H-Ib visa bill: "would do serious damage to the American information technology labor market, displacing many American workers ... speed up offshoring

Bill Would Double Cap on H-1B Visas | Grant Gross, IDG News Service | Friday, March 14, 2008 1:53 PM PDT

A bill introduced in the U.S. Congress would double the number of immigrant worker visas available each year under the H-1B program.

Microsoft today praised a bill introduced in the U.S. Congress that would double the number of immigrant worker visas available each year under the H-1B program.
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The bill would prohibit companies from hiring H-1B workers, then outsourcing them to other companies, he said. H-1B opponents have complained that outsourcing companies are among the top users of H-1B visas. [~80% go to Indian companies, outsourcers. ed.]

The legislation would also prohibit companies with more than 50 employees that have more than half of their staff as H-1B workers from hiring more H-1Bs, and it would prohibit employers from advertising jobs as available only to H-1B workers [i.e. ban-US worker discrimination. ed.], Karamargin said. "The bill would put some teeth in the Department of Labor's oversight role" of the program, he said.
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But despite some attempts at addressing H-1B fraud, Giffords' bill would do little to address worker concerns about the program, said Ron Hira, a public policy professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology and former chairman of the Career and Workforce Policy Committee at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers-USA.

"This bill takes none of the concerns raised by American technology workers seriously," Hira said. He called the bill a "massive" increase in the H-1B cap.

"This bill will basically do nothing to stem employers from using the H-1B program as a source of cheap labor and to substitute for American workers," Hira said. "It doesn't require any kind of labor market test -- demonstrating that a shortage actually exists before hiring an H-1B."

The bill doesn't fix "serious problems" in setting wage floors for H-1B workers, Hira added. "No matter how one dresses up this bill, it would do nothing to curb the practice of companies bringing in computer programmers for $12 per hour to displace U.S. workers," he said. "If this bill were to be passed as written, it would do serious damage to the American information technology labor market, displacing many American workers, discouraging the next generation of students from entering the career, and speed up the offshoring of high-wage high-technology jobs."