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For the new political order taking shape in Washington, however, H-1Bs aren't quite welcome. Amid promises of sweeping changes to immigration policy, President-elect Donald Trump and his choice for attorney general, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), have tabbed the program for a major overhaul, and might even scrap it altogether. In the House, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) is on the same wavelength.
Trump has described H-1Bs as a "cheap labor program" subject to "widespread, rampant" abuse. Sessions co-sponsored legislation last year with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) to effectively gut the program; Issa, a congressman with Trump's ear, released a statement Wednesday saying he was reintroducing similar legislation called the Protect and Grow American Jobs Act.
Sessions and Issa's legislation primarily targets large outsourcing companies, such as Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services, that receive the vast majority of H-1B visas and use them to deploy workers to American companies seeking to cut costs. In 2015, the top 10 recipients of H-1B visas were outsourcing firms. As recently as 2013, the Justice Department, which Sessions stands to take over, settled with Infosys for $34 million in a visa fraud case.
If they were smart they'd change the program to maximize brain-drain from other countries by making H-1B a fast-track to citizenship instead of the 6+ year wait for a green-card that it now is. Bring in the best of them rather than the cheapest of them and let them compete on equal footing rather than the indentured servitude of the current H-1B program.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 11 2017, @03:05AM
There isn't any reciprocity. The American Empire has the money, and the H1Bs want the money. The H1Bs lie to get in and do the absolute minimum work required to extract the maximum amount of money from the Empire. This situation is what happens when one empire becomes dominant. Massive wealth inequality attracts barbarians who are interested in wealth extraction and nothing else.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday January 11 2017, @03:22AM
You characterize the H-1B workers a little differently than I would, but you do understand what H-1B is all about. Those workers hope to exploit the empire, the empire is definitely exploiting the workers, and their home countries manage to harvest several benefits from the program. If you read TFA, you know that most of those workers return home with training provided by US companies, to promote Indian businesses, or even to start their own businesses. In effect, we have trained our own future competition, and India is quite happy about that.
Individually, those workers range from despicable SOB's, to admirable men and women. As with any other class of people, you have to judge each one on his own merits. Let's not characterize the workers as lazy, or whatever other terms you might use for them, alright? Or, we might have to accept the world's judgement that Americans are lazy, stupid, arrogant, etc ad nauseum.