Republicans in Congress will soon have the opportunity to prove whether they do the bidding of their corporate contributors or side with their hardworking voters. The corporations are lobbying to extend the Clinton Administration law that raised the number of H-1B visas to 195,000 a year, which otherwise is scheduled to expire on September 30 and revert to the 1999 level of 65,000. . . .
It's a fiction that the United States suffers a shortage of skilled labor, and most H-1B aliens fill entry-level jobs. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment among American electronic engineers has soared to 7 percent, and among computer hardware engineers to 6.5 percent, both surpassing the national jobless rate of 5.8 percent. According to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), electrical and electronic engineers lost 241,000 jobs in the past two years, and computer scientists and systems analysts lost 175,000 jobs.
IEEE president John Steadman says he has "never heard" of such high unemployment, and that the wide-open importation of H-1B aliens has substantially contributed to the hardship of U.S. engineers and computer scientists. The result, he adds, is "a very substantial and negative effect on the economic conditions of the United States." . . .
The national media treat H-1B as a non-issue, but local newspapers across the country are full of reports about how American workers are laid off and replaced with foreign workers. The San Jose Mercury News found scores of complaints filed at attorneys' offices, the EEOC, and the Departments of Justice and Labor. A Dallas database administrator said, "One recruiter flatly told me they have 50 H-1Bs willing to work cheap ahead of me in line." . . .
This is not free-market economics. It is collusion between corporations that pour big money into politics to pass legislation that replaces American workers with foreign substitutes. The law keeps wages artificially low for the benefit of corporate profits.
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