The use of H-1B visas to displace U.S. workers

Do you know about the H-1B and L-1 visa program for high-skilled immigrants? American Interest reports,

For the sponsoring company, what could be better? Management gets the compliant, lower-cost foreign labor often associated with outsourcing without having to deal with the hassles of unreliable remote monitoring or the overhead of having to open a satellite office in Bangalore.

But for foreign workers, there’s a catch: the employee is tied to the company that sponsors the visa. She cannot switch jobs, quit to found a startup, or indeed leave in protest of lower pay or dissatisfaction without forfeiting her immigration status. Moreover, upon termination, she is required to leave the country (unless, as is unlikely, she is able to find a second, established employer here in the U.S. to sponsor her directly).

...what a healthy immigration policy must not do—at either the low- or high-skilled level—is displace American jobs purely for corporate profit while at the same time creating an entire class of workers who do not enjoy the full rights of citizenship. The H-1B program as currently constituted, unfortunately, seems to do both those things. High-skilled Americans either lose their jobs or have their wages depressed, and America doesn’t get many of the usual benefits of allowing talented immigrants into our country through traditional means: the innovation, entrepreneurship, and drive that it adds to our culture and economy.

The H-1B workers at Disney might be more white-collar than the indocumentados on a California fruit farm. Likewise, the laid-off IT staff might be less down on its luck than inner-city African Americans no longer able to find first jobs in construction. But the pattern—and the problem—are unfortunately similar.

Read more here.

Disney is accused of laying off hundreds of IT workers and replacing them with H-1B foreing workers.
Patrick Thibodeau writes at Computerworld,

The use of H-1B workers to displace U.S. workers is getting more attention in Congress. In response to Southern California Edison's use of foreign labor, 10 U.S. senators recently asked three federal agencies to investigate H-1B use. But one agency, the U.S. Department of Labor, wrote back last week and told the lawmakers that large H-1B using firms "are not prohibited from displacing U.S. workers" as long as they meet certain conditions, such as paying each H-1B worker at least $60,000 a year.

Read more here.
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