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After US President Donald Trump and Congress failed to reach a funding deal by Wednesday's deadline, the government shutdown began. As a result, hundreds of thousands of federal employees face furloughs, and many offices will be closed. H-1B visas will also face a pause until the shutdown ends, says immigration attorney Nicole Gunara. She said that H-1B visa filings will not be processed until the Congress can agree on federal funding allocations.

Apoorva arrived in New York in 2018 on an H-1B visa, fresh from one of India’s top graduate schools and brimming with hope of building a life in the United States. She soon joined an architecture firm, eager to contribute her skills and establish roots. But her dreams were quickly dashed — because Apoorva, like many other immigrants on an H-1B, soon experienced some visa-related issues. She recalled being stuck at her minimum wage architecture job for over three years. Changing jobs on an H-1B visa is famously difficult, and often means enduring months of bureaucratic limbo and steep United...

Florida politician Anthony Sabatini has sparked debate over the H-1B visa row, tweeting a call for “a complete and total shutdown.” The move comes in the wake of President Donald Trump’s surprise announcement of a $100,000 fee on new H-1B applications, aimed at curbing alleged abuses of the program. Far-right politician Sabatini on Monday tweeted, “I am calling for a complete and total shutdown of H-1 B visas until we can find out what is going on.” His tweet went viral in no time, given the ongoing debate surrounding the H-1B visa and its impact on the American workforce and...

Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) today introduced the Visa Cap Enforcement Act. This bill restricts the ability of universities, research institutions, and non-profits to hire an unlimited number of foreign workers. “Colleges and universities shouldn’t get special treatment for bringing in woke and anti-American professors from around the world. My bill closes these loopholes that universities have abused for far too long,” said Senator Cotton. Text of the bill can be found here. The Visa Cap Enforcement Act would: Eliminate four exemptions to the H-1B visa cap, including one for foreigners who hold a master’s degree or higher from a U.S....

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ranking Member Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) are reintroducing bipartisan legislation to reform and close loopholes in the H-1B and L-1 visa programs. The H-1B and L-1 Visa Reform Act targets fraud and abuse in our immigration system, provides protections for American workers and visa holders and enhances transparency in the foreign worker recruitment process. Grassley and Durbin have long partnered to improve the H-1B visa system and first introduced their bipartisan legislation in 2007. Last week, the senators sent letters to 10 major U.S. employers, including Amazon, Google and Meta, scrutinizing their heavy...

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Monday that the order President Trump signed earlier in the day suspending certain temporary work visas through the end of the year will have a “chilling effect” on the nation’s economic recovery amid the coronavirus pandemic. “This decision, in my view, will have a chilling effect on our economic recovery at a time we should be doing all we can to restore the economy,” Graham said in a series of tweets. The order Trump signed Monday applies to H-1B visas, H-2B visas, H-4 visas, L-1 visas and certain J-1 visas. “Under ordinary circumstances, properly administered...

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) – Unemployment remains a major issue across the country. Many New York and New Jersey residents are losing hope, and are out of cash. Adam D’Aleo has listened to the New York Department of Labor’s “we are experiencing high call volume” recording more times than he can count. “It’s embarrassing, I remember it,” D’Aleo said. When he was laid off at the beginning of April, he filed for unemployment benefits online. Every time he logs in, he gets this notice: “To complete the claim, call the claims center.”

White-collar salaries are stalling partly because roughly 1.5 million non-immigrant, lower-wage visa-workers have been quietly imported to take many white-collar jobs, sometimes directly from American employees. ... Media descriptions of the controversial H-1B program say it brings in 85,000 foreign graduates per year. But the program actually keeps at least 460,000 foreign workers in the United States. Other estimates put the resident H-1B population at 650,000 or even up to almost 1 million. Similarly, the number of foreign college-grads getting a work-permit via the little-known “Option Practical Training” program rose again in 2018, despite President Donald Trump’s “Hire American” policy....

I was having a conversation on the weekend with a politically mixed crowd, and an interesting conclusion emerged: 1. EVERYBODY in the room--Republican, Democrat, Independent-- hated the H1B and L1 guest worker (cheap labor) visa programs and agreed that they've become incredibly corrupt and abused by the likes of Disney, Facebook, the Chamber of Commerce and other crony capitalists and politicians, and had to go. Even many of the Dems, some of whom (gag) had voted for Hillary, harshly criticized Obama for his negligence on H1B enforcement and were so fed up that they'd vote for Trump in 2020 if...

At the end of October, IT employees at Walt Disney Parks and Resorts were called, one-by-one, into conference rooms to receive notice of their layoffs. --snip-- [Disney:] "H-1B workers complement - instead of displace - U.S. Workers." It explains that as employers use foreign workers to fill "more technical and low-level jobs, firms are able to expand" and allow U.S. workers "to assume managerial and leadership positions." --snip-- "Some of these folks were literally flown in the day before to take over the exact same job I was doing," said one of the IT workers who lost his job. He...

