Thread: Report: India’s H-1B Companies Ask Labor Department to Let Foreign Workers Stay amid

Report: India’s H-1B Companies Ask Labor Department to Let Foreign Workers Stay amid Crash

April 3, 2020

Neil Munro


Altaf Qadri/AP Photo


The India-based NASSCOM business lobby is asking the Department of Labor to help the lobby keep its huge workforce of Indian H-1B temporary workers in American jobs throughout the coronavirus crash, according to a report in the Times of India newspaper.

“Everyone that has been involved in the H1-B program … has skirted the rules to stay in the United States,” said one lobbyist. “These companies do not want to have to fire these [H-1B] workers and send them back home — they want to hold them here” so they can grab jobs in the recovery, he said.
Labor Department officials declined to provide any information about the NASSCOM lobbying and declined to say if the agency would help businesses change the paperwork that allows fired H-1Bs to stay in the United States. The Indian report did not say if the NASSCOM lobbyists met with Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia.

If the administration moves forward in relaxing regulations governing the H-1B program amid spiking unemployment, “get ready for the pitchforks,” said Kevin Lynn, founder of the U.S. Tech Workers group that opposes the H-1B program. “When people have nothing left to lose, they will lose it — and they will direct it at the elites.” He continued:

On March 27, a friend of mine was fired after giving an hour of “knowledge transfer” to her [H-1B] replacement who came from overseas. Now she’s unemployed at a time when ten million other Americans have filed for unemployment. She doesn’t get to participate in the American Dream. Instead of being a member of the middle class, she’s a member of the financially impoverished class. And in America, to be without a job means you’re out of the pecking order, you’re on the low run, and in American today, that could be years, if not decades. The pitchforks are coming out because people are nine meals away from revolution.

The NASSCOM business association asked Labor Secretary Scalia to allow their imported H-1B visa workers to work at home during the coronavirus epidemic, said the Times of India.

The request seems like a minor accommodation in the coronavirus epidemic. But it is political dynamite because any concessions will help the U.S. and Indian companies keep blocs of laid-off H1-B workers in the United States so they can take many good jobs when the nation climbs out of the coronavirus hole.

There is much evidence that President Trump recognizes the sensitivities of this issue. On April 2, his deputies reversed a plan to import more H-2B blue-collar workers in the crisis. The sudden reversal came after an April 1 press conference where Trump dodged two questions about white-collar visa workers.

NASSCOM’s request to change the H-1B process creates extra problems for politicians.

The H-1B is the largest of the many visa programs — OPT, H4EAD, L-1, TN, CPT, E-3, B-1, — which keep roughly one million Indian contract workers, plus more than 200,000 migrants from China and other countries, in a wide variety of white-collar jobs throughout the United States. Few of the H-1Bs are more skilled than American graduates, and most are rated as “Entry-Level” or “Qualified” workers in the H-1B process.

Roughly 100,000 new H-1B workers arrive each year. These contract workers have to go home after six years unless their U.S. employer nominates them for a green card.

CEOs like to tout payroll savings when they announce H-1B contracts to Wall Street stick-pickers. But the short-term savings are typically wiped out by lower productivity, lower innovation, higher training costs, and massive featherbedding among Indian contractors, say Americans who have helped import H1-B workers. CEOs ignore those long-term costs because they are principally trying to jack up stock values, said one person in an office which tracked the costs of H-1B workers.

But managers and human resources (HR) staff also like to import blocs of H-1Bs because they are too complacent to bother recruiting and managing independent and innovative American professionals, said other U.S. managers and tech workers. NASSCOM’s H-1Bs workers are an easy temptation for the MBAs who prefer to spend more weekend time on their boat


https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2...ay-amid-crash/

NO!

Send them home!

We have our own out of work and the State Department needs to set up a Central Weblsite for employers to post jobs and let American's apply for those jobs.