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Invasion of the Body-Shoppers
Special visa allows firms to fill jobs with foreigners for less
By John Lasker

In the age of the Great Recession, if you tell any well-educated and out-of-work professional from Greater Cincinnati that thousands of non-citizen foreigners with advanced skills are employed locally and making bank, they just might flip their lid.

And if you take into consideration that one of the globe’s largest outsourcing firms bringing these non-citizen guest workers to the United States has a major office in Milford, any unemployed Cincinnatian probably should hold onto to the top of their skull.

The visa bringing these foreigners to Cincinnati and across America is the H-1b, which allows American corporations to hire foreigners with advanced skills — mainly IT professionals, engineers and professors — to come work in the U.S. for six years.

Quietly, the H-1b been around for over two decades but is now gaining a notorious reputation because many labor and IT unions claim the H-1b has displaced American workers, depressed wages and exploited the foreigners who use an H-1b.

The crux of the problem, critics say, is that U.S. corporations are blatantly ignoring federal law requiring them to only hire an H-1b if there is a serious shortage of Americans with the same qualifications.

Also, critics allege American corporations utilize the H-1b to keep wages low; studies have shown that most H-1bs working in the IT sector are initially offered a wage that is thousands of dollars less than the prevailing wage for entry-level IT pros who are U.S. citizens.

Proponents of the H-1b, such as Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who has called for an “infiniteâ€