8 of the Top 10 Businesses Approved for H-1B Visa Use Last Year Have Outsourcing Operations

[Omaha Steve]

http://wepartypatriots.com/wp/2012/07/18/8-of-the-top-10-businesses-approved-for-h-1b-visa-use-have-outsourcing-operations/

With countless capable and educated American workers unable to find jobs, it makes little sense for politicians like NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg to call for ending a cap on H-1B visas. But that is just what is happening, giving the system for delegating the visas, which are supposed to be used to lure qualified workers when companies are faced with an American labor shortage, cause for expansion despite consistent manipulation and misuse of the program by companies known to be outsourcers.

H-1B visas are primarily used in the tech sector. Participants have a college degree and can travel with their family as a perk (although spouses are not work authorized). They can apply for Legal Permanent Residency as they work on an H-1B visa. Many recent Congressional proposals have attempted to exempt them from caps making the argument that they are smart and should be encouraged to come and stay.

Wages associated with these visas are frequently not competitive and since citizenship is tied to the H-1B jobs these workers are easily exploitable.

Ron Hira, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology and leading critic of the program, recently spoke to WNYC about the program:

FULL story at link.

[rfranklin]

1. How is this different from indentured servitude?

I can't see any distinction.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948) declares in Article 4 "No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms"[35]. However, only national legislation can establish its unlawfulness. In the United States, the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act (VTVPA) of 2000 extended servitude to cover peonage as well as Involuntary Servitude.[36]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentured_servant

[Igel]

3. "Indentured."

H1-B visas are purely voluntary servitude. Nobody's "held" in them.

The "indentured" part comes in when you have a jobber importing people who can't pay their own way and then charges them expenses and interest beyond what they can pay. That's remarkably like indentured servitude, except that you're not indentured to the company (or person) you're serving and, from their viewpoint, you at most have a contract.

[LiberalEsto]

2. They will do anything to keep Americans from getting middle class jobs nt

[Igel]

4. There needs to be a requirement.

Companies should submit evidence that they conducted a public domestic search for people with qualifications needed to do the job, and that they received no suitable applications for the job at the wage offered.