The Scams and Problems of H-1B Visas
Immigration attorneys from Cohen & Grigsby explains how they assist employers in running classified ads with the goal of NOT finding any qualified applicants, and the steps they go through to disqualify even the most qualified Americans in order to secure green cards for H-1b workers. See what Bush and Congress really mean by a "shortage of skilled U.S. workers." Microsoft, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, and thousands of other companies are running fake ads in Sunday newspapers across the country each week.
(Parody) It's a race to the bottom . . . SEE PAGE 2
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Once we built a network Once we built a Highway |
Doug McIlroy said, "Any system built without in-house talent produces out-house results." Bill Tracker No Worries, the journalists who don't investigate and inform the public will also find their skills outsourced to the folks from other lands who won't report on it either. They want to keep the job. |
2006 Kill the Skill Bill - Daily Kos
The SKILL Act of 2006 has been designed to devastate the careers of professionals all across America. The SKILL Act of 2006 is actually two bills. One in the House of Representatives (HR5744) and one in the Senate (S-2691).
The legislation will:
A) Immediately double the number of H1B visas, which are allowed each year to bring in low paid computer professionals from other countries.
B) Increase the number of H1B visas allowed by 20% each year indefinitely into the future.
This act will provide unlimited guest worker visas to devastate the American middle class. Programmers and engineers are not the only jobs targeted. The H-1B, H-2B, F-1, and the new F-4 visas are focused on all professional occupations. http://www.programmersguild.org/
"Last year, Stanford University awarded 88 Ph.D.s in electrical engineering, 49 of which went to foreign-born students...." [ 4/6/06WSJ.com - Businesses Make a Push For High-Skilled Foreign Workers*]
begs a question about admission policies and the shortage of native engineering grads. Did Stanford get only 39 applications from US citizens who met its minimum eligibility requirements? Or did it turn down eligible US citizens in favor of foreigners with sexier
applications? For 30 years I've been hearing it gets 10-20X more applications than there are slots so I suspect it's the latter. It's a private school and can do pretty much what it wants but I think the question is quite relevant to taxpayer-supported schools.
The Foreign Labor Certification Data Center is the location of the Online Wage Library for prevailing wage determinations, and the disclosure databases for the temporary and permanent programs. Skills Page .Online Wage Library OES Search Wizard
OES Quick Search
SCA Search (from www.wdol.gov)
Foreign Labor Certification (FLC) disclosure data are available for the Permanent, H-1B and H-2B programs.
Copies of "Stolen Jobs" Series Available Free to Media
WASHINGTON (27 May 2003) — If you’re a policy maker or an investigative reporter, you’ve got to see “Stolen Jobs.” Produced by WKMG-TV, Local 6, in Orlando, Fla., “Stolen Jobs” provides an in-depth look at how some employers take advantage of loopholes in the nation’s immigration laws to replace U.S. engineers and computer scientists with cheaper foreign workers on H-1B and L-1 visas.
T.O.R.A.W. The Organization for the Rights of American Workers
"The Organization for the Rights of American Workers" is a grass-roots initiative demanding that U.S. jobs be preserved first and foremost for U.S. citizens. Off-shoring, near-shoring, H-1B, L-1 and many other Visa types, have displaced millions of American workers and students throughout the country. Decisions made via political policies which cater to corporate interests are not in OUR best interest. Join our cause to reverse the loss of jobs, the lack of employment opportunities and the ineffectiveness of educational advancement.
From e-Week -- CWA Calls for Repeal of H-1B Program By Lisa Vaas
Claiming that the H-1B visa program has "proven to be abusive of domestic workers in several ways," the Computer Workers of America union has passed a resolution condemning program abuses and called for the program's immediate repeal.
The CWA has had reservations about the visa program in past years, union officials said, but the straw that broke the camel's back was President Bush's FY 2003 budget proposal, which proposes the elimination of a technical skills training program for American workers that is funded by the $1,000 fees paid by employers that file for H-1Bs. The Bush administration wants to shift some $138 million out of the current H-1B visa-generated training account and apply it, and all future funds, to faster processing of permanent foreign labor certificationsa move the CWA derided in its resolution as adding "insult to injury."
