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The H1-b program is crap, but not just for the reason the OP posted. It is insufficient to meet the US's need for skilled foreign labor AND it artificially depresses wages by making H-visa holders indentured to their employer.
Ostensibly the H-visa should be treated as either a temporary or trial period after which the worker returns to their home country or is sponsored for a Green Card. The idea was that the employers wouldn't want to pay the nominal fees associated with the H-visas. However, those fees are too light, haven't adjusted for wages, and are often backhandedly transferred to the employees because program oversight is lacking and only focused on denying visas rather than enforcing employer compliance with regulations.
A better solution is to simply switch to skill-based immigration tied to need, skip the H-visa, and go straight to LPR (Green Card). If a basket of corporations polled indicates they need more HC workers one month, then the cap on HC workers is raised next month. If more tech workers are needed, the cap on tech workers is raised. The LPR's should be made similar to marriage visas with a 2-year trial period where the green card could be revoked for civil or criminal reasons:
- Failure to maintain employment (a gap of more than 3 months or something)
- Failure to pay taxes.
- Any enrollment into public assistance programs.
- Being convicted of a crime.
Employers should be charged an inflation-and-wage-adjusted premium for every foreign worker they sponsor. I would peg it to 1X the median wage for that position, making the foreign worker twice as expensive as a domestic one for the first year. Also, there should be NO requirement for the sponsored foreigner to stay with the company that initially sponsored them (and no "refund" of the fees the company paid to sponsor them). This would give the worker immense leverage to negotiate for higher wages and be a huge economic disincentive to companies who claim they "can't find" qualified Americans. If they really can't find them, they'll have to pay through the nose and take a gamble on sponsoring a foreigner.
Jettisoning the visa would mean that foreigners immigrating here would not longer be indentured servants of the corporations and could negotiate for the prevailing wage (or easily leave to go to another company that paid better).
This is a great solution for everyone (except the corporations who currently depend on foreign indentured H-visa workers) because it protects American workers by making them a cheaper and safer bet than imported foreigners. At the same time, if a company REALLY needs foreign talent, the bureaucratic barriers to getting them are lower, even though the economic ones are much higher.
If we were to implement such a system, I bet a LOT of companies would suddenly find that they actually could scrounge up the necessary American workers. Right now, with the H-visa program so favors employers that the pigs are just clamoring at the trough for more indentured servants, using any excuse they can come up with.
This is not a common occurrence... especially not at large companies. You can't fire people and replace them with h1b employees at a large scale without getting flagged.
Location: West Los Angeles and Rancho Palos Verdes
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TexasLawyer2000
This is not a common occurrence... especially not at large companies. You can't fire people and replace them with h1b employees at a large scale without getting flagged.
That information is not correct. It's been a common occurrence for the past 20 years. Lou Dobbs covered it on a regular basis in the early 2000's, and even invited Bill Gates to debate the topic after Gates' shameless shortage shouting before the U.S. Congress. Furthermore, Rob Sanchez covered the topic comprehensively in his Job Destruction Newsletter, citing countless examples of large numbers of U.S. citizens being terminated and replaced by low income scab labor. And even in recent times, the story is still being covered:
Do people still believe that? You can't believe everything you read on Facebook. Disney did not hire H1Bs to replace American employees. Look into the details of what happened and don't go by clickbait headlines.
Do people still believe that? You can't believe everything you read on Facebook. Disney did not hire H1Bs to replace American employees. Look into the details of what happened and don't go by clickbait headlines.
People won't read past the headline because that doesn't support their agenda.
Do people still believe that? You can't believe everything you read on Facebook. Disney did not hire H1Bs to replace American employees. Look into the details of what happened and don't go by clickbait headlines.
Read it and weep; they had two class-action lawsuit filed against them.
Leo Perrero and Dena Moore say they were illegally replaced by foreign workers. Both were laid off from their IT jobs at Walt Disney World in Orlando in January 2015.
They were told they had 90 days to train their replacements: Foreigners on H-1B visas, the most common visa for high-skilled foreign workers. If they didn't agree, they weren't eligible for bonuses or severance packages.
Perrero and Moore weren't the only ones in this situation. Up to 300 workers also lost their jobs.
The lawsuits, filed in a Tampa federal court Monday, charge Disney and two global consulting companies, HCL and Cognizant, for colluding to break the law.
Both HCL and Cognizant are outsourcing companies, known for submitting a high volume of H-1B petitions each year. By law, H-1B workers can't replace American workers, and the suit alleges that that's exactly what the three companies did.
And to make matters worse...
Quote:
Moore applied to several jobs at the company [after being laid off from her original position], interviewed for them, and was told that the jobs were only for H-1B holders or foreigners.
A furor over the layoffs in Orlando last January brought to light many other episodes in which American workers, mainly in technology but also in accounting and administration, said they had lost jobs to foreigners on H-1B visas, and had to train replacements as a condition of their severance.
[...]
Quote:
The Labor Department opened investigations of the outsourcing companies — the direct employers of the temporary immigrants — at Disney and at Southern California Edison, a utility that laid off hundreds of American workers in 2014. The investigations are continuing. At least 30 former Disney workers also filed complaints with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, claiming that they faced discrimination as American citizens.
Quote:
Sara Blackwell, a lawyer in Sarasota, Fla., representing the former Disney employees, said the suits charged that the companies had lied under oath when they said no Americans would lose their jobs
Quote:
Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, a Democrat who has been openly critical of Disney’s layoffs, offered a bill to reduce the H-1B quota by 15,000 visas a year to 70,000. The issue came up in the presidential race, as Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a Republican candidate, introduced a bill with Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, a Republican hard-liner on immigration, to sharply increase the minimum wage for H-1B workers to $110,000 a year, to discourage outsourcing companies from using the workers to lower wages.
Thanks for posting this link. A previous post implied that Disney fired American workers and hired foreign workers. As your link claims, this is false. Disney simply outsourced work to a consulting company. I don't blame them. Managing tech work with the major tech skill shortage is costly and it's smart to hire a company that has expertise in it.
Understanding the entire story is so important. Many people focus on the surface and go by just the headline and in this case claim "A company firing all its US citizen techies, and replacing them with cheaper H1B's" and similar. It's no surprise that the US is dependent on foreign workers in many high skilled areas when you realize this.
Disney is not the only company using outsourcing firms to hire immigrants to replace American workers.But they're one of the first to be caught
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