One of the dirty little secrets of the offshoring/outsourcing fiasco in I.T. is the onshoring of workers through the use of third parties.

Interview of Robert Sanchez by Kurt HydeAmericans have regularly been forced by their employers to train the foreigners who would be taking over their jobs. Fox News reported on a particularly tragic example of job displacement that took place in 2003: “Kevin Flanagan, a computer programmer with Bank of America, was fired from his job after being forced to train his replacement, an Indian worker who was taking over Flanagan’s job as part of Bank of America’s effort to replace its American workforce with foreign labor. Flanagan walked outside into his office parking lot and shot himself to death.” The...

One of the staples of progressive thought, especially as taught at the University level, is the historical record of colonialism and exploitation of less-developed countries at the hand of Western Europe and the United States. According to this model, much of what is currently the Third World is only in that condition because it has been plundered, and its goods and natural resources expropriated for the benefit and profit of others. Examples include sub-Saharan Africa, many Central American and South American countries, and Southeast Asia. There are a couple of comments to make about this. First of all, is it...

Q&A: Joe RichTitle: Executive vice president Company: Clark Consulting, Marlboro, Mass. What he does: Having just surveyed 37 U.S. IT companies about their college recruiting plans, Rich is lukewarm at best in his optimism about new IT graduates' job prospects in the U.S. high-tech sector. The main reason: Graduate hiring by U.S. high-tech companies this year increased by a mere 1.6% over 2003. What's more, although the total number of new college graduates has increased, most U.S. high-tech companies hired fewer college graduates this year than in 2003. What is the near-term IT employment forecast for recent university graduates? Hiring...

SEPTEMBER 13, 2004 - The annual IT workforce study is out from the Information Technology Association of America. And for once, it's genuinely useful. Gone is the rah-rah boosterism of years past. Gone are the million-new-jobs estimates that never came true and the predictions that most new IT jobs would go wanting because there just weren't enough U.S. IT people to fill them. Instead, it's a sober assessment stuffed with information of value to anyone hiring or looking for work in corporate IT. Much of that information is clearly presented in the report, which you can get at www.itaa.org/workforce/studies/04wfstudy.pdf. And...

Get set to jet set to Uncle SamPRIYA RANJAN DASH TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ FRIDAY, AUGUST 06, 2004 12:03:18 AM ] NEW DELHI: India seems to have finally acquired some trade chutzpah. It is all set to offer a free trade agreement on services to the champion of free trade, the US.  The offer has already been discussed between prime minister Manmohan Singh and commerce minister Kamal Nath and will be brought to the cabinet shortly. New Delhi feels the FTA deal would be a win-win for both the countries. While American banks and insurance companies can open as many...

In April, 2003, Kevin Flanagan, a computer programmer with Bank of America (search), was fired from his job after being forced to train his replacement, an Indian worker who was taking over Flanagan's job as part of Bank of America's effort to replace its American workforce with foreign labor. Flanagan walked outside into his office parking lot and shot himself to death. A year later, it's no surprise that the impact of foreign labor (search) on American workers has become a potent political issue this campaign season. What Americans need to understand is how complicit the U.S. government has been...

There's a new push in Congress to increase by 20,000 the number of foreign workers holding H-1B visas. Proposed legislation would accomplish that by exempting foreign graduates with advanced degrees from the visa cap. The bill, introduced earlier this month by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), is supported by Compete America, a coalition of manufacturers, academic groups and IT vendors such as Microsoft Corp., Intel Corp., Oracle Corp., and Sun Microsystems Inc. This year's H-1B cap of 65,000 was reached in mid-February, less than five months after the Oct. 1 start of the federal fiscal year. Smith's bill, the American Workforce...

Frank Hayes' fears about techies bailing out of a declining American IT workforce are already being realized ["ITAA's Job Dream"]. I've done it. I concluded that IT is largely a dead-end career for Americans and opted out so that my wife could pursue advanced degrees in education and move up in a field that can't be so readily outsourced or filled by guest workers. I rebelled at my former employer's "wage compression," outsourcing and use of H-1B and L-1 visa holders. One year ago, I resigned my IT job at NCR Corp., a Fortune 500 company based in Dayton, Ohio,...

In "The Brain Center at Whipple's," a classic Twilight Zone episode, a ruthlessly efficient businessman, Wallace Whipple, deals brutally with his employees when he decides to fully automate his factory. Installing computers and robots, Whipple drives a longtime dedicated worker to take desperate measures to protect his job. In the end, it is Whipple who finds that he is no longer needed when he is replaced by a similarly behaved robot. The message of that episode from 1964 rings true today. Whipple's goal was efficiency; today, it's saving money, and it's being done by outsourcing application development overseas. Outsourcing has...