A law firm that thought it was demonstrating its cleverness in posting videos of its conference on business immigration instead showed how they cynically stack the deck against American job seekers for their clients.
YouTube Videos Reveal Anti-American Outsourcing
UC Davis professor Norm Matloff has long sounded the clarion call that the H-1B program and green cards have numerous loopholes employers can exploit. That exploitation allows them to easily avoid hiring more expensive American workers, particularly older ones, in favor of cheap foreign labor.
Videos from a Cohen & Grigsby event held in Pittsburgh on May 15th made it onto YouTube. The series of videos as described by Dr. Matloff proved to be more than just a promotional effort for the law firm:
This set of videos gave a dramatic inside look at some of the loopholes, especially in the case of the employer-sponsored green cards. Here you have lawyers openly stating that their goals are to (a) help employers avoid hiring Americans, and (b) help employers hire foreign nationals on the cheap–and to do all this FULLY LEGALLY.
Matloff listed several choice quotes from the video, including this one by one of Cohen & Grigsby’s partners, Larry Lebowitz:
And our goal is clearly, not to find a qualified and interested U.S. worker. And you know in a sense that sounds funny, but it’s what we’re trying to do here. We are complying with the law fully, but ah, our objective is to get this person a green card, and get through the labor certification process.
So certainly we are not going to try to find a place [at which to advertise the job] where the applicants are the most numerous. We’re going to try to find a place where we can comply with the law, and hoping, and likely, not to find qualified and interested worker applicants.
The videos have since been removed from YouTube, but not before being viewed by a lot of people, including CNN’s Lou Dobbs, who made this observation:
But there are two facts that people keep forgetting — seven out of 10 visa requests under the H-1B program come from Indian companies in the United States to provide employees to outsource to American companies and reduce wages.
And the other little minor item which is supposed to be high-skill jobs, four out of five jobs under the H-1B program are level-one jobs, not level four, i.e., low-skilled jobs, not high-skilled jobs. These are Americans trying to screw American workers.
And it just is as plain, straightforward and can anyone convince any of us that the president of the United States and this Senate with this sham amnesty program isn’t aware of these facts?
Both InformationWeek and ComputerWorld have noted how US Senators Charles Grassley and Lamar Smith have demanded investigations by Labor Secretary Elaine Chao.
Meanwhile, readers who hear about companies asking for expansions of H-1B and green card programs, as Microsoft and Google have done, should keep in mind just what the impact of such an expansion could be.
