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Better H-1B Visa Is On All Thinking Persons Wishlist

By Joe Guzzardi

Polling shows that 72 percent of likely voters think the country is headed in the wrong direction. No other conclusion could possibly be reached. Inflation is up 8.5 percent since March 2021. At the pump, AAA calculates that the average price per gallon is $4.12, compared to $2.86 a year ago. The Southwest Border is a sieve; record high numbers of illegal immigrants, including single adult males and unaccompanied minors, continue to enter at will. Despite White House denials, rumors persist that the U.S. will soon send soldiers to the Ukraine.

Inflation, the porous border and Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine have kept another persistent problem out of the headlines – the continued displacement of qualified U.S. tech workers from their well-paid, white-collar jobs. Attribute the blame to the cheap-labor-addicted employers who significantly underpay their foreign-born workers. In December 2021, an Economic Policy Institute report coauthored by Ron Hira and Daniel Costa found that thousands of skilled migrants with H-1B visas working as HCL Technologies subcontractors at well-known corporations like Disney, FedEx and Google have been underpaid by at least $95 million. The victims are the underpaid H-1B employees, the displaced U.S. tech workers and others in related fields whose working conditions are downgraded when employment-based visa workers are underpaid without consequence.

For more than 30 years since the Immigration Act of 1990 created the H-1B visa, Congress has winked at users’ rule-bending year after year. By ignoring the deeply rooted problems in how the H-1B employment-based visa is acquired, Congress invites more of the same manipulation. To wit, during 2022’s first few months, criminal charges were filed against Bay Area fraudsters – two pairs of two individuals each – who gamed the complex H-1B rules for substantial financial gain.

The first case occurred in February when federal government officials accused two South Bay residents, Namrata Patnaik and Kartiki Parekh, of submitting 85 fraudulent H-1B visa applications. The visa scam was linked to other crimes that eventually led to $7 million in ill-gotten gains. The indictment charged that from 2011 through April 2017 Patnaik and Parekh submitted the duplicitous applications for foreign workers sponsored by PerfectVIPs, a San Jose-based semiconductor company. The company CEO was Patnaik, and the human resources manager, Parekh. Patnaik laundered proceeds of the visa fraud. In all, the indictment included three counts of visa fraud and one count of money laundering.

The second case, perpetrated by Elangovan Punniakoti and Mary Christeena over the decade that ended in 2020, involved 54 fraudulent H-1B visa applications that were sponsored by an IT staffing firm, Innovate Solutions. Punniakoti and Christeena were chief executive officer and president, respectively. The accused swindlers also were responsible for stating in applications that a foreign worker would be working on an internal project for Innovate Solutions, despite knowing that no such project existed. Visa fraud and money laundering carry ten-year, or longer, prison sentences, and hefty six-figure fines.

The solutions to a more functional H-1B visa, or at least guidelines to the remedies, may sound straightforward, but would be difficult to put into effect. The powerful, deep-pockets Silicon Valley lobby has Congress wrapped around its little finger. Nevertheless, here are a few starting points to consider should a pro-American worker Congress take over in 2022: end the current lottery, and replace it with a merit-based system. Specifically and unequivocally define what task a specialty worker performs to prevent marginal workers with average skills from taking an American’s job, and strengthen the Department of Homeland Security’s onsite enforcement powers so that agents can assure that an H-1B worker is actually performing the job identified on his application.

More important, end the H-1B’s dual-intent feature that allows what should be temporary workers – nonimmigrant workers – to apply for a permanent Green Card. And most important, to remove the well-earned, accurate perception that the U.S. government sanctions modern day, indentured servitude labor conditions, take control of the H-1B visa away from the employer. As the H-1B regulations currently stand, the employee is beholden to his employer because he, the employer, controls the visa and therefore foreign-born workers’ immigration status. If, in the employer’s view, the employee isn’t toeing the company line, whatever it may be, the employer can threaten him with a call to DHS, and recommend removal.

The wish list for cleaning up the H-1B visa is long, and while the Biden administration is in the White House, a pipe dream. But for GOP optimists who are looking ahead to November, and envision stumping on American job creation, an H-1B overhaul that benefits U.S. workers would be a good platform to adopt.

