Diane Alden
Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2003

Part I: Dumping the Third World on the West

H-1B and L-1 Visas: A Bipartisan Approach for Killing Off the Middle Class Who is the cheap labor lobby? That lobby includes limousine liberals like Bill Gates and nominal conservatives such as Michael Barone. In addition, the lobby involves nice upper middle class people who need inexpensive childcare workers, domestics and gardeners.

In the scheme of things, they are small potatoes. The big fish are the restaurant and hotel industry, unions, the technical industry, especially information technology, insurance companies, corporate agriculture, universities hungry for new money and new blood, the meat-packing industry and sweat shop clothing manufacturers helped along by the abstract and mechanical charitable policies of some American churches.

Then of course the 15,000 immigration lawyers, and public interest law firms for which they toil, do indeed work overtime trying to convince politicians and America that the influx of immigrants has absolutely no negative effects on America or American workers.

The lawyers tell the world that immigrants pay more in taxes than they collect in welfare benefits or social services. After perusing the numbers, I can understand why Shakespeare admonished, "Kill the lawyers."

Immigration lawyers will crunch numbers but they don’t want to discuss the impact of unrestricted immigration on the body politic or the cohesion and future progress of America and those born here.

They also won’t tell you that the rule of law is being twisted and contorted in order to satisfy special interests, the cheap-labor lobby, and the economic and political establishment. As the state of Minnesota discovered in 2000, large public interest law firms will sue state social services for failing to tell people in eight different languages what their benefits and services might be.

The Old H-1B Gimmick

Among the most dishonest techniques the cheap-labor lobby uses to further its agenda is the visa system. Open the big carpetbag containing visas and you will find the H-1B and L-1.

Corporate America seems to chew up and spit out technical people like a reformed smoker chomps gum. Evidence mounts that corporations ask and receive, from Congress and the system, the expansion of these particular visa practices.

The result is a flood of cheap labor into the U.S., with ensuing depressed wages not just for American workers but for immigrants as well. It amounts to indentured servitude for the visa holder and the practice of training their replacements for native-born workers. All this is done at the expense of the American middle class. (More on this later.)

The misuse of the visa system is devastating the computer job market and keeping wages artificially low and the visa holders themselves as indentured servants to the economic oligarchy.

Not a few economic analysts believe that part of our present economic problems is a result of distorting the market by using cheap labor practices to keep wages down. While that may also keep down costs for corporate America, it has absolutely nothing to do with the free market and the economic progress of native-born Americans.

It has everything to do with corporatism, as opposed to free-market capitalism, and the convenient collusion between government and business. While that is nothing new, it is now the middle and upper middle class feeling the pain generated by that collusion.

Technical immigrants on H-1B visas may not receive food stamps or free medical benefits; however, they are replacing American-born programmers and technicians because they will work for a third to half less. When they lose a job, H-1Bs are out of luck because of the way the system is set up. Those who have the money to return to their country of origin are lucky, but most stay on in the U.S. illegally.

Keeping the above in mind, I like to refer to the economic ruling class and political oligarchy as the "let’s kill the middle class" lunch bunch. It is alive and well and some of the names in this bunch would surprise you. It isn’t just Ted Kennedy, Dick Gephardt, Bill Clinton and Tom Daschle who apparently harbor a desire to strangle the middle class.

Among those who think importing cheap labor is peachy-keen is President Bush, at least before Sept. 11, 2001. According to the Washington Times shortly before that fateful day, Bush said, "We ought not to penalize an employer who is trying to get a job done, who hires somebody who is willing to do ‘that’ kind of work."

"That" kind of work is what native-born Americans supposedly don’t want to do. President Bush is misinformed if he thinks immigrant labor simply does what native-born Americans don’t want to do.

There is no shortage of American-born labor, there are just far too many employers willing to support and demand the admission of wave after wave of illegal, legal, asylum seekers and refugees in order to suppress wages to keep down costs and enhance their bottom line.

What that does, however, is to further the meltdown of the middle class. It also disallows the "poor," even the immigrant poor, from a chance to earn wages that keep up with costs and allows them to get ahead.

Well-known conservatives like tax-reform expert Grover Norquist have petitioned the U.S. Congress to expand the appalling H-1B or L-1 visa system. They employ the myth that there are not enough highly skilled technical workers with new skills coming along in the U.S. to accommodate the needs of industry. It is a convenient myth for the Republican establishment to cling to.

Even in the current DIFFICULT economic times the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, under Norquist, is demanding visas to import 115,000 techies per year.

In fact, some of our conservative "saviors" are "meatpacking" American white-collar middle class jobs into oblivion in the same fashion that jobs in meatpacking went the way of the buffalo in the 1980s.

