[Legacy Report] ENGINEERS MEET IEEE-USA and H-1B Worker
About the Meeting:
The following includes the direction, goals and procedure to include Members in the process. The suggestion came from IEEE-USA.
To: New Jersey Legislators,
On behalf of the 8,100 New Jersey members of the IEEE, I want to ask you to oppose all efforts to expand the H-1B visa program. This temporary work permit is often used to replace American workers with cheaper foreign workers, few of whom are every allowed to become American citizens. The program is undermining America’s competitiveness and harming both American and foreign workers in this country.
As you know, a number of major corporations have recently announced major lay-offs of American workers. In each case, the Americans were replaced by H-1B workers, whom the Americans had to train. So far in 2015 Disney, Southern California Edison and Fossil have replaced over 1,200 Americans this way – and these are just the companies who announced their plans. In 2013 the top 15 outsourcing companies used 31,000 H-1B visas, 37% of all private sector visas, making outsourcing the single largest use of H-1B visas. These are not isolated cases, but rather the most common way H-1Bs are used.
And, as the Department of Justice recently confirmed, it is entirely legal.
H-1B visas are not immigration visas, so these new workers are not immigrants and cannot petition for citizenship. In fact the outsourcing companies sponsor almost none of their H-1b workers for green cards, without which H-1B workers cannot become Americans. But that is, of course, the point. If Disney, Southern California Edison and Fossil wanted to employ Americans, they would have kept the employees they had. The point of using H-1bs was to avoid hiring Americans … for jobs in America.
The H-1B is bad public policy and bad economic policy. If you want to add more skilled workers to the United States, add them as we have for the past 200 years: as citizens. That requires issuing green cards, not H-1Bs.
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- Clifton Memoril Library, New Jersey
- United States
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- Co-sponsored by Richard Tax