, workers from Latin America and Europe, as well as Florida’s most important industries,” Scott wrote in the August 31 op-ed in the Miami Herald.He continued: I’ve heard from many constituents about how this bill would impact people in Florida, especially those who came to Florida from Latin America. Florida’s...

The way President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden talk about H-1B work visas is strikingly different -- and so are the Silicon Valley donors supporting their candidacies.

No GOP or Democrat members of the House voted against a rushed bill, approved August 22, that would help Fortune 500 companies quickly outsource jobs to foreign workers instead of Americans. The outsourcing bill is titled H.R. 8089, “the Emergency Stopgap USCIS Stabilization Act,” and it was unveiled the day before the vote. It is being portrayed as an emergency bill to prevent imminent furloughs by the underfunded U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) agency. The agency is funded with fees paid by employers and migrants, but the fee revenue crashed during the coronavirus crash, likely forcing a cost-saving agency...

The Department of State will soon offer a huge reward of more than 100,000 extra green cards in 2021 to the Indian and Chinese visa workers who took U.S. jobs from American graduates.

ALEXANDRIA, Va. – A Sterling man was arrested today on charges of conspiracy to commit visa fraud and for inducing aliens to come to the United States using fraudulently obtained H-1B visas. According to court documents, Ashish Sawhney, 48, allegedly used four corporations to orchestrate the improper submission of fraudulent applications for H-1B specialty-occupation work visas. The six-count indictment identifies Sawhney as the director or registered agent for Value Consulting, LLC, Value Software Products, Inc. (formerly known as Value Consulting, Inc.), Business Pointers, Inc., and E-Train ERP, Inc., each of which had offices located in the Eastern District of Virginia...

An IT staffing services firm, with an office in Hyderabad, India, discriminated against qualified Americans for white-collar jobs in favor of foreign workers with the Optional Training Program (OPT), the Department of Justice (DOJ) concludes. This week, DOJ attorneys announced a settlement with AllianceIT — which has billion-dollar corporate clients such as Cisco, CVS, Expedia, Humana, IBM, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo — after the firm was found to have discriminated against Americans for jobs in favor of foreign OPT workers. AllianceIT, according to the DOJ, discriminated against Americans with job postings where they advertised for “ONLY OPT’s who can...

In the last 24 hours we have learned a bit more about the decision of the Department of Homeland Security that it had to run a second lottery in the H-18 program on the questionable grounds that there was a need to use all of the 85,000 slots for new H-1B visas this fall.Apparently there was a substantial reduction in demand caused by the virus crisis.We have been told that there is a not-yet published, in-house legal memorandum saying that the agency had to follow that course. The Center for Immigration Studies will file a Freedom of Information Act request...

Over the weekend, it was reported that the Department of Homeland Security has run a second H-1B visa lottery for the apparent reason that "the agency did not receive enough applications for individuals selected in the first round" according to an article, partially behind a paywall, at Law360.The article quotes a USCIS spokesperson as saying "additional registrations needed to be selected to reach the numerical allocations." No details were offered on which companies had lost interest in the program, or the size of the "shortfall".In other words, the government is taking every possible step to make sure that every one...

Dear All: The Oxford dictionary defines the word “exception” as “a person or thing that is excluded from a general statement or does not follow a rule.” It comes to us from the Latin, “excipere” or to “take out.” So, if in the course of common everyday parlance, if a person states that something is an exception, one would rightly assume that the exception(s) would be limited and those granted an exception would be exceptions only after a great deal of due diligence. Tragically that is not the case with how the swamp creatures in our Department of State (DOS)...

The skilled American workforce is being cannibalized by Congress’s H-1B outsourcing program, a top White House aide told Breitbart News Daily. “The H-1B visa is sort of a Trojan horse to bring in folks who cannibalize our own workforce and ultimately take any number of intellectual property secrets, or proprietary information, back to their home countries,” Theo Wold told Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Daily host Alex Marlow. Wold is a deputy assistant to the President for domestic policy. The program’s flaws are highlighted by President Donald Trump’s August 3 decision to stop the H1B outsourcing of up to 300 jobs...

Nearly all GOP Senators and top officials at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are quietly backing the S.386 outsourcing bill pushed by Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), according to Hill sources. “There isn’t a single Republican in the U.S. Senate that will stand up against outsourcers,” said an advocate for more legal immigration. “I don’t think the GOP is going block the bill,” a Hill source said.

Hundred of Indians are reporting caste-based discrimination by Indians employed by American tech companies, following the filing of a lawsuit against Cisco, according to Vice. Under the headline, “Silicon Valley Has a Caste Discrimination Problem,” Vice reported: 'In the weeks since the lawsuit was announced, more than 250 Dalits from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, and dozens of others in Silicon Valley have come forward to report discrimination, bullying, ostracization, and even sexual harassment by colleagues who are higher-caste Indians, according to data provided exclusively to VICE News by Dalit advocacy group Equality Labs. 'There have been 33 complaints from...

The primary lobby group for India’s contract workers in the United States is turning its invective against Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) after he blocked the bipartisan bill to supercharge the flow of India’s visa workers into U.S. white-collar jobs. The group, titled Immigration Voice, quickly posted a Facebook image of Scott in KKK garb after his August 5 surprise intervention in the effort by Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) to pass his unpopular outsourcing bill. The group’s post was quickly removed, amid criticism by other would-be immigrants and by Americans [...] The group’s invective continued right up to Durbin’s August 5...

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday which curbs the H-1B outsourcing of jobs at government agencies. “We believe jobs must be offered to American workers first,” Trump told attendees at a signing event in the White House. Staffing companies have used the H-1B program to fill roughly 18,000 jobs in government agencies with foreign contract-workers. A White House statement said: President Trump is signing an Executive Order to create a policy where Federal agencies will focus on United States labor in lucrative Federal contracts. It would be unfair for Federal employers to replace perfectly qualified Americans with workers...

My overall view of the H-1B program is that it is used to bring low-cost labor to the U.S. IT industry, and that this lowers wages in the industry, and denies some half a million or so U.S. citizens and green card holders jobs. Young Indian males from the south of the country get the lion's share of these jobs as non-immigrant workers.Here's another, quite different take on the program: some of those working in the program – largely from India – have few skills but their hiring and their continuing to hold jobs is riddled with India-based fraud. And...

The Justice Department announced today that it reached a settlement agreement with ASTA CRS Inc., a provider of IT staffing and consulting services with offices in Ashburn, Virginia, and Greenbelt, Maryland. This is the ninth settlement under the Civil Rights Division’s Protecting U.S. Workers Initiative, which is aimed at targeting, investigating, and taking enforcement actions against companies that discriminate against U.S. workers in favor of temporary visa workers.The settlement resolves a claim that ASTA’s Maryland office discriminated against U.S. workers because of their citizenship status when it posted a job advertisement specifying a preference for non-U.S. citizens who held...