{"id":22790,"date":"2020-04-10T15:37:32","date_gmt":"2020-04-10T19:37:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/?p=22790"},"modified":"2020-04-10T15:37:34","modified_gmt":"2020-04-10T19:37:34","slug":"foreign-workers-preference-furloughed-immigrationreform-com","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/2020\/04\/10\/foreign-workers-preference-furloughed-immigrationreform-com\/","title":{"rendered":"American Workers Must Not Be Pushed Out The Door To Protect Foreign Guest Workers"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

American workers and college graduates have always received\nthe short-end of the stick when it comes to competition with foreign workers,\ndue to the fact that companies are able to convince foreign workers to accept\nlower pay, in exchange for access to U.S. labor markets.  Now, during the coronavirus pandemic,\nAmerican workers may be more even disadvantaged, with reports that citizen\nworkers may be furloughed or fired before their non-immigrant-visa-holder\ncolleagues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Employers may be more likely to lay-off, or outright fire, American workers for fear of negating their foreign employee\u2019s H-1B status.\u00a0 Chris Smith, the Co-founder and CEO of Kipsu, furloughed two-thirds of his team after the onset of the COVID crisis. However, he decided<\/a> not to lay-off an H-1B visa holder who works for him, in order to help that worker keep his immigration status and continue earning a salary in the U.S.\u00a0 According to Smith, this was \u201cto do right by the employee\u201d and not to waste the time and money he put into obtaining his H-1B worker. (It\u2019s curious that Mr. Smith seems to have had no concerns about \u201cdoing right by\u201d his American employees.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If an employer furloughs an American worker, that employee\u2019s pay is suspended. However, that is not the case for an H-1B worker.\u00a0 According to 20 CFR \u00a7 655.731(c)(7)<\/a>, an American company is legally required to pay an H-1B employee the full wage specified in the visa application filed on behalf of that foreign worker. So even if the employer has to shutter his business during the coronavirus pandemic, the employer must fully compensate any H-1B worker for non-productive time. Meanwhile American counterparts are forced to collect unemployment insurance \u2014 which usually pays a considerably lower rate than normal wages. (This requirement is supposed to discourage employers from becoming reliant on foreign labor or privileging foreign workers over their American counterparts. Obviously, it hasn\u2019t worked.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moreover, if a company terminates an H-1B visa holder, that\nforeign worker would either be required to leave the country or find a new\nemployer willing to sponsor him\/her.  If\nthe worker has a spouse or child on a dependent visa, then those family members\nwould also need to leave the United States. \nKnowing this makes many employers reluctant to fire H-1B workers because\nthey don\u2019t want to place \u201cundue hardship\u201d upon them, nor do they want to have\nto spend the funds necessary to replace them at a later date. However, the same\nemployers rarely seem to worry about the undue hardship imposed upon American\nworkers, many of whom may have relocated within the U.S. to accept a job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In essence, the entire system incentivizes employers to\ntreat their foreign H-1B workers with more care and consideration than their\nAmerican employees. And that simply isn\u2019t acceptable during a pandemic crisis\nthat has caused up to 16 million Americans to become jobless. If Congress\nlearns just one lesson from the coronavirus pandemic, it should be that its\nprimary responsibility is to protect the working Americans who drive the\nworld\u2019s greatest economy. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

American workers and college graduates have always received the short-end of the stick when it comes to competition with foreign workers, due to the fact that companies are able to convince foreign workers to accept lower pay, in exchange for access to U.S. labor markets.  Now, during the coronavirus pandemic, American workers may be more<\/p>\n

Read More<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":7371,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[11],"tags":[1558,1524,986,1392],"yst_prominent_words":[1938,8290,8292,2169,8110,2254,2187,2181,8291,2358,1932,4199,8293,8288,6407,8177,8289,8294,2414,1937],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22790"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/45"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22790"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22790\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22791,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22790\/revisions\/22791"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22790"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=22790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}