PFIR analyst Joe Guzzardi writes about immigration issues and impacts. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.

Better H-1B Visa Is On All Thinking Persons Wishlist

American Workers Available Despite Labor Shortage Wailing

By Joe Guzzardi

Depending on who is asked, the Southwest border invasion represents either sovereign America’s demise or the long-awaited answer to a national crisis. For citizens who watch the nightly news and see a flood of foreign nationals pouring over the border, then released into the general public, the imagery is deeply disturbing. But for the Chamber of Commerce, some employers and the establishment media, the U.S. needs more immigration, not controlled borders. In their eyes, the arriving migrants represent a labor market boost that will end the alleged too-few-workers mantra that dominates the business news cycle.

In her op-ed titled “Democrats Are Missing the Bigger Immigration Picture,” The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell argued that more, not fewer, illegal immigrants should be President Biden’s goal. Rampell’s reasoning: the migrants “can fill critical labor market shortages.”

Not surprisingly, the economy, at least as it pertains to filling “critical labor market shortages,” is the exact opposite of how Rampell and other immigration advocates alarmingly describe the situation. The U.S. has a significant overage of potential 16-64 employment-age workers not in the labor force. The problem is that they’re sitting at home.

In their March 2022 analysis of the unemployment and labor force participation among foreign and U.S. born that drew from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Population Survey (CPS) data, Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) researchers Steven Camarota and Karen Zeigler found that the labor force participation rate, 62.4 percent in March, has been in steep, long-term decline for decades. The fourth quarter of 2021 showed that only 73.2 percent of the working, U.S.-born were in the labor force compared to 77.3 percent in 2000. If labor force participation had remained the same in 2021 as it was in 2000, the researchers concluded, nearly 7 million more U.S.-born Americans would have been in the labor force in 2021.

The labor force participation decline is especially pronounced among the U.S.-born without a bachelor’s degree. Adding mostly unskilled, undereducated migrants with limited English skills, who appear to be the majority among the arriving aliens, would represent more job competition, and ultimately more unemployment for noncollege-educated Americans, particularly already underserved blacks, Hispanics and other minorities.

For decades, working age men have been disappearing from the labor force at record rates. In 1965, the participation rate for prime-age workers ages 25-54 was 96.6 percent – almost all adult men worked. Today, the reported participation rate is about 89.3 percent which means that, based on today’s prime-age 25-54 male population of 64.5 million, only 57.6 million prime-age men are working or actively looking for work – labor force-attached in BLS terms. About 6.9 million men are, therefore, neither working nor looking for work. Conclusion: despite advocates’ hue and cry for more foreign-born labor, millions of potential domestic workers are available; employers must pay fair wages, and offer competitive employment conditions.

The side effects of such a large nonworking adult population are many; all of them bad. People need work to maintain self-esteem and to gain a sense of community involvement. Joblessness has contributed to an increase in domestic abusebetween intimate partners and to alcohol dependency. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warned that excessive alcohol consumption is responsible for more than 95,000 deaths in the U.S. each year, or 261 deaths per day. These deaths shorten the lives of those who die by an average of almost 29 years or a total of 2.8 million years of potential life lost. Alcoholism is a leading cause of preventable death in the U.S.

Drug-related deaths are at a record high; unemployment is a significant drug dependency risk factor. More than 100,000 people in the U.S. died of drug overdoses between May 2020 and April 2021, according to the CDC. This is an increase of 28 percent from the previous April 2019 to April 2020 period. Unemployment is also a variable in the rising homelessness population. If heads of households are unemployed for long periods, intergenerational poverty can become a long-term consequence. A child’s economic future is most often determined by his living circumstances until he reaches age 23.

The link between the border and U.S. jobs is inexorable. The CIS research team found that since 2000, legal and illegal immigration has added 8.8 million workers. Many in Congress advocate for more international workers even though millions of Americans are available to hire and, because they’re unemployed, are struggling financially and emotionally. Advocacy that ignores unemployment’s deadly consequences is misinformed, self-serving and dishonest.


Guzzardi writes about immigration issues and impacts for PFIR from Pennsylvania. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org. Subscribe at joeguzzardi.substack.com.