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Why The H-1B Visa Racket Should Be Abolished, Not Reformed

Ilana Mercer — Sat, 22 Apr 2017 04:12:49 +0000

Billionaire businessman Marc Cuban insists that the H-1B visa racket is a feature of the vaunted American free market. This is nonsense on stilts. It can’t go unchallenged.

Another billionaire, our president, has ordered that the H-1B program be reformed. This, too, is disappointing. You’ll see why.

First, let’s correct Mr. Cuban: America has not a free economy, but a mixed-economy. State and markets are intertwined. Trade, including trade in labor, is not free; it’s regulated to the hilt. If anything, the labyrinth of work visas is an example of a fascistic government-business cartel in operation.

The H-1B permit, in particular, is part of that state-sponsored visa system. The primary H-1B hogs—Infosys (and another eight, sister Indian firms), Microsoft, and Intel—import labor with what are grants of government privilege. Duly, the corporations that hog H-1Bs act like incorrigibly corrupt rent seekers. Not only do they get to replace the American worker, but they get to do so at his expense.

Here’s how:

Globally, a series of sordid liaisons ensures that American workers are left high and dry. Through the programs of the International Trade Administration, the Export-Import Bank, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, the International Monetary Fund, and other oink-operations, the taxpaying American worker is forced to subsidize and underwrite the investment risks of the very corporations that have given him the boot.

Domestically, the fascistic partnership with the State amounts to a subsidy to business at the expense of the taxpayer. See, corporations in our democratic welfare state externalize their employment costs onto the taxpayers.

So while public property is property funded by taxpayers through expropriated taxes; belongs to taxpayers; is to be managed for their benefit—at least one million additional immigrants a year, including recipients of the H-1B visa, are allowed the free use of taxpayer-supported infrastructure and amenities. Every new arrival avails himself of public works such as roads, hospitals, parks, libraries, schools, and welfare.

Does this epitomize the classical liberal idea of laissez faire?

Moreover, chain migration or family unification means every H-1B visa recruit is a ticket for an entire tribe. The initial entrant—the meal ticket—will pay his way. The honor system not being an especially strong value in the Third World, the rest of the clan will be America’s problem. More often than not, chain-migration entrants become wards of the American taxpayer.

Spreading like gravy over a tablecloth, this rapid, inorganic population growth is detrimental to all ecosystems: natural, social and political.

Take Seattle and its surrounding counties. Between April 2015 and 2016, the area was inundated with “86,320 new residents, marking it the region’s biggest population gains this century. Fueled in large part by the technology industry, an average of 236 people is moving to the Seattle area each day,” reported Geekwire.com. (Reporters for our local fish-wrapper—in my case, parrot-cage liner—have discharged their journalistic duties by inviting readers to “share” their traffic-jam stories.)

Never as dumb as the local reporters, the likes of Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Mark Zuckerberg and Marc Cuban are certainly as detached.

Barricaded in their obscenely lavish compounds—from the comfort of their monster mansions—these social engineers don’t experience the “environmental impacts of rapid urban expansion”; the destruction of verdant open spaces and farmland; the decrease in the quality of the water we drink and air we breathe, the increase in traffic and traffic accidents, air pollution, the cellblock-like housing erected to accommodate their imported I.T. workers and extended families, the delicate bouquet of amped up waste management and associated seepages.

For locals, this lamentable state means an inability to afford homes in a market in which property prices have been artificially inflated. Young couples lineup to view tiny apartments. They dream of that picket fence no more. (And our “stupid leaders,” to quote the president before he joined leadership, wonder why birthrates are so low!)

In a true free market, absent the protectionist state, corporate employers would be accountable to the community, and would be wary of the strife and lowered productivity brought about by a multiethnic and multi-linguistic workforce. All the more so when a foreign workforce moves into residential areas almost overnight as has happened in Seattle and its surrounds.

Alas, since the high-tech traitors can externalize their employment costs on to the community; because corporations are subsidized at every turn by their victims—they need not bring in the best.

Cuban thinks they do. High tech needs to be able to “search the world for the best applicants,” he burbled to Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

Yet more crap.

Why doesn’t the president know that the H-1B visa category is not a special visa for highly skilled individuals, but goes mostly to average workers? “Indian business-process outsourcing companies, which predominantly provide technology support to corporate back offices,” by the Economist’s accounting .

Overall, the work done by the H-1B intake does not require independent judgment, critical reasoning or higher-order thinking. “Average workers; ordinary talent doing ordinary work,” attest the experts who’ve been studying this intake for years. The master’s degree is the exception within the H-1B visa category.

More significant: THERE IS a visa category that is reserved exclusively for individuals with extraordinary abilities and achievement. I know, because the principal sponsor in our family received this visa. I first wrote about the visa that doesn’t displace ordinary Americans in … 2008:

It’s the O-1 visa.

“Extraordinary ability in the fields of science, education, business or athletics,” states the Department of Homeland Security, “means a level of expertise indicating that the person is one of the small percentage who has risen to the very top of the field of endeavor.”

Most significant: There is no cap on the number of O-1 visa entrants allowed. Access to this limited pool of talent is unlimited.

My point vis-à-vis the O-1 visa is this: The H-1B hogs are forever claiming that they are desperate for talent. In reality, they have unlimited access to individuals with unique abilities through the open-ended O-1 visa program.

There is no limit to the number of geniuses American companies can import.

Theoretically, the H-1B program could be completely abolished and all needed Einsteins imported through the O-1 program. (Why, even future first ladies would stand a chance under the business category of the O-1A visa, as a wealth-generating supermodel could certainly qualify.)

