From a story reported here by Breitbart's Tony Lee:
High-tech lobbies like Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us have poured in millions of dollars in high-profile campaigns to secure more high-tech visas.
And they have partly been succeeding. The Senate's amnesty bill that passed last year would double and possibly triple the number of high-tech visas and, as Breitbart News has reported, House Judiciary Committee Chair Rep. Bob Goodlatte's (R-VA) "SKILLS" Act that ... passed out of his committee would double the number of H-1B visas.
Ron Hira, a public policy professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology who has worked on these issues for more than a decade, said on the conference call that the H-1B visas that are filling the supposed "gaps" are "doing more harm than good" to the U.S. science and engineering workforce.
He noted that the majority of the H-1B visas are being used for "cheaper workers" from abroad and mentioned that offshoring firms used 50% of the cap last year to further their business model of bringing in "lower-cost H-1B workers to replace American workers." [Rutgers University's Hal] Salzman said that even after American software engineers train their replacements, they cannot speak out about their experiences for fear of being blackballed or having to forfeit their severance payments.
Hira said that the H-1B program has run amok because "Congress sets the wage floors way too low" and "far below the market wages for American workers" while not placing any "requirement to look for or recruit American workers first, so there is no displacement of American workers."
"As a result, you are basically inducing companies to game the system to bring foreign workers to undercut American workers," Hira noted. "Instead of complimenting the U.S. workers as it should, it's substituting for the U.S. workforce and taking away future opportunities by shifting the work overseas."
Salzman said that in this arrangement, the employer has nearly total control of the "indentured" H-1B workers because they hold their work permits. ...
Further, Matloff emphasized that H-1B visa holders earn 5-10% less on average than American workers and there is a high churn rate that gives companies a "never-ending supply of new hires," allowing them to replace workers over the age of 35 while weakening the "bargaining position of current workers." The Senate bill, Matloff said, exacerbates this problem by providing 150% of the visas that the IT industry has said they needed at the beginning of the debate.
