H1-B visa program kills the American dream By Rick Manning, 2/26/16
Can you imagine being forced to
train your replacement when the corporation that preached family to you decided
they could go cheaper if they just imported a foreign worker? Well that is exactly was Disney Corporation forced some of their highly skilled IT employees to endure,
in a widening national scandal about H1-B visa abuse.
The H1-B visa program is designed to
allow businesses to apply for a limited number of high tech workers to come to
America to fill skill gaps in the American workforce. But rather than
being an honest means to meet domestic corporate needs that Americans cannot
fill, the program has become nothing more than a human resources department
scam where workers are laid off in favor of lower cost foreign imports.
Former Disney tech employee Leo Perrero told the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and
the National Interest, “How do I explain to my young children to follow their
dreams and find a job that they love? I followed my dream of having a career in
technology to have my very same desk, chair, and computer all taken over by a
foreign worker who was just flown in to America weeks before.”
Perrero was given the choice of
training foreign workers to take his job, or lose his severance pay, and chose
to endure the humiliation of sitting side by side with imported tech workers
and spoon feeding them basic processes. And Disney saved tens of thousands of
dollars per employee annually by abusing this skilled worker import program,
somehow making the Magic Kingdom seem much less magical in the light of day.
But the entertainment, media
conglomerate is not alone in abusing the H1-B visa program which the Techsters
continually demand that Congress expand. Not content with their
billion-dollar stock portfolios fueled by a Federal Reserve created bubble,
high tech personalities like Mark Zuckerberg have spent a portion of their
newfound wealth trying to expand the H1-B visa program so they can cut their
labor costs — dealing Americans out of a piece of the tech pie.
Subcommittee Chairman Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) points out that the problem at Disney is not
isolated saying, “The sad reality is that — not only is there not a shortage of
exceptionally qualified U.S. workers — but across the country thousands of U.S.
workers are being replaced by foreign labor. The picture next to me is from
Northeast Utilities — a company based in Connecticut and now known as
Eversource — that announced that it was going to lay off employees in its IT department
and hired outside companies that used H1-B employees to provide its IT
services. These U.S. workers were forced to train their foreign
replacements and were silenced by Northeast Utilities. According to one of
these workers who contacted my staff and requested to remain anonymous for fear
of retaliation, ‘the only way that we could make a statement
was by placing small American flags outside of our cubicles and aisles. Gradually, as we got replaced by the H-1Bs, the
flags disappeared as we did.’”
To make matters worse, Attorney General Loretta Lynch recently ended an investigation into whether Southern
California Edison unlawfully used the H1-B visa program to replace 500 American
IT workers concluding that no charges would be filed because the law had been
followed. That, even after Southern California Edison similarly threatened to
withhold severance packages from employees that refused to train their foreign
H1-B replacements.
If, as Lynch concluded, the H1-B
visa program can legally be used to strip away good paying U.S. jobs for lower
cost replacement workers, then Congress needs to act to halt all H1-B visas
from being issued until the system can be corrected.
If used to fill legitimate needs for
skilled workers, the H1-B visa program makes sense, but in today’s iteration,
it is little more than a direct corporate handout of low wage labor at the
expense of skilled American workers and if that isn’t a crime, it should be.
Rick Manning is the President of
Americans for Limited Government.
Comments
Not so long ago, we had H1b visas
for electronics engineers with MS degrees. They had been selected in their
countries to attend their universities to earn BSEE degrees. Many of these
students were sponsored by their countries to come to the US for their MSEE
degrees. We hired them and they became US citizens. We called this the “brain
drain” and we got great engineers from this. We hired foreign BSEE grads as
Technicians.
We also had thousands of seasonal
agricultural workers from Mexico on H2a visas. In the 1970s, employers who had
special needs could document their case and apply for a work visa for specially
trained foreign workers. One that I hired was a technician we found in Mexico,
He had completed his apprenticeship for sharpening and maintaining stone corn
grinding equipment. It took 6 weeks, but we proved that skill was not available
in the US citizen workforce and got to hire him with a work visa.
A few years later, we saw foreign
students being hired for the summer for hospitality jobs like waitresses and
life guards. We also saw illegal aliens and family members of legal aliens
hired as maids, fast food workers, grocery store cashiers and lots of other
jobs that were previously held by US high school and college students. Our own
kids were not getting the necessary early work experience they needed.
Now we see H1b visas going to
technicians, not engineers. A California Power Company hired 500 temp
technicians from an international temp service. Meat processing jobs all went
to foreigners and the Muslims are demanding prayer rooms and different breaks.
In addition, we have immigrants
coming in as anchor babies, chain migration family members, lottery winners and
tons more corporate transfers.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party
Leader
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