Thus, once relatively high-paying blue collar jobs became benefit-free, low-paying, dangerous jobs that have a turnover rate of 50 percent to 100 percent in 2003. Meatpacking is also the most dangerous occupation outside police and fire service.

According to an AP report, Tyson Foods is facing cheap labor meltdown as the Department of Justice discovered that Tyson actively recruits illegal cheap labor through an employment service. It would seem that the days of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” are returning to the U.S. thanks to the corporate mercenary class and feckless politicians.

What is really scary, however, is that "conservative" leaders who should know better are begging for more H-1B visas. They include Republican Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. Frist is guiding an increase in H-1B visas through the Senate.

The immigration apologists and the cheap labor club are either largely ignorant of the facts OR, knowing the facts, they believe that whatever corporate America wants, corporate America should get and by gosh the federal government is there to please.

But to call this the "free market"? I don’t think so.

Evidently, the pack of them have not read the testimony of Dr. Norman Matloff before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Immigration.

Dr. Matloff is a professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of California at Davis. His documented and massive study titled "Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage" reveals that the U.S. does not have a "critical labor shortage" in technical areas and that there are enough native-born TRAINED Americans to fill jobs that may be available.

Furthermore, it is the economic immigrant from places like India and Pakistan who suffers the most. Everyone with a computer should read the study, which may be found online. It is devastating.

According to Matloff:

There is a broad consensus that the H-1Bs are indeed exploited in terms of wages and working conditions. This was found in

• the study at UCLA, which found that the immigrant engineers were paid 33% less than comparable Americans

• the study at Cornell University, which found underpayment of H-1B programmers and engineers by 20-30%

• my study at UC Davis, finding that immigrant programmers and electrical engineers were paid 15-20% less than comparable Americans

• the report by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which found that the computer-related H-1Bs were paid a median of $53,000 per year, far below the national median of $66,000 for this field

• the audit done by the Department of Labor, finding that 19% of the H-1Bs were not even paid the salaries promised by the employers on the visa application forms

• the report by the National Research Council, which found that ''H-1B workers requiring lower levels of IT skill received lower wages, less senior job titles, smaller signing bonuses, and smaller pay and compensation increases than would be typical for the work they did''

• articles in respected, pro-business publications such as Forbes Magazine (''Indian programmers working in the U.S. on temporary H-1B visas typically earn 25% to 30% less than their naturalized colleagues'') and the Wall Street Journal (''Recruiting foreign talent is cheaper than hiring Americans'')

• statements by the H-1Bs themselves, who have formed the national organization ISN (www.isn.org) with a goal of persuading Congress to reform the program

One need not even use data sets to see the problem. Most H-1Bs are de facto indentured servants, unable to switch jobs. Thus they cannot leave for a higher-paying job elsewhere, nor can they negotiate higher wages with their present employers by threatening to leave. So, they have lesser opportunities than do normal workers who are free to move about in the market. Thus it is indisputable, from basic economic principles, that on average they are making less money than they would if they had their freedom.

So it is that in the last 20 years the fiction was created that there is a shortage of American workers to do certain jobs. That fiction benefited the economic and political elite as the importation of cheap labor helped the bottom line, voting blocs were created and, for the most part, states bore the social costs for the federal government’s "big heart."

In fact, we have witnessed the dumping of large numbers of humanity from Third World cultures for social, economic and political reasons.

This is not class warfare; this is about pointing out how the system has been warped by the continued misuse of influence and the law in order to give special privilege to one group of Americans over another. Let’s not mention turning simple justice and the rule of law on its head.

Why does corporate America import cheap labor using the visa system while it creates a class of indentured servants imported from other countries at the expense of the American middle and lower classes? Why does government approve? The corporate bottom line and the benefits and contributions accrued to the political oligarchy is why.

Inside the High-Tech Jungle

The case of Siemens, Inc. is revealing. It exposes the big lie projected by the cheap-labor lobby. It is not merely anecdotal information, as Matloff and Harvard’s George Borjas have shown in their studies on the H-1B visa and various immigration issues that impact the working class and the taxpayer.

Organizations which have a quantity of documented data include FAIR and the Center for Immigration Studies. But for those who consider the latter two biased, they cannot quibble with Matloff and Borjas.

Pick a company, Siemens, Aetna or GE Capital, the royal screwing continues apace.

Mike Emmons, formerly with Siemens, Inc., told his story on national TV and on the Barry Farber Show. According to Emmons, his former employer, Siemens ICN and Tata Consulting, an Indian consulting firm, used the congressional L-1 visa to replace 20 American computer techies with Indians.

