| Time | Text |
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H-1B Work Visas: A Miserable Fraud
00:04:54
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| There's been a lot of talk about H-1B work visas. | |
| 72.6% of the people who come in on them are Indians. | |
| 12.5% are Chinese. | |
| And only about 2% are white. | |
| But naturally, the sample visa you find on the internet is for a Frenchman. | |
| The whole thing is a miserable con on American workers. | |
| A way to bring in cheap foreigners to undercut wages. | |
| But how? | |
| Does it work? | |
| I thought a company couldn't hire H-1Bs unless it advertised for Americans and couldn't get them. | |
| Boy, was I wrong. | |
| Every year, hundreds of thousands of foreigners get jobs Americans never even heard about. | |
| What a miserable fraud. | |
| The original H-1 visa goes back to 1952 to let in foreigners of distinguished merit and ability to perform The law has been turned upside down. | |
| Now, unlike every other work visa, the more recently established H-1A and H-1B visas are set up to lead directly to permanent residency. | |
| And they are not limited to people of distinguished merit and ability. | |
| Believe it or not, even cooks and cashiers can get them. | |
| There's supposed to be an annual cap of 65,000 H-1B visas. | |
| President Clinton temporarily raised the cap for three years to 195,000, but caps don't mean much. | |
| Besides the 65,000, there are an additional... | |
| 20,000 visas for people who have earned a master's degree or higher in America. | |
| There is no cap at all on H-1Bs used for work in universities and research institutions. | |
| And these limits are only for newly issued H-1Bs, which are for three years. | |
| There's no cap on renewals. | |
| And that is how you get annual totals like these from 2016 to 2023. | |
| In 2023, the first figure of 118,948 is for brand new H-1Bs. | |
| That's almost 34,000 more than the theoretical limit of 85,000 if you add the two caps of 65,000 and 20,000. | |
| And as you can see, there were more than 260,000 H-1B renewals that year for a total number of 386,318. | |
| You're supposed to be able to renew a three-year H-1B only once for another three years. | |
| But there are all sorts of rules for getting around this. | |
| And foreigners, yes, foreigners can get special Defense Department H-1Bs that are good for 10 years. | |
| How many people are here on H-1B visas? | |
| That number is in this H-1B Authorized to Work report. | |
| But the most recent figure is only up to third quarter 2019, when there were 619,327 foreigners working here on H-1Bs. | |
| If you have one of those visas, you can bring over all your children under 21 and your spouse, and spouses can legally work. | |
| I bet you never even thought about that. | |
| According to some estimates, several hundred thousand spouses have jobs. | |
| Jobs, I suppose, Americans just won't do. | |
| As I mentioned, unlike other work visas, H-1Bs are meant to be a route to adjusting your status to Lawful Permanent Resident, or LPR. | |
| The estimated total number of H-1B non-immigrants who have adjusted status in fiscal year 2017 to 2019 is 96,798. | |
| That's more than $32,000 a year, which means that every year, just over 5% of H-1B workers get a green card and no longer need a visa at all. | |
| Next step, citizenship. | |
| Visas are supposed to go only for theoretical and practical application of highly specialized knowledge, but all sorts of people get them. | |
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Foreign Worker Headhunting
00:05:16
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| And an employer does not. | |
| I repeat, does not have to try to hire Americans first. | |
| All he has to do is fill in a Labor Condition Application, or LCA, online. | |
| It might take three minutes. | |
| It says the foreign worker will get the prevailing wage and that hiring a foreigner will not make working conditions worse for Americans. | |
| Who checks that? | |
| LCAs are reviewed by the department within seven working days for completeness and obvious errors or inaccuracies. | |
| That is bureaucraties for rubber stamp. | |
| Only if you have so many H-1B workers you are classified as H-1B dependent, or you have already been caught out as a willful violator of the rules, only then do you have to claim you tried to hire Americans first. | |
| Yep, they let cheaters back in the game. | |
| And who's going to check? | |
| A huge percentage of these applications are filed by middlemen, headhunters, and most of them aren't even American companies. | |
| Here are the top 12 H-1B applicant companies for 2021. | |
