Media Worth Sharing & Legislation Worth Cosponsoring!

While we always want to debunk bad media coverage and stay informed about bad policies the Beltway crowd tries to sneak past the voters, one thing we take care not to overlook is the chance to elevate good commentary and pull out key points from reporting (good or bad).

With that in mind, we want to hone in on is white-collar immigration this week. There are some recent developments worth sharing related to H-1B and OPT visas.

(We included a short summary about those visas at the bottom of this email if you want a refresher.)

H-1B and OPT continue to do what they are intended to do: undercut and displace U.S. workers with a cheaper, more indentured visa worker. It is not surprising that we also see fraud and abuse by employers in these programs.

Considering the stakes for and resources available from the forces desiring ever more of these visas, its not a surprise to see news and commentary representing their interest.

But there has been a recent surge of media coverage and punditry that we can scream from the rooftops (or just share on social media):

In a piece titled "America's Asymmetric Civil War" in The Tablet, professor Micheal Lind discussed how guest workers "are bound to the employers that sponsor them, and who are thus more easily manipulated and intimidated than either free American citizen-workers or immigrants with green cards who can quit bad employers."

"The progressive Democrats of Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft lobby for more H-1B visas, which go overwhelmingly to young male foreign nationals who are often willing to work for less money in worse conditions than comparably educated American citizens and naturalized immigrants."

A long-form piece by Rikha Sharma Rani in Politico is packed with quotes, anecdotes, and stats about how the H-1B program indentures workers, undercuts the labor market's wage-raising mechanisms, and provides billions of dollars worth of savings for the companies taking advantage of these programs.

"The whole [H-1B] model is to bring people who will happily work for 80 hours a week for less money... They want somebody who will say 'yessir,' 'yes ma'am.'"

Read the whole thing about this "big scam"!

The Biden administration's vetting of H-1B applications looks lax all of a sudden.

"Denial rate for H-1B visas drops sharply under Biden administration," (Adam Shaw, Fox Business) and "Tech Firms Cheer Smoother Visa Sailing," (Margaret Harding McGill, Axios) report. One quote that stood out:

"Daniel Costa, director of immigration at the Economic Policy Institute, noted that despite increased scrutiny during the Trump administration, the H-1B cap was still met every year. Costa said the visa program is important, but 'it is severely lacking in terms of good wage rules and oversight by the Labor Department.'"

I'm your Huckleberry!

In a truly heartening development, some in Congress are taking tangible action to significantly improve wage rules.

Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) recently introduced new legislation: H.R. 6206 - the American Tech Workforce Act. The centerpiece of the bill is to reform the H-1B visa program to stop Big Tech's use of the visa to undercut the wages of American tech workers. The bill would also eliminate Optional Practical Training (OPT), the largest guestworker program never passed by Congress.

Please take a moment to send a message to Congress about H.R. 6206!

*The H-1B visa was created in 1990, when President George H.W. Bush signed the Immigration Act of 1990. In the early 2000s, again at the urging of corporate lobbyists, another Bush administration unilaterally invented OPT to circumvent the H-1B cap. The Obama administration then expanded it in 2008, allowing aliens admitted on an F-1 student visa to work for up to three years after graduating (while still under their "student" visa).