Specifically, L-1 Intra-company transfer visas were used by Tata Consulting to bring foreigners from Tata Consulting India to Tata Consulting U.S.A. These so-called consultants are then sold off to American businesses, Siemens ICN in Lake Mary, Fla., and San Jose, Calif.

Emmons states: "Management mandated we train our foreign replacements, then Americans were shown the door. It was the most demoralizing thing I have ever experienced." Similar cases at Aetna have recently come to light as well.

• Under the L-1 intra-company transfer visa, consulting companies (mainly from India) can import as many "American replacement workers" as they need. There are absolutely NO constraints on the quantities they can import into our country.

• There are no salary constraints, as the H-1b is supposed to have.

• The INS provides easy mechanisms to bulk import replacement workers using the INS blanket petition. "[U]nder the L-1 ‘intra-company transfer’ visa foreigners can come into the country and then demand that current employees train them."

Mr. Emmons is understandably upset. What one does when one is upset, of course, is to contact one’s political representatives to get some kind of simple justice. This is what happened to Mr. Emmons and others like him when they petitioned for a redress of grievances.

"For five months, every week, I contacted the offices of U.S. Representative John L. Mica (Florida District 7) and Senator Bob Graham. We begged and pleaded with them to help American citizens but they just turned a deaf ear. They don't care about us, they care about one thing and one thing only and that is corporate campaign funds and the possible votes."

Furthermore, "Mica called me in September when my flyer reached a man whose son had been displaced after he trained his Indian replacement (at GE Capital). That man wrote Mica with displeasure in his immigration voting record. Why did Mr. Mica contact me? It's clear now, to shut us up so he could get reelected and continue to get those campaign dollars. Representative Mica and Senator Graham know what they are doing, they have known for quite some time, but helping American citizens is not their business. Their business is the collection of campaign funds."

In the economic and political quest for "globalization" or cheap labor or "diversity" or campaign funds, as the case may be, our elite have exhibited thoughtless disregard for our national well-being and the individuals who make up the body politic once known as the American citizenry.

But what the heck! Mr. Emmons and his 20 co-workers at Siemens are merely collateral damage in the junk bond world of globalization and social diversity.

Meanwhile, a computer engineer who wishes to remain anonymous used to work for the insurance giant Aetna. He wrote: "I'm in the computer programming field. I'd been with Aetna for 4 years, at about the midpoint (nowhere near the maximum) of my salary range. In December, Aetna cut several hundred Information Technical people. We'd been told that "these positions were being eliminated." Of my group of nine, three (including myself) were among those let go in December. As of today, I've yet to land an interview."

Finally he states, "This morning I responded to a blind ad (placed by an agency) for a programmer with medical claim experience. I received a reply this afternoon from the recruiter. Take a guess as to the hiring company. You guessed it, Aetna!"

All this is happening at the expense of American integration, cohesion and prosperity for the vast majority of Americans who are trying to hang on to their niche in the middle class. However, there are class action lawsuits being considered under the RICO statutes.

This is what meatpacking giant Tyson Foods is facing. If the lawsuit is decided in favor of the former employees of Tyson under RICO, they will collect TREBLE damages. Perhaps the American programmers and engineers need to consider something similar against the collusion between the feds and some of the buccaneers of corporate America.

Behind the Corporate and Federal Blarney

According to Dr. Matloff, behind "The hidden agenda … which began in 1997 turned out to be to leverage Congress to increase the yearly quota of H-1B work visas, under which employers were importing tens of thousands of programmers to the U.S. each year. The campaign succeeded, with President Clinton signing the increase into law in October 1998. Yet in 1999 the industry started calling for even further increases in the visa quota, which it attained in October 2000."

Matloff adds: "The fact that the industry cries of ‘shortage’ were nothing more than a political ploy was illustrated by the fact that heavy layoffs in the industry began around January 2001 … two months after the industry lobbyists were insisting to Congress that there was a ‘desperate’ shortage (and nearly a year after the NASDAQ stock index started falling). In the economic slowdown of 2001, employers became even pickier than before."

Notwithstanding, the cheap-labor lobby is still demanding that we import more H-1B techies.

The H-1B visa holders continue to arrive, but don’t blame the immigrant engineers and programmers. Blame corporate America and the federal government as they conspire to take advantage of all of us for their own base reasons.

Part III: States of Disunion

Footnote 1. Roy Beck, NumbersU.S.A.

To comment, write alden@newsmax.com or visit my Web site at www.aldenchronicles.com.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Immigration/Borders

Editor's note:
"Let Freedom Ring" – Sean Hannity reveals how to triumph over the left