4 thoughts on “Great Discussion On H1-B Visas”

  1. It all goes back to square one.. 40 million illegals ( welcomed in by Joe Biden ) are being supported by the rest of tax paying Americans. And yes, we should value our Veterans. The discussion was supposed to be about HB-1 visas and very little of it was devoted to them.

    Latest numbers show almost 6 million of US citizens are unemployed. I doubt that a significant number of these are due to HB-1 visas.

    1. I think, Fred, that many young people getting out of college in the STEM fields– science, technology, engineering and mathematics– have great difficulty getting good jobs. And it has been that way for some time. Foreigners are taking those jobs via the various visa programs.

  2. From National Review:

    ” Trump Was Right the First Time on H-1B

    Just this September, the Trump administration announced what promised to be a sweeping reform to the H-1B guest worker visa program. The idea was that employers would be charged $100,000 for each new H-1B visa recipient, creating an incentive for the participants in the program to only use it for what it was intended for — attracting world-class talent to the United States. Our major criticism of this reform was that it was too easy for employers to evade the fee and that most H-1B petitions involve aliens already here, who would be exempt from it.

    Whatever its ultimate utility, the reform and the presidential proclamation accompanying it acknowledged that H-1B visas are used as a loophole to bring in semi-skilled labor at below-market wages. Firms abuse the program in multiple ways, filing duplicate applications, misclassifying jobs to hide the skill level, and hiding job listings from American applicants by blocking American IP addresses from accessing them.

    The reform smoked out the Chamber of Commerce. In a court filing arguing that the $100,000 payment trespassed against the underlying statute, the chamber abandoned the argle-bargle about bringing the “best and brightest” into the U.S. It turns out that employers “need not show their [H-1B] workers are the best of the best, but merely highly skilled.”

    Then, last week on Fox News, President Trump, whose views on legal immigration often contradict those of his more restrictionist advisers, reversed field.

    When host Laura Ingraham said, “We have plenty of talented people here,” Trump fired back: “No, you don’t have — you don’t have certain talents. And you have to — people have to learn.”

    “You can’t,” he elaborated, “just say a country is coming in, going to invest $10 billion to build a plant, and going to take people off an unemployment line who haven’t worked in five years, and they’re going to start making their missiles. It doesn’t work that well.” Trump has also floated a “temporary pass” for illegal immigrants who are working on farms. ”

    Trump may simply be repeating what tech and agriculture company executives have been saying to him in recent weeks. Or, perhaps he is spooked by reports of China’s new “K-Visa” which was announced in time to take advantage of news about America tightening its restrictions. He shouldn’t be.

    There is no evidence that H-1B visas meaningfully contribute to American competence or competitiveness. They are most often used and abused for semi-skilled workers doing the most menial forms of desk work, data entry, or occasionally hard-coding data. Already there are signs that AI programming tools are making the very junior-most programming jobs obsolete. Defenders of the program point to the degree requirements. Critics and anyone with eyes to see will notice the proliferation of online diploma mills built to help migrants clear this hurdle.

    The program is quite literally designed to prevent USCIS from investigating whether the information an employer files under the Labor Condition Application with the Department of Labor matches the quality of the real H-1B visa applicant.

    There are plenty of ways America recruits top-level talent to our shores, including the O-1 visa program, which, while not impossible to game, does have higher standards. The H-1B program is a joke. President Trump was right the first time around.

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