Senators starting to look at H1B abuse

Good day all. For those of you who work in the technology sector, you are quite familiar with the phrase “H1B.” This is a specific type of visa that allows foreign workers into the United States without going through the standard process for a green card.

People who come in to the United States under the H1B program are limited in how long they can stay. The normal course of the visa is a company determines they have a need for someone, and that there are no Americans who are available to take the job. Then someone can come in and work in the United States for that company.

That’s the way it’s supposed to be, but it isn’t the way it actually is. More and more, corporations are claiming that they can’t find “Qualified” people and must bring in people from outside the United States. I know for a fact that this is a bald faced lie. Now, it looks like someone in the Senate has noticed and is going to ask questions. Here are some of the details from Fox News:

A popular visa program allegedly is being misused by U.S. companies to lay off thousands of American workers and replace them with foreign labor. And, adding insult to injury, many of the laid-off workers allegedly have been forced to train their replacements, in what one anonymous whistleblower called a “humiliating” experience.

I know someone that this happened to. It was a long time ago and I won’t name the company. I was also screwed over by them, but for a different reason. However, companies are not being more blatant than usual with their attempts to hire cheaper slaves workers.

The allegations have caught the attention of a bipartisan group of senators — including immigration hawk Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., and the No. 2 Senate Democrat, Illinois’ Dick Durbin — who are calling for a federal probe. A letter sent by 10 senators urging an investigation specifically cited reports of the firing and hiring practices at Southern California Edison, California’s second-largest utility. The incidents are concentrated in the IT field, and involve American workers being replaced by H-1B visa holders.

I remember reading about the Southern California Edison story. While I don’t know the law here, on the face of it, it looks like the management of Southern CalEd outright lied about needing foreign workers.

“A number of U.S. employers, including some large, well-known, publicly-traded corporations, have reportedly laid off thousands of American workers and replaced them with H-1B visa holders,” the senators wrote.

I remember people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs screaming to Congress that they couldn’t find enough people, while thousands of IT people were out of work and searching for a job. This scam has been going on for over a decade, and Americans are getting fed up with it.

In the letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, and Labor Secretary Thomas Perez, the senators urged the departments to “investigate the unacceptable replacement of American workers” to see whether laws were broken.

Of course laws have been broken, starting with perjury. I seem to recall that these companies, when certifying that they can’t find Americans for these jobs, swear on pain of perjury that the paperwork is true. It obviously isn’t. As to getting the Obama regime to do anything about it? Please, don’t make me laugh. Now what exactly is the H1B Visa program and what’s it’s supposed to do?

The H-1B program is supposed to be used to bring in, on a temporary basis, skilled workers with highly specialized skills not readily available in the U.S. They are often used in the technology sector to bring in engineers and computer programmers.

Now when they say highly skilled, they usually mean someone who is a specialist in a specific discipline, such as cryptography. There aren’t that many people in the world who understand encryption and most of them work for various government agencies around the world. Those aren’t the people they are hiring. There are also limits designed to protect American workers.

Further, U.S. employers can hire foreign workers for up to six years and must pay them the same rate they would pay other workers with similar qualifications, or the prevailing wage for that job and location, whichever is higher. This is done to prevent foreign workers from depressing U.S. wages and from being exploited.

Yeah, right. When pigs fly!

Now, people are starting to blow the whistle on H1B visa fraud. Companies are getting greedy and replacing Americans in job lots.

But reports have surfaced that the replacements are happening at an alarming rate. And former Southern California Edison workers have complained to lawmakers that they were replaced by less-skilled workers at lower costs.

They aren’t kidding about less skilled. I have first hand information, (Granted, it’s over a decade old), of recent graduate from Mumbai replacing people with up to 20 years experience.

Anonymous workers who were displaced by the visa holders also submitted written testimonials to lawmakers detailing their firings. Several claimed they were forced to train their replacements, and threatened with losing their severance if they did not.

Nice. Nothing like threats of bankruptcy and homelessness to encourage cooperation, is there? I seem to recall that the FBI would regularly jail members of organized crime for pretty much the same thing.

“We had no choice in this,” one anonymous worker who claimed to have been one of those let go from Southern California Edison, said in a letter. The worker described how when the two vendors were picked – Infosys and TCS, both major Indian companies – SCE employees were told to “sit with, video chat or do whatever was needed to teach them our systems.” If they did not cooperate, according to the testimonial, “we would be fired and not receive a severance package.”

And if they were fired, they would also lose any unemployment benefits as well. As you might expect, SCE denies everything.

In a statement, Southern California Edison said it abides by the law and will cooperate with any investigation that concerns the issues mentioned in the senators’ letter.

Well of course they will say that. Do you really think they will come out and say “Of course we fired all the American workers and replaced them with foreigners. The foreigners work for half what we have to pay the Americans, and if they give us any lip, we can fire them and have them deported.”

Now the way this scam is working, and in a way that is designed to protect the Management of companies that do this, is to use a contracting firm to bring in the lower paid H1B visa people.

“By transitioning some IT operations to external vendors, along with SCE eliminating some customized functions it will no longer provide, the company will focus on making significant, strategic changes that can benefit our customers,” Southern California Edison’s emailed statement read.

But the senators, in their letter, raised several questions about how the replacements were being done. They said it appears the workers are often not employees of the U.S. company laying off workers – but are contractors working for foreign-owned IT consultants. The H-1B program stipulates that applicants must have a valid “employer-employee relationship” – and the senators questioned whether that was the case here.

There is no question about this. I have more first hand information, far more recent too, about a company hiring H1B workers through a contracting service, not hiring them directly. The employee is actually working for the contracting service and not the company they have been placed in. They are paid by the contracting service and the service is paid, a lot, by the company.

A little known fact about these foreign owned contracting services. They will not, under any There’s no circumstances, hire an American. Why? Americans know what they are worth and will not work for the money the H1B workers will.

They also asked whether the companies “engaged in prohibited citizenship status discrimination” (against American citizens); and whether the visa petitions showed “any evidence of misrepresentation or fraud.”

Oh hell yes! Of course they are “Misrepresenting” how they are bringing in these workers. Now people are speaking out on the abuse.

Ronil Hira, a professor at Howard University, said at the hearing that the utility outsourced work to two companies, and those companies employed H-1B staffers who were then trained by the employees they were replacing. “There could not be a clearer case of the H-1B program being used to harm American workers’ wages and working conditions,” Hira said.

The one bright spot in all this? It isn’t a Democrat v Republican matter. This is crossing party lines, and when something like this occurs, there is a good chance of things happening. Personally, I want to see a few CEO’s and Human Resources Directors taken away in handcuffs. Will this actually happen? I’m not holding my breath.

Thatisall

~The Angry Webmaster~

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