Thread: Big Tech Fears Trump’s ‘America First’ Visa Reforms

by JOHN BINDER
14 Feb 2017
Washington, D.C.

A number of multinational tech companies fear what could be President Donald Trump’s next move on the issue of foreign guest worker visas that are allotted to corporations every year.

Under Trump’s drafted executive order, the H-1B visa, which Silicon Valley tech companies use to hire foreign high-skilled workers, would be reviewed “to make H-1B allocation more efficient and ensure that beneficiaries of the program are the best and brightest rather than arbitrarily distributed by lottery.”

Multinational tech giants based in India fear that the number of H-1B visas could be slashed under Trump or GOP legislation, a policy which Trump has said puts American workers first.

Tech outsourcing companies based out of India like Infosys, Cognizant, Tata Consultancy Services, and Wipro are all bracing for potential reforms in the H-1B visa, CNBC reported.

India’s corporations are particularly concerned about any reforms to the H-1B visa program, as workers from that country account for nearly 70 percent of all of the H-1B visas allotted every year, according to research by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS).

“Residents of Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka, as we will show, have 24 times the chance of being hired as an H-1B as the average resident of the world, excluding U.S. workers, who, of course, have zero chance of being hired in this program,” David North, an immigration expert with CIS, wrote.

Financiers in India voiced their concerns last month when they wrote about their fearfulness of H-1B visa reform under Trump.

“Immigration restrictions are the main source of India’s vulnerability,” the Chief India Economist with Nomura Sonal Varma wrote to clients, according to CNBC.

Likewise, Citi’s Director for India Research Surendra Goyal told clients that “Immigration reform remains an overhang to watch and likely a key theme for the IT services sector in 2017.”

Director of Governmental Affairs for NumbersUSA Rosemary Jenks told Breitbart Texas that Trump’s executive order draft is feared by multinationals for the specific reason that it throws a wrench in their current model where tech departments are handed over to consulting firms who then find cheap, foreign workers to fill job positions.

“These would be hurt the worst and fastest by what the executive order is proposing. Their whole business model goes out the window,” Jenks said in an interview.

Jenks warned that even if Trump does eventually sign the drafted order on the issue, it would not be the end-all solution to ending abuse within the H-1B visa system where older workers and STEM graduates are discriminated against.

“The executive order will not address all the problems with H-1B,” Jenks said. “It would be unfortunate if the only thing we did was fix some of the problems through executive orders.”

http://www.breitbart.com/texas/2017/...-visa-reforms/

We need to stop all visas except for extremely specialized skills that aren't available in the US. Obviously, IT is not one of them. All those visas should be stopped on the lack of need. Labor Department can do that with a simple ruling, once we get Puzder in there to do so.

Outsourcing Firms Called-out by White House after Trump H-1B Order



by JOHN BINDER
24 Apr 2017Washington, D.C


Outsourcing firms, which supply major U.S. companies with thousands of foreign workers, are being called-out by the Trump White House.

During a White House briefing on the issue of the H-1B visa, where some 650,000 foreign workers are in the U.S. at any given moment, specifically mentioned three outsourcing firms that are working to replace Americans with foreign labor: Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, and Cognizant.

“Just to illustrate a little bit more how the lottery works — so some companies oftentimes are called outsourcing firms,” the White House briefing statement reads.

“You may know their names well, but like the top recipients of the H-1B visa are companies like Tata, Infosys, Cognizant — they will apply for a very large number of visas, more than they get, by putting extra tickets in the lottery raffle, if you will, and then they’ll get the lion’s share of visas” the statement continues. “Which is very different than I think how most people think of the H-1B program — they imagine it for more — being for — again, they would think of it as being for skilled domestic work, rather than contract work.”

“And those three companies are companies that have an average wage for H1B visas between $60,000 and $65,000,” the statement read. “By contrast, the median Silicon Valley software engineer’s wage is probably around $150,000.”

The White House briefing went on to call out the abuses associated with the H-1B visa program, where companies like MassMutual Insurance hires Cognizant to fire hundreds of their American employees to hire cheaper, foreign workers to do their jobs.

“And you’ve seen some of these high-profile examples where you have career employees at a company who have been working there for 10, 20 years, and then they get laid off and they hire a contracting firm using H1B workers at much less pay,” the statement said. “And again, this is an issue that labor unions have called attention to for a long time.”

The White House also mentioned that reforms of the H-1B visa and other foreign guest worker visa programs must be accomplished through rulemaking, executive orders, and Congress.

Attorney John Miano, who co-wrote the H-1B exposé Sold Out with Michelle Malkin, told Breitbart Texas that the move by the Trump Administration is a step in the right direction, but said it was not the end-all-be-all to reform.

“It’s a step in the right direction that they’re calling attention to problems in the program. You can’t criticize them for doing that,” Miano said.

This year alone, Infosys, Tata Consulting Service, and Cognizant asked for a combined total of almost 44,000 H-1B visas, something Miano says is a misuse of what the program was intended for.

“One of the things is that we have this whole business of importing labor to fill jobs,” Miano told Breitbart Texas. “If this was supposed to be for jobs that Americans can’t fill, then this whole system of contract labor should not exist in H-1B. A lot of companies are doing this. It’s becoming labor brokerage.”

While the Trump Administration issued an executive order demanding a legal review by the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security and the Labor Department into abuses by H-1B visa program, as Breitbart News reported, Miano says more must be done.

“In reality, you have to tackle them by going through the regulations. They’re hundreds of pages long. It takes an army of lawyers,” Miano said. “The big problems in this program, the President doesn’t have the power to fix, a lot of this has to be done by Congress.”

http://www.breitbart.com/texas/2017/...mp-h-1b-order/

See also.

Indian Techies, IT Firms Fret As Trump Orders U.S. Visa Review
https://www.alipac.us/f12/indian-tec...review-346273/