H-1B Visas Help Corporations, Hurt Americans

Nearly a year ago, in his testimony to a Senate subcommittee, a laid-off Disney IT worker tearfully told of the humiliation he suffered when forced to train his foreign-born H-1B visa replacement. Leo Perrero had received glowing performance reviews during his ten-year career at Disney.

Late in 2014, Disney abruptly gave Pererro and about two dozen of his IT colleagues three months’ notice, the final days of which they were ordered to spend teaching overseas workers to do the jobs they once held. If they refused to “transfer knowledge,” as the process is cravenly called, they’d lose their severance pay.

Perrero’s emotional testimony ended with his plea to Congress to end the H-1B abuses now common at corporate giants like Southern California Edison, Caterpillar, Hertz, Toys“R”Us and others.

Despite the financial and psychological damage American workers suffer when they’re fired to make room for visa holders, little has changed during the year since Perrero’s testimony. In December, AT&T announced that it and a subsidiary would lay off more than 1,000 American workers while continuing to import H-1Bs. AT&T shamefully offered its displaced American workers the option to find a lower paying job within the company or to be permanently laid off.

H-1B visas are capped at 85,000 yearly, and numerous legislative efforts to increase the total have failed. Nevertheless loopholes have been exploited which allow the visa guidelines to become more expansive as universities and nonprofits are now exempt from the 85,000 cap.

For example, the University of California San Francisco, the UC system’s biggest medical center, announced in late 2016 that it would lay off about 100 career IT staffers and contractors. Like Disney, UCSF directed the workers to train their foreign-born replacements. Guideline manipulation puts thousands more American jobs at risk.

Overdue, pro-American worker changes could be on the way. As currently structured, the H-1B visa is issued for two three-year terms. But if H-1Bs have filed green card applications, they can work longer. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services would neither confirm nor deny that a proposal to eliminate the extension exists. A USCIS representative said, however, that the agency is committed to protecting U.S. workers’ interests and to reforming employment-based immigration programs so they benefit Americans to “the greatest extent possible.”

Ending the provision that allows workers to stay pending their green card applications’ approvals would have far-reaching benefits. Once an H-1B temporary guest worker receives lawful permanent resident status, he’s no longer dependent on his employer/sponsor, and can then seek a job in any occupation where he’ll either compete with Americans or displace them.

The H-1B’s original purpose was to complement the U.S. workforce. Instead, the visa has brought cheaper, often lower-skilled workers to the U.S. to take American jobs. Although IT employers insist that they cannot find enough skilled Americans, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) reported that only half of U.S. college graduates in science, technology, engineering and math, the STEM professions, found jobs in those fields, while at least one-third of IT jobs go to foreign guest workers.

Harvard University labor economist Lawrence F. Katz insightfully identified for The New York Times the true H-1B beneficiaries, and they’re not American workers. Katz said that the two big winners are “the workers who come here with H-1B visas, and the companies that employ them.”

According to research by Goldman Sachs, close to one million H-1Bs do jobs in the U.S. that require university degrees. The one million total represents jobs that should have gone to Americans, but didn’t.

Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform researcher and writer. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org. Find him on Twitter @joeguzzardi19.