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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: 3, Funny) by xpda on Wednesday January 11 2017, @05:54AM
Why on earth would the USA want to import highly educated workers, anyway? Immigrants just spend most of their money in the U.S., really cluttering up our economy with unnecessary growth. Instead, we should pay them to work in India or China. Sending the money to India and China will keep our own economy lean and mean.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Wednesday January 11 2017, @02:42PM
One of the problems is that it isn't a permanent thing. The foreign workers are trained by Americans and then they return to their country to do the work remotely. If they stayed in the US and became citizens then it wouldn't be as big of a problem.
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