The American Immigration Lawyers Association, the US Commerce Department, and many high-tech industrial organizations are ramping up their Congressional lobbying efforts for unlimited guest worker visas to provide cheap foreign labor to replace those expensive Americans with their health insurance, retirement and tax burdens.
See what Lou Dobbs (CNN) has to say about the issue:
American Immigration Lawyers Association
http://capwiz.com/...
Urgent Action Needed to Provide H-1B Visa & EB Green Card Relief
Ask your legislators to act in the lame duck session!
Urge your Senators and Representative to provide urgently needed H-1B and EB green card relief in the post-election lame duck session. The lame duck offers the last chance this year to fix this growing crisis!
Lou Dobbs (CNN)
http://transcripts.cnn.com/...
Regardless of the power shift in Congress, the cheap foreign labor lobby is coming on strong, pushing for legislation that would dramatically increase the number of foreign workers allowed into this country under existing guest worker programs.
Bill Tucker reports.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
BILL TUCKER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Microsoft's Bill Gates this week fired the first shot in the coming fight for more cheap foreign labor. Gates warning of a shortage of high-tech workers that his company needs to be competitive.
His solution? Bringing in more foreign workers.
Critics say he's got it wrong.
STEVE CAMAROTA, CENTER FOR IMMIGRATION STUDIES: If we have a shortage, then the solution is to let the labor market be tight and more Americans will be attracted to those jobs as wages rise. If American business really feels that we're not teaching enough math and science in school, they need to pressure the political institutions to do a better job of teaching our kids.
TUCKER: Congress has a different solution. It's known as the Skill Act of 2006. It would nearly double the current cap on H1B visas and allow for a 20 percent increase every year after the previous year's quota was met, virtually guaranteeing an endless supply of lower-paid workers from overseas.
A study by Georgetown University found that the total potential number of new tech visas created by the Senate bill would by 1.88 million over the next decade. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics only projects a need for 1.25 million workers in computing and engineering fields. That's more visas than jobs.
Worker advocates say Congress is ready to solve a problem that doesn't exist.
KIM BERRY, PROGRAMMERS GUILD: We don't see any evidence of a shortage. A shortage under the laws of supply and demand would be an increase in wages, it would be body shops or headhunters stealing employees from other companies.
TUCKER: And that's not happening.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
TUCKER: No. In fact, wages are stagnant and declining. A study published by "BusinessWeek," in fact, found that the starting wages for computer scientists and engineers fell 12 percent or worse, Lou, from 2001 to 2005. It doesn't sound like a tight labor market to me.
DOBBS: No, it's just going in the opposite direction.
You know, at some point these people have got to be a little embarrassed by their shoddy economics and their lack of, let's say, integrity and intellectual honesty in what they are doing here. And perhaps at some point find a conscious in corporate America about what they are doing to working men and women in this country. You would think it would happen -- we hope sooner rather than later.
The "SKIL Act of 2006", as quoted above, is S.2691 and HR5744. This act will provide unlimited guest worker visas to devastate the American middle class. Programmers and engineers are not the only jobs targeted. The H-1B, H-2B, F-1, and the new F-4 visas are focused on all professional occupations.
http://www.programmersguild.org/...