Read this article...
https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2013/03/30/visa-program-has-been-hijacked-outsourcers/VAg6o9KgS2tuoZ3WbmaqeK/story.html
... and note the following quote:
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The reality is that once employees get green cards, they command an American salary and can go elsewhere if they don’t receive it. Much of the competitive advantage of having that worker disappears. Employees on H-1B visas understand this all too well. Online discussion forums are full of workers strategizing about how to escape companies that haven’t given them a raise in years. On one forum, a person identifying himself as a Cognizant employee wrote that he suspected his bosses of deliberately submitting shoddy paperwork for his green card to keep him longer in a low-wage job.
When the H-1B visa program was invented in 1990, no one expected that Indian companies would be its biggest subscribers. “Exploitation of the H-1B by outsourcers is a new abuse,” said Bruce Morrison, a former Connecticut congressman who authored of the 1990 Immigration Act, which gave birth to H-1B visas. Morrison said the law — which vastly expanded employment-based green cards — was designed to curb the abusive practice of bringing temporary workers to fill permanent jobs. He crafted the bill with different professions in mind: nurses, physical therapists, and mechanics who serviced data processing machines, many of whom were from Taiwan and Korea.
“Rather than increase H-1Bs, we need to increase green cards — and deliver them to new hires immediately,” Morrison said. That “would eliminate the disincentive to hire Americans.”
But some companies have become addicted to H-1Bs. For them, the visas created a dream workforce: Young people with no family obligations who feel grateful for the chance to work long hours for relatively low wages. Workers who literally can’t leave for better-paying jobs. Disposable people who go home after three years or six years — just when they start getting expensive.
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If the person that helped create this bill to solve an issue that many of us in the tech industry felt might be of use, but on a VERY limited basis, also realizes like the rest of us who've lived with it for over 20 years that this program is messed up and causes more harm than any help it gives anyone. It certainly doesn't help workers at all, and if employers truly needed it for what it was originally set up for (to get SOME employees quickly over here with UNIQUE experience and expertise qualifications), then they should realize that they themselves SCREWED THEMSELVES when they abused this program, and that given that the abuse of this program hasn't stopped despite efforts to stop it, it is time to stop the program NOW!!!! If companies need foreign employees, they should sponsor people for getting green cards which allows them far more rights as Morrison notes here that they SHOULD get, and preserves more a sense of a real "free market" for employees to compete for jobs rather than having it rigged towards those who might work as indentured servants for more than they would earn back in their home country when the difference of the cost of living there versus here is an order of magnitude.
The way so many paid corporate shills are trying to make Bernie and the rest of us in to being "anti-immigrant" by wanting to end guest labor programs like this and wanting to encourage REAL immigration instead is disgusting and hypocritical. THEY are the ones that are anti-immigration when supporting this crap polluting immigration bills, as THEY want to have people only come here under temporary slave labor agreements that screw both the foreign workers in terms of their rights and us American workers and other green card workers in terms of being able to compete with slave labor.
Don't let these shills get away with this! Call them out on it. Bernie and we don't deserve those kind of comments!
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