3/30/17 – H-1B Visas

H-1B visas have had a profound impact on U.S. workers.

Here’s what’s happening behind the headlines.

H-1B is the visa in which highly-skilled foreigners are fast-tracked to the head-of-the-line to enter the U.S. They fill jobs for which there are no U.S. workers.

Well, that’s the claim.

And that claim is hogwash, according to a just-released study.

A trio of researchers scrubbed the data. They found that without this visa program, wages in H-1B related fields would be as much as five per cent higher.  The employment of American workers would be nearly 11% higher.

[As with other visas, the H-1B visa is ripe for abuse.  For years, a group brought in an untold number of immigrants to serve as medical instructors by claiming their skills were required a “Adam University.” No such university exists.]

[In fact, it appears U.S. authorities are conducting very little, if any, due diligence to determine how many schools that are admitting immigrants are fake.]


Here’s how it works.

Most H-1Bs are issued for computer-science related jobs like those found in Silicon Valley. Firms lay-off older Americans. In the past few years, tens of thousands of U.S. workers have been sacked at Microsoft [here], Cisco, Symantec, HP, Qualcomm, Intel and elsewhere [here, here].

Many companies bring in lower-paid foreigners to fill the vacancies. These foreigners are locked-in to these employers because the H-1B visa is assigned to the company.  The visa is good for a maximum of six years.  After which these temps return home.  To be replaced by more foreigners.

Several Silicon Valley companies have lobbied Congress to triple H-1B visas from sixty-five to 195,000 annually.

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