|
DEAR
FRIENDS,
In your phone calls, you may want extra grist to read from. Rosemary
Jenks and her Capitol Hill Team have put together an exceptionally
succinct and powerful official NumbersUSA document on H-1B visas.
Also, this can help you understand exactly where we stand on this issue
as an organization and the factual basis for it.
Vote “NO” on Any Proposal to Import
Additional Foreign Workers
U.S. workers are counting on you!
Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas) is leading an effort to
hotline his proposal to nearly double the importation of H-1B
nonimmigrant foreign workers and to more than double the number of
employment-based (EB) permanent residents admitted to the United States
each year, among other things. This proposal would:
Suppress
wages in high-skill occupations;
-
Force more
highly-skilled American workers onto the unemployment rolls
-
Further erode
America’s middle class
-
Deter American
children from pursuing degrees in high-tech fields
-
Exacerbate already
rampant immigration fraud
-
Potentially
undermine national security
H-1B AND EB FOREIGN WORKERS TAKE JOBS FROM U.S. WORKERS
In 2000, the aggregate U.S. unemployment rate for
computer and mathematical occupations—occupations for which employers
are most likely to seek cheap labor via the quick fix of the H-1B
visa—was 2.2 percent; in 2003, it was 5.5 percent; and by mid-2005, it
stood at 5.8 percent. Congress responded to this rising unemployment
rate by significantly increasing the number of H-1B visas available
annually in 1998, 2000, and 2004, while lamenting that not enough
American children are pursuing degrees in high-tech fields.
Current law allows for the admission of 65,000 H-1B specialty-occupation
workers, plus an additional 20,000 foreign graduates of U.S.
universities, plus an unlimited number of foreign workers for nonprofit
research institutions. Another 140,000 permanent immigrant visas are
available each year for EB workers and their families. In a February
2005 chat session on ft.com, Intel Corporation Chairman Craig Barrett
suggested that this is not enough and proposed that “(we) should just
staple a green card to every advanced degree granted to a foreign
national from a U.S. university in science and engineering.”
By importing large numbers of foreign workers to fill high-tech jobs,
Congress reinforces a vicious cycle: Americans—particularly
minorities—are even less likely to enter these high-skill fields given
big business’ well-known predilection toward hiring cheaper foreign
workers. One recent study showed that, in September 2004, 70,000 black
Americans trained in computer-related occupations were unemployed and
that the unemployment rate in these occupations was 8.62 percent for
black Americans, as compared with 3.82 percent for all U.S. workers in
these fields.
H-1B AND EB FOREIGN WORKERS DEPRESS U.S. WAGES
Professor Norm Matloff of the University of California,
Davis, an expert on computer industry hiring practices, reports that
there are four primary ways employers profit by hiring foreign workers:
1) Employers pay foreign workers less than Americans with the same
qualifications. A recent Center for Immigration Studies report bears
this out: on average, labor condition applications to import H-1Bs for
computer-related jobs indicated the employers’ intention to pay wages
that were $13,000 less, on average, than Americans in the same
occupation and state were paid.
2) With an almost limitless supply of young foreign workers available,
employers can avoid hiring—or layoff—older, more experienced (i.e., more
expensive) American workers.
3) Employers exploit H-1B nonimmigrants’ de facto status as indentured
servants by forcing them to work longer hours than they could require of
U.S. workers and avoid paying overtime.
4) The importation of foreign workers artificially swells the U.S. labor
pool, thus removing any incentive employers otherwise would have to
raise wages, increase benefits, or improve working conditions.
FRAUD IS RAMPANT IN THE H-1B AND EB VISA PROGRAMS
Increasing the number of visas available in these programs will only
exacerbate existing problems. A March 2006 Government Accountability
Office (GAO) report documented some distressing trends regarding fraud
in the EB immigrant program:
-
The Department of
Labor’s (DOL) Inspector General audited some 214,000 labor
certification applications filed with DOL from January 1, 2001,
through April 30, 2001. Of those applications, 54 percent (about
130,000) contained “false—possibly fraudulent—information.”
-
The report
documented the case of a prominent immigration attorney in the
Washington, D.C. area who received as much as $21.6 million in
exchange for submitting up to 2,700 fraudulent EB immigration
applications between 1998 and 2002.
-
The Office of Fraud
Detection and National Security (FDNS) within U.S. Citizenship and
Immigration Services has failed to implement either crucial internal
control standards recommended by the GAO or fraud control best
practices. In the absence of serious quality control measures,
immigration fraud continues undeterred.
-
Fraud in these
foreign worker programs also compromises national security.
According to FDNS, about 5,200 immigration applicants each year are
identified as potential national security risks because they are
listed in the Interagency Border Inspection System (IBIS) database
of immigration violators and people of national security interest.
Internal agency documents show that even this basic background check
is not being conducted on all immigration applicants or sponsors of
immigrants, so it is anyone’s guess how many aliens slipped through
the system despite the fact that they present a threat to national
security or are associated with terrorists.
-
In addition,
organized crime groups have utilized complicated plots to take
advantage of our weak immigration security procedures. For example,
they have created of shell corporations whose sole purpose is to
sponsor aliens as EB immigrants, ostensibly, as those phony
entities’ employees. Most disturbingly, the GAO reported that
several aliens linked to a hostile foreign power’s intelligence
service were found to have been employed as temporary workers at a
sensitive military research facility.
In addition to being unable to effectively detect and deter immigration
fraud, the DHS Inspector General reported in September 2005 that USCIS
has “neither the technology nor an operational methodology” to ensure
that it issues only as many H-1B visas as the law authorizes. This is
why USCIS, in 2005, issued almost 7,000 more H-1B visas than are allowed
by law.
The Cornyn proposal to expand the importation of foreign workers is bad
economic policy, bad national security policy, and bad immigration
policy.
VOTE “NO” ON IMPORTING ADDITIONAL FOREIGN WORKERS.
|