<snip>
Layoffs at Sun prompt inquiry over H-1B visas
SOME SAY FIRM FAVORS FOREIGNERS
The continued use of the H-1B visa program during one of the tech industry's most severe downturns, when thousands of people have lost their jobs, has heightened renewed criticism of the program. It is a hot-button issue with many U.S. engineers who fear the country is giving away its tech jobs. Santiglia told the Justice Department that Sun discriminated against U.S. citizens during its layoffs and in its hiring since then. In an interview, he said he thinks the company favors H-1B visa holders and suspects those workers may be paid less and may be more pliable. Santiglia said the U.S. Department of Justice's civil rights division in Washington, D.C., ``has asked for the citizenship status of every Sun Microsystems employee before and after the layoffs.''
William Kramer didn't want to blame racial prejudice for his failure to find an engineering job. But after a year of job hunting in Silicon Valley's booming economy, he began to wonder what was going on. Despite his credentials -- he is a master's candidate in physics with experience at Lawrence Livermore, Lawrence Berkeley and Los Alamos national laboratories -- Kramer (who did not want his real name printed) couldn't land a job. Then, one day this spring, his phone started ringing with all kinds of promising job offers. It hasn't stopped since. Kramer isn't sure what made the offers start pouring in, but he has a theory: Shortly before the calls started, the year's supply of 115,000 H-1B visas was used up.
- Tech companies only start to hire minorities when they can't get any more foreign workers. H-1B visa is like giving company welfare.
- President Clinton signed H-1B program bill to bring 195,000 foreign workers. African Americans, Latinos, women, older workers and other groups are loosing opportunities. There are no provisions requiring employers to try to recruit from minority groups first before hiring a foreigner.
- Local Graduates of Community Technology programs want entry level jobs so they can advance in a company, but are can't compete with foreigners for that job.
- The Shortage is Bogus. Tech companies don't hired as many women, members of minority groups and people with disabilities as other industries do.
- African Americans and Latinos only 3 percent of tech workers, about 10 percent of the U.S. workforce.
- Women nearly half of the U.S. workforce, only a fifth of U.S. science and technology workers, from lack of encouragement for women to enter this field in the education system and society as a whole
- Older tech workers of all races and both sexes often report being underemployed.
- American University Professor Laura Langbein studied this phenomenon and found that for every year of age, it takes an engineer an additional three weeks to find a new job.
- Companies don't bother to follow the rules of first hiring a US citizen.
- Intel and other high-tech companies seek out H-1B workers because those workers tend to earn less and because visa holders are less likely to job hop than Americans. It's like getting cheap slave labor. H-1B rules say visa holders should be paid the same as Americans for the same jobs, but that rule is unenforced.
- On average H-1B holders earn less than other workers. H-1Bs earned a median salary of $47,000 in 1998 and 1999. The median salary for all computer programmers in 1998 was $53,400, and for systems analysts it was $54,110. Bay Area, programmers made around $65,210 in 1998, and systems analysts made $61,860.
- have you thought of the H-1B visa issue as simply a numbers game?
When Congress last month nearly doubled the number of H-1B visas for temporary foreign workers for the next three years, Silicon Valley's high-tech companies cheered. But the lawmakers' quick fix did nothing to tackle the fraud and abuse that plague the program and little to prevent backlogs that leave workers and companies in limbo.
No talent shortage in U.S. (7-29-2001) -- letters to the SJMN today
"I am not shocked by the content of the Mercury News' recent article ``Tech Talent Alarm Sounded'' (July 22). However, I am shocked that Congress and much of the media are accepting the pro-immigration lobby ``party line'' without question.
The cold, hard truth is this: Many U.S. companies have outsourced their talent-recruitment to third parties who refuse to hire qualified U.S. scientists, programmers and engineers because they are perceived to cost more than imported H1-B replacements.
There is actually a huge surplus of high-tech brains in America, but we have zero social capital. That is why we can be discriminated against with impunity. I personally spent seven years in poverty while looking for high-tech employment. How did I escape? By removing my Caltech master's degree and my six years of NASA experience from my application.
By pretending to be a mediocre worker instead of a genius, I was suddenly offered work by the same companies that had refused to consider me before.
