The concept of H-1B visas is straightforward. The H-1B is the visa in which highly-skilled foreigners are fast-tracked to the head-of-the-line to enter the US. They are hired to fill jobs on a temporary basis for which there are no US workers.
Well, that’s the claim. And that claim is hogwash, according to a 2017 study.
A trio of researchers scrubbed the data. They claim that without this visa program, wages for American employees in H-1B related fields would be as much as five per cent higher. On top of that, the employment of American workers would be nearly 11% higher. In other words, H-1B visa workers are not so much filling vacancies, but instead are cheaper employment alternatives to American workers.
The Customs and Immigration Service explains there is an “annual numerical limit (cap) of 65,000 new statuses/visas each fiscal year. An additional 20,000 petitions filed on behalf of beneficiaries with a master’s degree or higher from a US institution of higher education are exempt from the cap.” An H-1B visa is awarded through a lottery and is good for three years. It is renewable for no more than three additional years for a total of six years. As many as 85,000 workers are permitted in the US each year under the H-1B visa program.
In the study, the trio found most H-1Bs are issued for computer-science related jobs like those found in Silicon Valley. According to press accounts, in the mid-2010s some of the biggest Silicon Valley tech firms began laying-off older Americans to cut employment costs. In return, many tech firms were bringing in lower-paid foreigners to fill the vacancies created by the laid-off higher-paid Americans.
Facts appear to bear this out. During the aughts, tens of thousands of US workers were sacked at Microsoft, Cisco, Symantec, HP, Qualcomm, Intel and elsewhere [here, here]. Many of these workers were older, higher-compensated employees. At the very moment they were laying off US workers, several Silicon Valley companies lobbied Congress to triple the H-1B visa cap from 65,000 to 195,000 annually to fill job vacancies.
During the same time Silicon Valley tech firms were laying off workers, the number of applications for H-1B visas tripled from about 65-70,000 annually to nearly a quarter-million. According to the National Foundation for American Policy, many of the same companies that laid-off US workers submitted H-1B visa applications, presumably to fill the many of the positions vacated by the layoffs. The foreign workers arriving in the US are locked-in to the sponsoring employers because the H-1B visa is assigned to the company, not the immigrant.
The number of H-1B visa applications have skyrocketed in the last couple of years. There were nearly 500,000 applications last year and more than 780,000 applications this year. An estimated 260,000 workers were laid off by tech companies in the past three years.
Some abuses of the H-1B visa program are downright brazen. For example, an organization brought in an untold number of immigrants to serve as medical instructors by claiming their skills were required at Adam University. Based in Denver, Adam University desperately needed instructors for its nursing program and it needed to hire immigrants because there were not enough US citizens to fill the positions.
Starting in 2007, Adam University began bringing in nurses from abroad to fill the vacant positions. This continued for about five years before a critical detail was discovered: Adam University didn’t exist. Yet, Colorado state officials and federal immigration officials green lighted the fictitious Adam University’s business plan.
A scheme was hatched to bring skilled nurses into the US using the H-1B visa program. At that time, there was no special visa program dedicated to immigrant nurses. However, applicants could be admitted as teachers of nursing. That was how the fabricated Adam University came into being.
Potential nursing instructors were told jobs paying as much as $72,000 annually at an American university were waiting for them. According to press accounts, most of the nurses came from the Philippines. They were charged nearly $7,000 by the agency to acquire an H-1B visa. Charging someone to acquire a visa is a violation of law.
Because Adam University didn’t exist, the high-paying jobs didn’t exist. Instead, this organization would represent the immigrant nurses as their employment agency and would hire-out the nurses to lower-paying healthcare positions. To add to the scam, agency officials would pocket as much as third of the immigrants’ wages.
Mark Hyman is a 35-year military veteran and an Emmy award-winning investigative journalist. Follow him on Twitter, Gettr, Parler, and Mastodon.world at @markhyman, and on Truth Social at @markhyman81.
Mark welcomes all news tips and story ideas in the strictest of confidence. You can reach him at markhyman.tv (at) gmail.com.