Whatever happened to the “Hire American” promise?
Trump supporters and others were shocked to hear Pres. Trump ad lib, in the State of the Union address, his wish to bring in immigrants in record-breaking numbers. Worse, he repeated the idea again the next day!
It seems that along with bringing American-run businesses back to the U.S., employers want to continue using foreign workers instead of U.S. citizen workers, and they’re lining up the President to assure they can keep on using cheap foreign labor in the U.S. at the expense of U.S. citizens.
Abuses of the H-1 visa program have been going on for many years, especially in the computer technology field, but also in other fields.
Here’s a good summary of the current situation:
Do we really need so many foreign tech workers?
By Froma Harrop, syndicated columnist, Feb. 7, 2019
Americans don't usually think of technical professionals as "guest workers," yet at any one time, there are more than a half-million foreigners holding tech jobs in the U.S. They are here thanks to the H-1B visa program. H-1B, so the official spiel goes, addresses an alleged shortage of "highly skilled" Americans to fill jobs "requiring specialized knowledge."
Growing evidence, however, points to companies' using the program to replace perfectly qualified American workers with cheaper ones from elsewhere. A new report published by the Atlantic Council documents the abuses. The authors are Ron Hira, a political scientist at Howard University, and Bharath Gopalaswamy, director of the Atlantic Council's South Asia Center.
Among their criticisms:
—Virtually any white-collar job can be taken by an H-1B visa holder. About 70 percent of them are held not by what we consider tech workers but by teachers, accountants and salespeople, among others.
(Denver Public Schools employs teachers on H-1B visas. During a strike, the district actually threatened to report participating foreigners to immigration authorities. It later apologized.)
"By every objective measure," Hira and Gopalaswamy write, "most H-1B workers have no more than ordinary skills, skills that are abundantly available in the U.S. labor market."
U.S. colleges graduate 50 percent more students in engineering and in computer and information science than are hired in those fields every year, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute.
—Employers don't have to show they have a labor shortage to apply. They don't even have to try recruiting an American to fill the job.
Cutting labor costs is clearly the paramount "need." In Silicon Valley, computer systems analysts make on average just over $116,000 a year. But companies can hire H-1B workers at a lower skill level, paying them only about $77,000 a year to do the same work, the report says.
And it's not unheard-of for companies to ask American workers to train the H-1B workers taking their jobs. "60 Minutes" featured Robert Harrison, a senior telecom engineer at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center. Asked whether training his replacement felt like digging his own grave, Harrison responded:
"It feels worse than that. It feels like not only am I digging the grave but I'm getting ready to stab myself in the gut and fall into the grave."
…
Apparently, the argument that "tech jobs need filling" has, in many cases, oozed to "we want cheaper foreigners." The H-1B program demands a major overhaul.
Read the entire article at: https://www.jacksonsun.com/story/opinion/2019/02/07/do-we-really-need-so-many-foreign-tech-workers/2801047002/
