I’m a good Democrat, pro-immigrant, but I have to admit I’m not in favor of H-1B visas, especially H-2B visas. Big business fretted in 1990 that they didn’t have enough knowledgeable Americans to do technical IT work and they needed a mechanism to bring in foreign workers on a temporary basis to fill that need.
The rules were simple: The visa is good for three years with renewals and extensions possible. The incoming worker must have at least a Bachelor’s degree. Employers must pay a minimum of $60,000 a year. Employers must confirm that the wages and working conditions of American workers will not be negatively impacted by an H-1B worker.
The fact is these workers — many from India and China — are being exploited, as are domestic workers.
Who is profiting from these highly skilled workers? The Migration Policy Institute, an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit think tank in Washington, DC, has found:
- Almost one-third of all approved H-1B petitions in fiscal 2017 went to just 20 companies, even as 40,645 firms were approved to sponsor H-1B visas that year. The top employers are either foreign consulting firms, some accused of using the visa to outsource U.S. jobs, or U.S. high-tech giants such as Amazon, Apple and Google.
- Among the top 20 firms, those with the highest share of H-1Bs pay less and employ fewer workers with advanced degrees, compared to companies that are less dependent on an H-1B workforce. Workers at H-1B dependent employers in the top 20 earned an average $82,788 in fiscal 2017, as compared to $110,511 for H-1B workers in top firms that are not dependent. And just 27 percent of H-1B workers in the dependent firms had a master’s degree or higher, as compared to 55 percent working for employers who are not H-1B dependent.
- About 71,000 spouses of H-1B visa holders have received work authorization under a 2015 policy that the Trump administration has signaled it plans to end.
- The share of H-1B workers in computer-related occupations has risen from an average of 47 percent between fiscal 2000-2009 to a high of 69 percent in fiscal 2016.
Walt Disney World fired more than 200 IT workers in 2015 and hired an outsourcing company to replace them with workers on H-1B visas, a clear violation of the intent of the program. Southern California Edison, California’s largest utility company based in the Los Angeles area, laid off more than 400 IT workers, some of whom trained their replacements, Indian workers with H-1B visas. And using the same outsourcing company that worked so well for Disney, the University of California, San Francisco, signed a $50 million contract to lay off 80 IT workers and outsource much of their work to India. The school claims it will save $30 million in five years.
Once again, this is example of corporate exploitation and a law that was meant to supplement the American workforce rather than supplant them. Some companies are creating a pool of cheap labor, paying H-1B workers lower salaries than they would pay Americans to do the same job. American companies are using the system to ship jobs overseas or importing workers who are overjoyed to have a job in the Land of Plenty even if they have to work for less than their American counterparts.
It galls me to be on the same page as President Trump, but he has directed the US Citizen and Immigration to increase oversight of the H-1B visa system. This was, of course, after he had issued his “Buy American, Hire American” executive order in April, 2017. The administration recently issued a policy memo scrutinizing the type of work visa workers are doing, why a foreigner is needed to do it, and what wages are being paid.
Then came the H-2B. According to the Economic Policy Institute:
The Essential Worker Immigration Coalition (EWIC)—a lobbying group representing the interests of employers—claims that it is “concerned with the shortage of both semi-skilled and unskilled (‘essential worker’) labor” and thus “supports policies that facilitate the employment of essential workers by U.S. companies that are unable to find American workers.”
There are other visas that allow agribusiness to hire seasonal temporary workers for planting and harvesting our crops. Clearly there is a need not because we don’t have American workers who could do the work, but because American workers won’t.
Now we want to open the doors for semi-skilled and unskilled work that is obviously within the purview of American workers. Those who are currently doing the work run the risk of being undermined in wages as well as employment. I’m torn because I know this is an opportunity for those looking to better their lives, but conditions are ripe for exploitation.
More than 40,500 companies sponsored workers for H-1B visas in fiscal 2017. A total of 345,262 H-1B petitions were approved in fiscal 2016, including 230,759 extension requests, and the requests continue to grow each year.
This is another facet of immigration that needs to be addressed with sensitivity, something sorely lacking in the current administration.