Program abuses may be costing Americans jobs
Program abuses may be costing Americans jobs
Date: Tuesday, August 22, 2006 12:09 AM
<<<<< JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER No. 1545 -- 08/22/2006 >>>>>
A new article has come out that's quite good, until it starts quoting
former Labor Secretary Robert Reich - and from that point on the bull is
piled high and deep. Reich contends that H-1B was well-intended but then
went awry.
"The H1-B program is sensible in principle," Reich said. "But the
program has been administered poorly, and sometimes abused.
Employers have been bringing into the United States semi-skilled
workers, many of whom have the same skills as American workers.
Employers would rather have access to the foreign workers because
they're cheaper. But in too many instances, Americans are ready,
willing and able to take on those jobs."
At first blush Reich's statement sounds reasonable except for one problem -
the H-1B visa wasn't written with good intentions, unless of course you are
coming from the point of view of employers who wanted H-1B as a way to
undercut American workers. It has always been a cheap labor visa and Reich
knows it. It's best to take anything Reich says about H-1B with a grain of
salt because he is like Jekyl and Mr. Hyde on this issue.
Too much of this article dwells on the lack of enforcement of H-1B
regulations. The real problem is not enforcement -- it's the fact that H-1B
is a flawed law that's filled with loopholes.
In 2005 Robert Reich and Newt Gingrich were keynote speakers at a Workforce
Summit in San Diego. For those who could afford $150 minimum admission fee,
Reich was more honest about what he thought H-1B was all about, and while
he was at it showed his rabid disdain for American high-tech workers:
"We have become fat, happy and lazy," he said. "Now, when we go
looking for the engineers we need, we have to depend on other
countries."
The best thing about this article is that it revisits the Mike Emmons story
-- a story that needs to be told over and over. If you haven't watched this
video about Emmons and the infamous Siemens case, click on this link and go
to "WKMG-TV - "Stolen Jobs" and "Workers Replaced".
http://www.zazona.com/shameh1b/MediaClips.htm
Mike Emmons has a new web tool that you can use to send emails to the
staffers of all of our elected Congresscritters. Click here if you too
would like to bombard the staffers!
http://www.outsourcecongress.org/outsource/congress/schstaffers.html
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http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/nation/story/8B96CF75688CED7C862571CF0057BFD3?OpenDocument
Program abuses may be costing Americans jobs
By Ron Harris
POST-DISPATCH WASHINGTON BUREAU
08/20/2006
WASHINGTON
Mike Emmons still remembers the day he met his "replacement," three Indian
computer technicians who had been brought to the United States on special
temporary visas for highly skilled workers.
Emmons and other workers for Siemens Information and Communication Networks
in Orlando, Fla., were told in 2002 that they were to train the incoming
workers and afterward they would be laid off and their jobs eliminated.
In addition, if the Americans refused to train the workers, they would lose
their severance pay. Advertisement
"I was shocked," said Emmons, 44, who now supervises management information
systems for the Florida state attorney's office in Orlando. "It's all
legal. Our country created these programs, and they're using them to take
jobs from Americans."
In testimony before a House committee two years after the layoffs, Gregg
Ward, Siemens vice president for government affairs, said the company acted
due to "marketplace challenges" that forced it to "improve its positioning
and sustain its business." He said the company helped some of the affected
workers find jobs at Siemens.
Siemens isn't the only company to use a guest worker program to send some
of its work out of the country. In the ongoing debate over immigration
reform, Emmons and others say that while many worry that guest worker
programs for low-skilled foreigners might affect the employment of American
workers, tens of thousands of highly skilled foreign guest workers who
already enter the country annually are having an impact now.
The U.S. has a variety of guest worker programs. They are used to employ
everybody from college professors to research scientists to farm workers to
maids, cooks and waiters to truck drivers.
The most commonly used program is the H-1B visa, a program designed to
bring in highly skilled workers, largely computer programmers and high-tech
professionals. About 65,000 visas are issued annually under the program.
Another is the L-1 visa program, which allows foreign companies with
offices in the United States to bring workers in from overseas while paying
them the lower wages they earned while working on projects at home.
Those programs have drawn the ire of organized labor, engineers and
computer programmers.
"They sounded good in the beginning, but they are now being used as a way
of stealing jobs rather than bringing work to the U.S.," said Kim Berry,
president of the Programmers Guild, an organization of computer programmers
that has been fighting the visa laws.
The programs were set up in 1990 after educational institutions like
Washington University and major corporations like Microsoft, Monsanto Co.
and Anheuser-Busch Cos. Inc. complained that they could not find enough
qualified Americans in the computer sciences and other high-tech
professions.
The federal government began making tens of thousands of specialized visas
available so that U.S. companies could bring in highly skilled foreign
help.
Loopholes in the law
Critics, including former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, say the programs,
while well-intended, have gone awry.
"The H1-B program is sensible in principle," Reich said. "But the program
has been administered poorly, and sometimes abused. Employers have been
bringing into the United States semi-skilled workers, many of whom have the
same skills as American workers. Employers would rather have access to the
foreign workers because they're cheaper. But in too many instances,
Americans are ready, willing and able to take on those jobs."
To protect American workers from being undercut, the law requires that
foreign workers under H-1B visas be paid the "prevailing wage."
But a study released in June by the General Accounting Office found that
the Department of Labor had approved thousands of H-1B applications even
though the forms clearly stated that the applicants would be paid less than
the prevailing wage.
While the visas were designed for companies that had specific technological
or educational needs, so-called "body shops" that don't produce any
products have sprung up, Berry and others note.
"Body shops" arrange for foreign workers to receive H-1B visas even though
technically they don't have jobs. The shops then function as temporary
agencies for foreign workers to find jobs in the United States.
Some agencies apply for hundreds of H-1B visas and then farm the workers
out to companies on a contract basis. Others bring over only a handful of
workers and then charge the workers a percentage of their salaries.
"Unfortunately, the law allows for those kinds of loopholes," said Rep.
John Hostettler, R-Ind., who has been holding hearings on the law as
chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
Lack of oversight
The H-1B program has long had a troubled path. In May 1996, the Office of
the Inspector General studied the program and issued a report titled, "The
System is Broken and Needs to be Fixed."
That report concluded that the Department of Labor, which has oversight for
the program, was doing all it could to within its authority to weed out
abuses, but the "programs do not protect U.S. workers' jobs or wages."
The report said the department's watchdog role "amounts to little more than
a paper shuffling and rubber stamping."
The General Accounting Office conducted a similar study 10 years later and
in June released a report with similar conclusions.
Sigurd R. Nilsen of the GAO found numerous lapses but noted in his report
that in many ways the Labor Department is restricted from real enforcement
because of the way the law is written.
Some want to reform the program, and others want to eliminate it.
Hostettler doesn't want to see the program end, but he does want changes.
"I want to enforce the law first," he said. "After we do that, we can get a
true idea of the impact on American workers. Right now, the Department of
Labor has not appropriately enforced it."
Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr., D-N.J., has introduced a bill that would reform
guest worker programs. His bill would eliminate "body shops"; require
employers to demonstrate their inability to find an American worker before
they could hire an H-1B visa worker; and more closely monitor the wages
being paid to H-1B workers.
So far, the bill hasn't gotten much traction.
Instead, the Senate passed legislation to increase the number of available
H-1B visas from 65,000 to 115,000 next year.
rharris@post-dispatch.com 202-298-6880
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