Thread: Bank of America cancels visa-holders' job offers

Bank of America cancels visa-holders' job offers
By Christina Rexrode - The Charlotte Observer
Published: Tue, Mar. 10, 2009 08:03AMModified Tue, Mar. 10, 2009 08:04AM

Bank of America Corp. has been forced to withdraw job offers to a small number of foreign-born business students, the latest sign of the government's tightening hold on the banking industry.

A provision of last month's massive stimulus bill, the Employ American Workers Act, essentially forbids banks that receive government money from hiring workers with H-1B visas for two years. Those visas allow companies to temporarily hire educated foreign workers for specialized occupations, and are often used in fields like technology and medicine when companies can't find American workers to fill the jobs.

The H-1B visas aren't normally such a point of contention for banks; even the largest users of the program, such as JPMorgan Chase & Co., apply for only a few hundred visas each year. But banks are under increasing scrutiny from legislators who loaned them billions in taxpayer dollars, and the industry's thousands of newly laid-off workers aren't all feeling kindly toward their foreign colleagues.


The two senators who co-sponsored the Employ American Workers Act rode that sentiment last month, when they inserted the law into the stimulus bill.

“While we are suffering through the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the very least we can do is to make sure that banks receiving a taxpayer bailout are not allowed to import cheaper labor from overseas while they are throwing American workers out on the street,â€

Good, good, and GOOD!!!

And how much do we want to be bet that they will have NO trouble whatsoever in finding plenty of qualified Americans to fill those jobs?

[quote]
Immigration advocates offer a scathing assessment of the new law, calling it jingoist and divisive. They also say it's counterproductive, because it prevents banks from hiring the best workers – which they'll need if they're going to escape the global financial crisis.

“If Bank of America found this one guy in England who they thought would be the guy who could solve this crisis, they couldn't hire him,â€

Wow! Senators Sanders and Grassley working together on something like this.

This sends a very strong signal to the mass immigration lobby.

With people from the left and right working together on these measures, the opposition is in trouble.

W

[quote]“If Bank of America found this one guy in England who they thought would be the guy who could solve this crisis, they couldn't hire him,â€