If there is a justification for immigration during a period of persistently high unemployment, I have not heard it made by any of our politicans. President Obama was asked by the wife of an unemployed engineer why the U.S. allows H-1B visas (for engineers and other high-tech workers) when so many are unemployed. The president seemed remarkably ill-informed in responding. He said, without citing any statistics, that businesses tell him they cannot find enough engineers. But this kind of anecdotal evidence is usually misleading. We don't know what kind of businesses the president was referring to. He should have known that there are many unemployed engineers. In fact, the Census puts the number at 1.8 million.
So why do we have any legal immigration when so many Americans are looking for work? Isn't the U.S. government obligated to pursue immigration policies that serve the interest of our citizens? It is. One of the purposes of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), the current immigration law, is to preserve job opportunities for American citizens. On the other hand, employers can petition the government for permission to import foreign workers with specialized knowledge, in many cases engineers to work in technology companies. The INA requires employers certify that they could not find an American citizen to fill the job at the "prevailing" wage level (8 U.S.C. 1182 (n)(1)). However, the the law requires the Department of Labor to issue the certification within seven days unless it is incomplete or "obviously inaccurate." So the process is skewed heavily in favor of granting the requests.
The program is fraught with fraud and abuse. A federal government study concluded that 20% of the H-1B applications are fraudulent in some respect. An entire cottage industry of firms that obtain H-1B workers and then "loan" them to another employer has cropped up. One such firm has been convicted of repeated violations of the program, was fined and excluded for a year.
Unfortunately, the Republican presidential candidates have not pressed the issue of H-1B visa fraud in the campaign. They have either bought into the myth of a labor shortage, or, like Mitt Romney, instinctively know it is a myth but make only occasional rhetorical bows to the problem. Romney has said that legal immigration should be tied to the performance of the U.S. economy. But more often he simply declares that he "loves" legal immigration without any qualification as he felt compelled to say in the last debate in Florida. He also said the charge of being "anti-immigrant" was "repulsive."
Why is it repulsive? Surely one can favor a moratorium on H-1B visas (capped at 65,000 per year) to preserve employment opportunities during a time of high unemployment. As noted, that is one of the mandates of the INA. And any president who refuses to follow the law is violating his oath of office. I don't think adjusting immigration limits downward is "anti-immigrant," but if it is then the INA is anti-immigrant. It sets an overall limit on the categories of immigrants that can be admitted into the country by year including H-1B workers. This is a recognition that the U.S. cannot absorb an unlimited number of immigrants while maintaining a low level of unemployment.
Why not have immigration levels make economic sense?
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Let's get together on this issue! I know Obama is trying to separate the people right now, because that's what Saul Alinsky has taught him, but please, please America... please fix our Country! This is NOT the same country that I grew up in! Not even close! What about OUR freedom?
The RICH don't want to pay decent wages so we just keep bringing in more and more people with displaced Americans collecting their "rice bowl" being unemployment and food stamps.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbFEgFajGU
Not the content, which most who pay attention should have known, but that HP actually allowed this on their site when it doesn't push for mass amnesty, higher immigration levels or open borders.
I'm just shocked.
How can countries who just recently had electrical power have more IT experience than Americans?
Washington is a joke and we need to send them all home, because they are lining their pockets with kick backs.
Why are India firms allow to hire only India worker? There are so many whys?
I met up with this practice for companies replacing American workers with foreign visa workers at a telecom firm years ago. They treated the guy like a slave too.
What the author will probably never realize unless he's told directly is that this is the common practice of the US from as far back as the 1850's. If you come to a NYC in that decade, you'd see free Blacks thriving until millions of poor desperate Irish come all at once and push them out of what's now the Village, Chinatown, Little Italy and then every point on the west side before reaching Harlem. Luring one group over to suppress wages is an old American practice that is conveniently brushed under the rug until you're under fire. These actions aren't unprecedented.
Yes, you are right. Free blacks lost jobs that would have helped them move up the economic ladder because the country was flooded with immigrants who would work for less. Booker T. Washington made his famous speech exhorting employers to 'cast down your bucket where you are' and hire US born African Americans to little avail.
The other thing this lawyer forgets to add are the wages and total compensation these graduates are paid – many in the range of $100,000 to $300,000. Yes, we are talking about management or highly skilled positions here not crop pickers and about people with high quality experience and degrees from the Harvard and the likes. Please, go ahead and close the program, this way you would be left only with the 2 million illegals and other lowlifes and their kids which the U.S. government will subsidize for the rest of their life. And in the meantime most of the top U.S. schools will lose 99% of their top foreign candidates and of course all the patents, start-ups, upper management. Don’t worry there is Europe, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong and other industrialized places which are much more welcoming, and besides the U.S. doesn’t need high end technology and innovation it can just go back to manufacturing t-shirts or whatever does not require highly skilled human capital. Oh and yes those $300,000 jobs - they will follow across the pond as they always have. P.S. in the meantime we should send back all the American Citizens working outside of the U.S. back – and thrust me they are not 65,000 more like 4 million.
It'll just take a minute and you can help by signing this petition, click here:
http://www.change.org/petitions/united-states-citizens-enact-2-constitutional-amendments-choose-voting-for-person-not-a-party?share_id=YfjTebuCnZ&
Once you're done, please ask your friends to sign the petition as well. Grassroots movements succeed because people like you are willing to spread the word!
Portal
The H-1b visa itself is "anti-immigrant". Supporting more H-1b visas is supporting an anti-immigrant policy, not to mention an anti-worker policy.
The H-1b is about temporary employment. It's a nationalized temp agency, and the top sponsors of the visa are of course Indian offshore outsourcing firms and American body shops. Workers don't have the ability to change jobs without finding another sponsor or risking a setback in any permanent residency application they have pending (for those who really do want to immigrate).
If you really support immigration and immigrants, you would oppose EMPLOYER sponsored visas. Employers should not be immigration middle-men because their motives aren't about our national interests, rather their corporate interests.
As to the point you make on numbers being driven by economic circumstance of course it should. As employment rises immigration should rise to sustainable levels, and when unemployment rises immigration levels should fall. Right now we should restrict immigration to family members of immigrants and citizens already here and some humanitarian cases. It makes no sense to force a growing body of unemployed to compete with additional people in the workforce.
And if your primary business model is offshore outsourcing, you should not be permitted to sponsor any workers. Let's call the H-1b by its real name - the "Offshoring Visa".
Including the 20k foreign Grad students who take H1 b after graduating from masters programs.
If the 20k you speak of truly are national assets, they don't belong on an H-1b visa.