Yes, in the 21st century it has become necessary to lie on the résumé and pretend to have lower qualifications in order to avoid being discriminated against by the anti-genius, anti-U.S.-worker high-tech establishment.
Let's get something straight: There is no shortage of engineers, computer programmers or scientists. I know this from personal experience, since it took me over 15 months to get a single job offer after receiving my bachelor's degree in electrical engineering (with a 3.59 GPA) in 1998.
I probably sent out 120 résumés to ads I saw in the newspaper and got about seven interviews -- so how can anyone in his or her right mind claim that there is a shortage of engineers?
The only ``shortage'' in the high-tech industry is that of honesty.
U.S. Tech Firms Abusing Visa Program, Critics Say
WASHINGTON -- Amid a massive wave of tech layoffs, U.S. firms obtained government approval to bring in a record 163,200 foreign workers under a controversial program that critics say is being abused to hire cheaper overseas talent.
Although the number of visas approved under the H-1B program fell short of the 195,000 allowed annually, the hiring binge in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 has caused a furor in an industry that has experienced more than 600,000 layoffs over the last 10 months.
"At a time when hundreds of thousands of Americans are out of work, many employers are rubbing salt in the wound by hiring foreign workers," said Dan Stein, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a Washington group that has long sought to curtail immigration to the United States.
The record applications for foreign workers--the majority of whom take jobs in the high-tech industry--come more than a year after Silicon Valley mounted a multimillion-dollar lobbying effort to persuade Congress to expand the program to satisfy skyrocketing demand for highly skilled workers.
HOW TO FIGHT 11/21/01
There *is* a way to fight this however:
Part of the H1b process is advertising the job. This is called "Labor Market Qualification" and you have to do it for F-1 (student work) visas as well now. The scam here is that they put little tiny ads in the San Jose Mercury News with almost all the words abbreviated and in the smallest type they can find. Any resumes that appear in response to such an ad must be "disqualified" and the INS apparently has access to this paperwork. I remember doing this a few times when I worked at Oracle (not the company I mentioned above, although Oracle has a lot of H-1bs)
So, what everyone who's out of work should do is *answer every one* of those ads that they're even remotely qualified (or overqualified) for. You'll make so much work for these companies, and leave such a long paper trail, that eventually this program will be more trouble than its worth. (keep a record of which ads you respond to, and *follow up on the phone* with the HR department of the company involved. The ads have code numbers on them which you should note down.)
You MIGHT get a job this way (we hired a couple people who did this persistently at Oracle. If an employer can show they hired a respondent for a different position, that gets them off the hook as well). You'll very likely get an interview and that's hard these days.
Make them explain why you werent qualified for the job if they say that. Prefereably in writing. If they wont put it in writing, write down the name of the person you're talking to, and the time and date and a summary of the conversation. Keep records. Just doing this makes it much harder for companines to give away jobs that should be going to people already here.
The important thing to remember is that they MUST disqualify you on some rational basis. And you're likely dealing with an HR flack, not a hiring manager. The hiring manager already knows who they want to hire and hopes there wont be any resumes to respond to.
I think you can probably also file a complaint with the INS about a company that persistently wont hire you. You could certainly send a stack of documentation to your Congressman and they'd likely be interested.
Always be polite. Don't threaten anyone, don't accuse them of being unAmerican or anything like that. Just stick to the facts and write stuff down. You *may* end up working at one of these companies...
If I end up layed off again (could be the 3rd time in a year...), I may do some of this myself...
Best regards,
-jcp-
The U.S.'s non-immigrant visa program, particularly the L-1 classification that allows companies to transfer workers from overseas offices to the U.S. for up to seven years while they continue paying workers their home country wage. According to research firm Gartner, Inc., approximately one of 10 U.S. technology jobs will be overseas by the end of 2004." - source
Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage
'In a July 13, 1999 column by Nathan Cochrane in an Australian publication, Fairfax IT, computer graphics guru Carsten Haitzler noted, "Be wary of H1-B visas in the USA - you basically get shackled to a company... Being a non-American in the USA is almost like being a second-class citizen."'
Security experts join list of most-wanted migrants " The list of jobs on the MODL has shrunk to a dozen, from a high of 26 last year, mostly centred on big-ticket e-business implementations and operating systems expertise, and is expected to fall to just a handful in the next few weeks."
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