H-1B: Donald Trump Orders Legal Review of Outsourcing Visa Programs
Four federal agencies will put many U.S. visa worker programs, including the H-1B white-collar outsourcing program, through a “full legal analysis,” a White House official told reporters Monday night.
The review may wreck several of the many programs used to import a population of perhaps 1.8 million foreign temporary workers for a huge variety of U.S.
Those programs are no in jeopardy because critics — including attorney John Miano — say the programs lack a firm legal foundation amid a variety of firmly established laws which bar discrimination against U.S. workers.
Moreover, many of the cheap-labor guest-worker programs have been quietly extended and enlarged by prior administrations...
For example, critics have long argued that there is no legal foundation for President Barck Obama’s decision to provide work permits to several hundred thousand spouses of H-1B white-collar workers, and there is no legal foundation to President George W. Bush’s decision to provide multi-year work permits to foreign students...
In addition, the federal government has repeatedly expanded the H-1B program, and even allows non-profit groups to bring in an unlimited number of foreign students. In 2015, for example, non-profit employers — including many universities and affiliated hospitals — employed roughly 100,000 foreign white-collar workers. Several states are also using that regulation to create non-profits which bring in cheap college graduates for use by employers in Massachusetts and other states...
According to a report by Politico:
[A White House] official criticized the H-1B system for awarding visas randomly, without taking into account an applicant’s skill or salary level. “The result of that is that workers are often brought in at well below market rates,” the official said...
The annual inflow of foreign contract workers is huge, adding up to roughly 1 million short-term or long-term workers, either in white-collar or blue-collar jobs. The imported contract workers are not immigrants, not citizens, nor green card holders, but are temporary workers slated to return home after several years. Generally, employers do not have to interview Americans before hiring foreigners for the U.S.-based jobs.
Many of the contract workers stay for several or more years, ensuring the resident population of white-collar and blue-collar contract workers is much larger than the annual inflow and may reach a resident population of 1.8 million. The left-wing Economic Policy Institute pegs the resident population at 1.4 million...
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