| See where it says, outsourcing, offshoring? | |
| If that condom says yes, those companies are body shops that find cheap foreigners to work for American companies. | |
| Out of the top 12, only Amazon. | |
| Google and Facebook are hiring H1Bs for their own account. | |
| Number two, Infosys, based in Bangalore, India. | |
| Number three, Tata, Mumbai, India. | |
| Number four, Wipro, Bangalore. | |
| Number five, Cognizant is in New Jersey, but was founded in India and run by Indians. | |
| Number eight, HCL, Nodiyah, India. | |
| Number 10, | |
| Deloitte, India supports H-1B applications. | |
| Number 12. Tech Mahindra in Pune, India. | |
| How do you make money doing this? | |
| Like any headhunter, you charge a fee for each foreigner you send to an American client and or you skim off part of his salary. | |
| Client pays you $60,000 for the H-1B worker. | |
| You pay the worker $50,000. | |
| Sometimes the headhunter just steals wages. | |
| This 2021 report found that the big Indian body shop HCL, which sends workers to Disney, FedEx, and Google, was stealing at least $95 million a year from H-1B workers. | |
| Amazon only recently reached the top spot in H-1B sweepstakes. | |
| In 2016, it was number 10, way behind the Indians. | |
| But as you can see, all it did was cut out the middleman. | |
| The green chunks, For both males and females, those are Indians. | |
| The red chunks are Chinese. | |
| Sometimes American companies get caught. | |
| In 2021, Facebook had to pay a $5 million fine and pay up to $9.5 million to the Americans it refused to hire. | |
| Foreigners can get H-1B visas for rock-bottom jobs. | |
| VisaPal is a site that tracks who gets what. | |
| So how about this? | |
| The top row is for a 7-Eleven cashier who got $25,000 a year in East Haven, Connecticut. | |
| This is followed by application date and job start date. | |
| In 2015, a cashier in Chino, California slipped in for $18,000 a year. | |
| Here are dancers and cooks. | |
| The dancers' H-1Bs came through in 2010. | |
| But I don't think the prevailing wage that year for a ballet dancer in New York City was under $20,000. | |
| And not one of these cooks was making over $30,000. | |
| I wonder how many of those cashiers and cooks are now U.S. citizens. | |
| And what was the standard for H-1Bs? | |
| Highly specialized knowledge. | |
| What a joke. | |
| The system is full of weird complications. | |
| There is a lottery for applications that exceed the caps, and Indian headhunters load the dice for their customers by filing dozens of online applications for the same guy. | |
| Tech bosses are always complaining about a shortage of American STEM workers, but that's Bosch. | |
| This 2022 article from a researcher at the Economic Policy Institute carefully demolishes that argument. | |
| Bosses just want cheap labor. | |
| And this table shows that from 2016 to 2021, while real wages, the orange bars, grew for other professions, they shrank in computer, math, and engineering jobs, where H-1B competition is worst. | |
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Trump's Criticism of H-1B
00:01:52
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| Some laid-off Americans had to train their replacements. | |
| Even the New York Times didn't like that. | |
| Pink slips at Disney, but first, training foreign replacements. | |
| In 2016, candidate for president Donald Trump slammed the H-1B system. | |
| I know the H-1B very well, and it's something that I frankly use, and I shouldn't be allowed to use. | |
| We shouldn't have it. | |
| Very, very bad for workers. | |
| Candidate Bernie Sanders was an H-1B skeptic, too. | |
| He lambasted tech companies for hiring visa holders at the same time they're cutting other staffers. | |
| Even candidate Hillary lashed out against U.S. IT workers having to train their H-1B replacements, calling the employers callous and insensitive. | |
| When he was president the first time, Donald Trump ordered a review of the H-1B system, but nothing came of it. | |
| Now, of course, he's changed his tune. | |
| Trump supports immigration visas backed by Musk. | |
| I have many H-1B visas on my properties. | |
| Cooks and cashiers, Mr. Trump? | |
| The Indians in his circle, AI chief Sriram Krishnan and Vivek Ramaswamy, want loads more H-1B visas, especially for Indians. | |
| Three million of them in America. | |
| Fourteen times as many as in 1980, just aren't enough. | |
| And I guess the $27.6 billion in remittances Indians shipped back home to India, that's not enough either. | |
| What a deal! | |
| Take jobs from Americans and spend your paycheck in India, not America. | |
| Donald Trump says he's going to make America great again. | |