Free Republic

A plurality of Democrats and liberals say the government should allow Fortune 500 CEOs to import white-collar visa workers for the good career jobs needed by U.S. college graduates, according to a February 9 poll by Rasmussen Reports. In contrast, Republicans and swing-voters overwhelmingly prefer that CEO hire American graduates before importing more visa workers, according to the January 31 to February 4 survey of 1,250 likely voters. U.S. companies now employ at least 1 million foreign graduates instead of American gradautes. The poll asked, “Should Congress increase the number of foreign workers taking higher-skill U.S. jobs or does the...

United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced on February 5 that it would delay the effective date of the H1B final rule, announced on January 7, from March 9 to December 31, 2021. In an official statement issued by USCIS, the immigration agency said: “The delay is to give USCIS more time to develop, test, and implement the modifications to the H1B registration system and selection process, and to train staff and perform public outreach as well as give stakeholders time to adjust to the new rule.” Upcoming H1B cap season The delay means that the upcoming H1B cap...

The H1B visa system has been modified following the announcement of a final rule by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). The new look H1B visa program will prioritize skills and salary level over the lottery system. The changes are said to be in the interests of protecting US workers and ensuring that the most highly skilled foreign workers benefit from the H1B visa program. The final rule announced by USCIS will come into effect 60 days after its publication in the Federal Register. The next H1B visa filing season is expected to begin on April 1 2021. Commenting...

President Trump is facing a fast-approaching deadline to extend an executive order he imposed earlier this year suspending various temporary work visas amid the coronavirus pandemic. Trump is under pressure from some corners to extend the order into 2021, which would put pressure on the incoming Biden administration over whether to quickly rescind it. The president's advisers are said to be split over whether Trump should act, according to sources familiar with discussions. Trump in June signed an executive order suspending the issuance of H-1B visas, H-2B visas, H-4 visas, L-1 visas and certain J-1 visas. The moratorium on new...

Press Release WASHINGTON, DC – U.S. Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren (CA-19) – Chair of the House Immigration and Citizenship Subcommittee and author of H.R. 1044, the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act – today released the following statement on the status of legislative solutions to improve the employment-based immigrant visa system in America: “I’m very disappointed that we have not yet been able to reach a compromise between the House and Senate on a version of the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act that creates the change we need and that can pass both Chambers of Congress. But I won’t give up hope...

December 21st, 2020 (4: 40 PM EST) : Below are the updates from today as of the updated time.Omnibus Spending Bill Text Released : The Omnibus Spending Bill Text is available now. It is a massive 5,593 page document. There is no reference to any legislative text related to HR1044 or S386 in it. Below is the summary of our review by section.Detail Review of Omnibus Spending Bill for HR1044 Text : We have reviewed major sections that has DHS or DOL agencies are involved and below is the summaryDIVISION F : This is the first section related to DHS...

Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren will put her Silicon Valley version of GOP Sen. Mike Lee’s S.386 green card giveaway bill into the year-end omnibus bill — if top GOP leaders stand aside, say sources and lobbyists. The GOP leaders who can stop Lofgren’s bill include Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R.Ky., appropriations chairman Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who recently won reelection.The Democrats “can sneak it through, so the leadership needs to draw the red line,” warned one Senate staffer. Lofgren is an immigration lawyer and represents a district in Silicon Valley. She pushed for the 2019...

Billionaire GOP mega-donor Charles Koch is urging elected Republicans and Democrats to pass amnesty for illegal aliens and increase legal immigration levels, even as 24.5 million Americans remain jobless or underemployed. Koch, in an op-ed with Brian Hooks of Stand Together, writes that Republicans and Democrats should “come together” to give amnesty to the roughly 11 to 22 million illegal aliens living in the United States and increase legal immigration levels beyond the 1.2 million green cards given to foreign nationals annually.

Robert Heath, a skilled IT worker and a U.S. citizen, operating without a lawyer, has won an important battle with a Dallas-area corporation that published advertisements saying it was interested in hiring specific classes of aliens; in other words, it was discriminating against U.S. citizens, according to a Justice Department press release.The Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division on December 8 approved a settlement among Heath (the "charging party"), the Department, and Ikon Systems of Frisco, Texas, the recruiting firm in question. The key section of the settlement is this:[The government's] investigation found that ... Ikon posted at least eight...

This is the Eleventh Settlement under the Civil Rights Division’s 2017 Protecting U.S. Workers InitiativeThe Justice Department today announced that it signed a settlement agreement with Ikon Systems, LLC (Ikon), an IT staffing and recruiting company based in Texas.This is the eleventh settlement by the Civil Rights Division under its 2017 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. Today’s settlement resolves claims that Ikon routinely discriminated against U.S. workers by posting job advertisements specifying a preference for applicants with temporary...

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...