Senators are certain to grill Mark Zuckerberg about how Facebook trades personal data for financial gain, but while he’s in the hot seat, they should also be getting answers why he and other tech companies continue to sell good-paying American jobs to foreign workers through the H-1B visa program.
It would be a particularly timely line of questioning given that U.S. Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS) just announced on Friday that the 65,000 H-1B visa cap had been reached in less than five days.
The visas permit American companies in a range of industries to hire foreign workers for up to six years in “specialty” occupations that generally require a Bachelor’s degree. The sectors can vary as widely as engineering and medicine to journalism and academia.
In the past, outsourcing and contracting firms have dominated the H-1B market, but the San Francisco Chronicle reported applications were down among three of the top four firms between 2015 and 2017.
On the other hand, tech companies were increasing the number of visa requests. Facebook’s applications jumped more than 71 percent, while Uber upped their applications by 115 percent and Tesla by an astonishing 194 percent.
According to a report by the Silicon Valley Competitiveness and Innovation Project (SVCIP), almost two-thirds of those working in the largest tech centers were not born in the U.S.
Those findings mirror a Seattle Times analysis that found 71 percent of San Jose information technology workers were foreign-born aliens, while 50 percent of those in San Francisco and nearly 40 percent in Seattle were not born in America.
As the founder of the open borders interest group, FWD.us, Zuckerberg has perpetuated a fake story about a “skills gap” in engineering and tech. He might want to check his own facts.
In a 2016 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Rutgers University professor, Dr. Hal Salzman, got straight to the program’s fatal flaw.
“The fundamental problem of U.S. and foreign IT outsourcing firms’ hiring practices is the exclusion of U.S. workers–whether native or immigrant, citizen or permanent resident—which is made possible by specially crafted legislation for this purpose; it is legislation that serves as a congressionally-provided subsidy to a highly profitable industry to hire guestworkers at the expense of jobs for U.S. workers,” Salzman testified.
Ron Hira, an associate professor at Howard University, put it in human terms.
“American workers lose their jobs to H-1Bs, lose wages and bargaining power to H-1Bs, and the government spends pennies on training for jobs that are cheaper to fill with H-1Bs,” he said. “This is fool’s gold for American workers. It is a lose-lose situation,” added Hira.
It might be time for Zuckerberg and his allies to not only protect the data of their users and customers, but also the jobs and wages of highly trained American workers who want to contribute to our tech-based economy.
6 Comments
Many of these HB-1 VISA recipients also overstay those visas and disappear instead of going home. We should not issue any more of those VISAs until those who have overstayed have gone home. The names of the over stayers should also be published in their home country along with names/addresses of relatives and whenever someone from that country wants to apply they are told that they can’t come over until one of the over stayers have gone home and then give them the list of names/addresses. When families in the native land start getting phone calls and visits from new applicants many of those over stayers may likely go home. This is also where we need the biometric entry/exit system. Publish their names here as well and penalize any company who continues to allow them to work on an expired VISA.
It is unbelievable this could happens in USA.
I have read some 17 million science, math, medical and computer tech educated Americans have lost their jobs to foreigners through the H 1 B Visa program. This is not an ‘administrative oversight’. The H 1 B Visa ‘program’ Is nothing less than an act of White Genocide.
This is a problem that you point out. However, if you check, our educational system has fallen greatly behind the international standard because Progressives have taken over more worried about social engineering our youth instead of what they need to know to compete in career fields such as you describe.
I do agree that the practice of training new personnel on a visa only to end up them being their replacement is pretty heartless and you are correct that in that case “It’s not skills it’s money”.
I am looking at the “bigger picture” of the problem.
Foreign visa workers also fill gaps when the jobs available are more than the availability of potential employees to fill those gaps.
That’s a pile of ****. Stop talking smack, moron. This is about H-1Bs, not your moronic and incorrect ideas about US education.
The majority of Americans with degrees in one of the four STEM fields at not working in one of those fields according to the Census Bureau. Numerous companies have fired their American workers and refused to give them severance packages unless they trained their foreign replacements. Pretty hard for the companies to argue that they can’t find qualified Americans when they hold those American workers hostage and force them to train others to replace them. It’s not skills it’s money. The law as written incentivizes firing Americans.