In a report that will be no surprise to anyone familiar with either the organization or the situation, the Economic Policy Institute has published a report that finds that the program is basically a stalking horse for low wages:
H-1B is a temporary nonimmigrant work visa that allows U.S. employers to hire college-educated migrant workers as well as fashion models from abroad; nearly 500,000 migrant workers are employed in the United States in H-1B status.1 The H-1B is an important—but deeply flawed—vehicle for attracting skilled workers to the United States. The H-1B visa is in desperate need of reform for a number of reasons that we have explained in other writings,2 but the fundamental flaw of the H-1B program is that it permits U.S. employers to legally underpay H-1B workers relative to U.S. workers in similar occupations in the same region. This report explains how this occurs by describing the H-1B prevailing wage rule and analyzing the available data on the wage levels that employers promise to pay their H-1B employees.
The key findings of the report are:
- DOL lets H-1B employers undercut local wages.
- A small number of employers dominate the program.
- Outsourcing firms make heavy use of the H-1B program.
- Major U.S. firms use the H-1B program to pay low wages.
This is a serious political issue but not a partisan one. All of those have been true under both Democratic and Republican administrations and is as true of companies run by Republicans as those run by Democrats.
I have this habit of reading the blog posts from most recent backwards.
I should have noted in my comment on the most recent post that our corona policy will inevitably result in not just unemployment, but lower wages. No demand. No wages. Fuck you, Fauci, you protected Washington bureaucrat. You are everything wrong with America today. (and how about that Wuhan advocacy??) Fuck you, you fucking piece of shit.
Ahhhh. With that said. I have no experience with the visa issue, Dave. But everything you have posted over the years seems sensible. This requires redress. But how?
My first exposure to it was nearly 50 years ago, with H-1B and L-2 visas. They weren’t called that then but the characteristics of the various work visas were pretty much the same.