I remember some years ago when Dick Gephardt was running for president and talked about an international minimum wage – something that makes enormous sense. Oh well, now that he’s a lobbyist, he probably doesn’t care anymore! From Computerworld:
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) says that the H-1B program has created “multinational temp agencies” that undercut U.S. wages and discourage students from entering tech fields.
Schumer, speaking on the Senate floor in advance of its approval Thursday of $600 million for border security that includes an H-1B visa fee increase, said the H-1B program has morphed into program used to hire foreign tech workers “willing to accept less pay than their American counterparts.”
… The impact of the low-wage workers is also “discouraging many of our smartest students from entering the technology industry in the first place,” said Schumer. “Students can see that paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for advanced schooling is not worth the cost when the market is being flooded with foreign temporary workers willing do to tech work for far less pay.”
Schumer heads the Senate’s Immigration, Refugees and Border Security Committee, and is spearheading work on a comprehensive immigration bill. A bill isn’t expected until early next year, after the November election, but Schumer warned on Thursday that H-1B visa was “likely to be dramatically restricted” in the bill.
Out here on The Final Frontier of the Logging Industry, a traditional way of life practiced for generations since those beleaguered sailors ran out of beer and dumped The Pilgrims (who you callin’ illegal?) at Plymouth Rock… it has recently come to light that H1-B has been used to import workers to forest jobs once the livelihood practiced for generations, claiming as employers “claim” that in a region, a state and community built on a hundred and fifty years of getting logs out of the woods and turning them into boards so folks in Philadelphia can build houses utterly decimated by the widespread destruction of those jobs, leading many to abject poverty, divorce, homelessness drugs alcohol suicide etc., during the Clinton Years… they could find no “qualified workers”.
Here’s another little thing employers do. They hire J-1 workers through groups such as Council for Educational Travel U.S.A. to do part-time and temp jobs. I recently was reading about a dustup in Pennsylvania about this.
http://blogs.mcall.com/capitol_ideas/2010/07/thursday-morning-coffee-a-quick-fillup.html
I suspect there are students right here in the USA who wouldn’t mind those jobs packing candy.
They do it to get away from home for a few months and experience the USA while being cheated of their earnings by agencies that skim off their wages. How many of these students don’t go back home after the summer vacation?