CIS Report on H-1B Visa Abuses

A disturbing report from the Center For Immigration Studies.

This report details how American businesses abuse the H-1B Visas designed for foreign/guest workers to come to the US for employment of higher skilled jobs, when businesses cannot find Americans to do the work...this report shows us that businesses are using legal and illegal immigrants to do "classified" work with very low pay; how businesses are lying to the Dept. of Labor on the level of skill and wages for these workers.

Grab a cup of coffee before you read this report. It's long but well worth the time.

Some key findings:

Very few H-1B workers are "highly-skilled." Employers who used the Department of Labor’s skill-based prevailing wage system classified most workers (56 percent) as being at the lowest skill level (Level I) as did most State Employment Security Agency (SESA) wage determinations (57 percent). This suggests that most H-1B computer workers are low-skilled workers who make no special contribution to the American economy, or that employers are deliberately understating workers’ skills in order to justify paying them lower salaries.

According to the applications filed in 2005, it appears that employers may be significantly understating what U.S. computer workers are earning in order to justify paying low wages to H-1B guestworkers in those occupations. In FY 2005, H-1B employer prevailing wage claims averaged $16,000 below the median wage for U.S. computer workers in the same location and occupation.

90 percent of H-1B employer prevailing wage claims for programming occupations were below the median U.S. wage for the same occupation and location, with 62 percent of the wage claims in the bottom 25th percentile of U.S. wages.

While higher than the prevailing wage claims, the actual wages reported for H-1B workers were significantly less than those of their American counterparts. Wages for H-1B workers averaged $12,000 below the median wage for U.S. workers in the same occupation and location.

The reported wages for 84 percent of H-1B workers were below the median U.S. wage; 51 percent were in the bottom 25th percentile of U.S. wages.

Many employers make prevailing wage claims using wage sources that are not valid under the law. The Department of Labor routinely approves prevailing wage claims based on these invalid sources.

If that's not enough to get your blood boiling, further reading is required:

Observations
The preparation of this report involved many weeks of examining LCA data. While outside the scope of this report, a number of questionable patterns were found. Some of those patterns involving computer occupations are listed here in the hope that other researchers might investigate them.

Many employer addresses listed on LCAs are not bona fide business addresses. These include residences and mail drops.

The number of LCAs filed for certain states suggests that the number of H-1B workers exceeds the number of jobs. For example, the number of LCAs filed for New Jersey suggests that the number of H-1B programmers that are supposed to be working in the state greatly exceeds the number of programming jobs created in the state.

Some groups of LCAs contain identical data except for the employer contact information. One such group had five employers, three of which listed a residence as the business address.

Wages for computer programming managers were also significantly below the median for U.S. workers in those occupations.

WE have a problem here: It's called overly GREEDY American businesses. In a nutshell this report proves that some businesses will go to great lengths to deceive the government on what employment practices are commonly being abused. Using H-1B Visas to bring in low skilled immigrants robs our honest businesses of valuable help; this practice also robs the American people of an honest debate on the issue of illegal immigration.

One has to question how much of this report has been read by members of Congress, those who are in the process of seeing to it that even more jobs will be given away to immigrants...who apparently have more rights than we the American people have. Yet, the illegals are also being screwed over. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what's going on here. The business lobby is fueling these reform package deals for their own greedy benefit. No one wins here, folks. No one.

X Posted @ ARS