Homeland Security announces steps against H1B visa fraud

Homeland Security announces steps against H1B visa fraud

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By Julia Edwards Ainsley
Reuters April 3, 2017
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FILE PHOTO: U.S. Department of Homeland Security emblem is pictured at the National Cybersecurity & Communications Integration Center (NCCIC) located just outside Washington in Arlington, Virginia September 24, 2010. REUTERS/Hyungwon Kang
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By Julia Edwards Ainsley

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced steps on Monday to prevent the fraudulent use of H1B visas, used by employers to bring in specialized foreign workers temporarily, which appeared to fall short of President Donald Trump's campaign promises to overhaul the program.

A White House official said Trump may still do more on the program.

Trump had promised to end the lottery system for H1B visas, which gives each applicant an equal chance at 65,000 positions each year.

Lobbyists for businesses who rely on H1B visas, commonly used by the tech sector, had expected Trump to upend the lottery in favor of a system that prioritized workers who are highly skilled and would be highly paid in the United States.

The lottery for fiscal year 2018 opened on Monday without changes.

The start of the lottery was seen by those watching the issue as the unofficial deadline for the Trump administration to enact H1B visa reform, and the failure to meet that deadline signals that Trump's promised overhaul of the system may be off the table or long delayed.

"More oversight is a good start, but employers can still use the program legally to depress wages and replace American workers. That falls short of the promises President Trump made to protect American workers," said Peter Robbio, a spokesman for Numbers USA, a Washington-based group that advocates for limiting immigration into the United States.

The Trump administration has taken other steps to crackdown on H1B visa abuse, such as issuing a Justice Department warning to employers and announcing plans to increase transparency on applicants.

"These are important first steps to bring more accountability and transparency to the H1B system," a White House official said. "The administration is considering several additional options for the president to use his existing authority to ensure federal agencies more rigorously enforce all aspects of the program."

Tech companies rely on the program to bring in workers with special skills and have lobbied for an expansion of the number of H1B visas awarded.

Proponents of limiting legal immigration, including Trump's senior adviser Stephen Miller, have argued the program gives jobs that Americans could fill to foreign workers at a less expensive cost.

The measures announced by DHS on Monday focus on site visits by U.S. authorities to employers who use H1B visas.

In future site visits, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agents will investigate incidents where an employer's basic business information cannot be validated; businesses that have a high ratio of H1B employees compared with U.S. workers; and employers petitioning for H1B workers who work off-site.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/homeland-...000725870.html

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The lottery for fiscal year 2018 opened on Monday without changes.

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Another failed campaign promise. The problems with the program should have been resolved before any 2018 applications were accepted.

Unfortunate. Perhaps the DOJ will keep them in line.

https://www.alipac.us/f12/doj-employ...ricans-345625/

Congress determines how many visas are issued each year, and DHS just complies with that number. DHS can do some enforcement of abuse, fraud and cheating within the program but neither DHS nor Trump can eliminate the H1B program, Congress has to do that.

As to firing Americans and replacing with them H1B visa workers, that element is not handled by DHS. It's handled by the Department of Labor. Trump still doesn't have his Cabinet Secretary for the Department of Labor confirmed yet. If Puzder had been confirmed, this aspect would already be a done and finished deal.

We'll see what Alexander Acosta can or will do on this once he's confirmed. He passed committee last Thursday, so he should be voted on by the Senate maybe sometime this week unless the Democrats decide to drag it out. We'll see what happens.

Trump will fix the H1B program. Trump doesn't want Americans being fired and replaced by visa workers, whether high-skilled, low-skilled, or otherwise. He doesn't want any unemployed or underemployed American anywhere competing with visa workers for any job in the United States.

But we always appreciate the Democratic Yahoo News staying on top of a situation they've never before shown any interest in whatsoever. I don't know where we'd be today with the DNC tracking our President and half-reporting the story with their bias against this Administration.

If it needed to be implemented in the first place, it should have been given a time period of about 5 - 7 years.

During that time, we should have made a concentrated effort to educate our own people to do the work.

Truthfully, I think we have a lot of people who can do this work. I have really talked with people who say some of these 'tech' workers are not as savvy as it is put up to be and many of them do have to be trained by those who are replacing them.

So, to fix it - begin phasing it out and allow it to operate for maybe 5 more years.

It's just suicide.

Our government is bringing, protecting, subsidizing the illegals to work at all jobs, but particularly the entry level jobs. Those are the places many young people begin their journey into the workforce.

So those jobs are taken by the illegals.

For those young people who are trained in the tech fields, their jobs are going to the asinine HB program.

So every wonder why young people want to sit and play video games, rather than go out looking for jobs that are non existent or that they will loose to an illegal when it shows up?

Ever wonder why so many young people don't go to college or tech school? They know they may not can get a job due to HB worker or will loose it and have to train their replacement.

Of course, that isn't the case with all of them - or even most of them - but it has to enter into the mindset of a lot of young people.

Our people already know how to do these things. There are a few skilled, special artisan construction type workers that the Europeans know better than we do, it's passed down through the ages of masons, stone-cutters, and other trade groups in Europe. But that's not who we're bringing over, you could count those on a couple of hands a year, short term specific projects.

Employers don't hire these workers because they need them, they hire them because they can and do so at a cheaper wage.