Now you understand my disappointment. In his April 18 Executive Order, President Trump promised to merely reform a program that needs abolishing. That is if “Hire American” means anything to anybody anymore.

©2017 ILANA MERCER
The Daily Caller, Townhall.com, The Unz Review,
The American Thinker, The Libertarian Alliance,
The Liberty Conservative, Ricochet.com.
April 21

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H-1B Hogs Swindling ‘Average’ Americans

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 14 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The other day, John Miano of the Center for Immigration Studies pointed to the duplicity of “Microsoft’s attempts to downplay layoffs while calling on newly elected President Obama to provide more foreign labor.” Naturally, the man with the reverse-Midas touch can’t make labor materialize magically, but he could issue more H-1B visas.

Touted as a means of trawling for the best and the brightest, the H-1B swindle is anything but. “Ordinary talent doing ordinary work” is Professor Norm Matloff’s overall assessment of the H-1B crop. A longtime critic of the H-1B racket, Professor Matlof’s analysis has been cited extensively.

The 65,000 yearly recipients of H-1B visas are mostly “average workers.” H1-B recruits are supposed to posses at minimum a bachelor’s degree, or “graduate equivalent” work experience. The master’s is the exception within the H1-B visa category. In fact, twenty thousand additional H-1B visas are set aside for high-technology workers with the master’s degree. This year, 5,600 such applications were received.

The Department of Labor uses four levels of classification. The first two require little or no higher-order thinking. They are entry-level positions, which is where the vast majority of H-1B workers are concentrated. Very few, only 11 percent, fall into the top category and “plan and conduct work-requiring judgment and independent evaluation”—DOL’s words.

Three percent of a typical Microsoft H-1B visa intake are level four workers—i.e., do work that requires independent judgment. Among the companies that push the hardest for expanding the H-1B program, level-four workers entrusted with critical reasoning are rare.The O-1 visa is the visa reserved for individuals with extraordinary abilities.

Immigration lawyers have made it their business to navigate the labyrinth of visa programs. According to one such law firm, Houston-based Zhang & Associates, the O-1 visa:

…is a nonimmigrant status category for aliens of extraordinary ability in the sciences, the arts (including the television and motion picture industry), education, business, and athletics. This is an employment-related status that allows qualified aliens to live and work in the United States. An O-1 petition is sponsored by an American employer.

More significantly, there is no cap on the number of O-1 visa entrants allowed. Access to this limited pool of talent is unlimited.Zhang confirms that “O-1 applicants are not subject to any cap or quota. Each case is considered on its individual merits; the total number of O-1 applicants that year does not affect one’s chance of approval.”

My point vis-à-vis the O-1 visa is this: The primary H-1B hogs—Infosys (and another eight, sister Indian firms), Microsoft, and Intel—are forever claiming that they are desperate for talent. But, in reality, they have unlimited access to individuals with unique abilities through the open-ended O-1 visa program ─ that is if they really wanted it.

Granted, the O-1 visa application process is not as easy to scam as the H-1B program. But immigration lawyers are doing their best to overcome this obstacle. Zhang boasts that in the case of a client it calls “Mr. Gao,” a mere master’s degree, one publication and an approved patent did the trick. And VDARE.COM’s Rob Sanchez has reported a case in which an Argentine pin-up girl got an O-1.

A recently published investigation by The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which oversees [the H-1B program], found a fraud rate exceeding 20 percent, with violations ranging from nonexistent businesses being granted visas, to phony job descriptions. [Lou Dobbs, November 1, 2008]

Whether they are capable of complex conceptualization or not, recipients of the H-1B visa are, nevertheless, getting a good deal. Visa advocates perpetuate the tall tale this visa provides a steady supply of the super-smart; visa opponents, for their part, like to cry croc about exploitation and slave-labor. I guess they think that misplaced compassion adds force to their arguments.

H-1B visa holders are not paid inferior wages. From the fact that an oversupply of high-tech workers has lowered wages for all techies, it does not follow that these (average) men and women are being exploited. Rather, it is the glut of average worker bees—their abundance—that has depressed wages.

(Incidentally, the Bureau of Labor Statistics confirms that wages for computer programmers have been falling. All the while industry whines about labor shortages. Shouldn’t a labor shortage be pushing wages up?)

Before dissolving in puddles of (misplaced) pity, remember: Voluntary exchanges are by definition advantageous to their participants. They involve giving up something one values less for something one values more and finding someone else with “opposite valuations.”

The H-1B visa holder forfeits his (apparently unexceptional) labor for a salary many times the salary he’d get in India or China or Pakistan. If he were not incalculably better off than he was in his previous life, he would not have taken a calculated risk in a plush American office.

The benefits to “lazy” locals, left out of the decision-making loop, are less obvious—unless one considers the joys of a “diverse” work force. These can entail anything from critical communication glitches, to cries of “Allahu Akbar” from the company’s “multidenominational” (curiously monopolized) prayer and meditation rooms, to experiencing “Islamic toilet etiquette” (Jamal carrying a cup of water along to the john).

Theoretically, the H-1B program could be abolished and all needed Einsteins (and pin-up girls) imported through the O-1 program. They just need to demonstrate “extraordinary ability.”

But industry lobbyists never suggest this. Funny thing.

The yearly quota of 65,000 H-1B visas is usually filled on April 1 of every year, which is the date the US Citizenship and Immigration Services begins accepting applications for the new yearly allotment. So far only about 13,500 such requests have been received, an indication of how bad the job market is (or how good the jobless recovery, if you follow establishment economists).

Of one thing you can be sure: There are a lot more than 13,500 unemployed, average but adequate American workers who’d jump at the opportunities being “outsourced.”

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