Obama’s Other Executive Action on Immigration

When President Obama issued a series of executive orders on immigration last November, he unleashed a fierce torrent of criticism for granting millions of undocumented immigrants a de-facto amnesty. Lost in all the attention paid to that fight, however, was a lesser known executive action taken at the same time, one which the administration claimed would “modernize, improve and clarify immigrant and nonimmigrant visa programs to grow our economy and create jobs.” 

Now, the Obama administration has issued guidance clarifying what exactly their modernized, improved visa system will look like, and it’s not pretty: It appears that the president aims to unilaterally overhaul a critical visa program to usher in a flood of cheap foreign labor, crowding thousands of American workers out of their jobs and potentially discouraging many more from reentering the workplace. Analysts say the president’s actions, which have gone largely unnoticed by the public, will bring in thousands of foreign workers on L-1 visas to fill job vacancies in the U.S. The visa program allows an employer to transfer an employee within its organization from a foreign office to an American office. Most notably, many Indian workers come to the U.S. on L-1 visas to fill information-technology positions.

The L-1 program is not supposed to replace American workers with foreign nationals. But that’s what’s happening. Michael Emmons, who from 1997 until 2002 worked as an information-technology contractor at Siemens, the multinational engineering giant, was forced to train his foreign replacement when Siemens pushed out its employees in favor of cheaper labor from abroad. (“Forced” is the right word for it, too: The company threatened to withhold severance pay from those outgoing American employees who refused to train their foreign replacements.) The foreign workers were paid far less than the Americans they replaced because the same wage constraints that are in place for the employers of other visa-holders and American workers do not exist for those that use L-1 workers ...

The president’s policy may outperform his initial expectations. Doug Ellice, a former DHS inspector general employee, says if the Obama administration wants to do so, it could create a program that soon begins “admitting millions and millions of people” ...