U.S. Tech Workers

@ifspp we bring together civic minded people to advocate on behalf of American workers harmed by employment visa programs & demand Congress enact reforms.

[U.S. Tech Workers @USTechWorkers]

@Victory202151 Again, go after the low hanging fruit. The H-1B was legislated into existence and requires Congress to reform or put it out of existence.

[U.S. Tech Workers @USTechWorkers]

WSJ: A Princeton PhD in chemical engineering applied to 2,300 jobs, ranging from postdoctoral fellowships to corporate science jobs and software engineering positions. He still hasn’t found a job. 34% of Americans surveyed by Gallup in August said it was a good time to find a quality job.

Meanwhile, Congress is fixated on finding a way to pass a bill that staples green cards to any international student who earns a PhD in the United States.

We should start by asking why our own graduates can’t find jobs before importing more workers.

[U.S. Tech Workers @USTechWorkers]

@JobsNowPR @DHSgov And what better vantage point to do that from than a centralized board.

[U.S. Tech Workers @USTechWorkers]

How about going after the low hanging fruit? Theoretically, @DHSgov can end the STEM OPT extension in 60 days with prudent rule making. That is in your purview.

Then down the road and recognizing OPT was intended to be only “practical” training, shorten the program to only six months. Surely @StephenM has made the case for this?

While we are on the subject of low hanging fruit, @USDOL needs to create a digital bulletin board and require all companies to post new PERM ads there for a minimum of 30 days and allow applicants to apply through a company’s online portal - no snail mail or email a resume allowed. Then audit the results. If you need help with this, surely the folks @JobsNowPR would be happy to assist.

[Homeland Security @DHSgov]

DHS is proud to stand with @VP Vance and the @WHFraudTF on rooting out fraud in our country.

We will continue to root out the fraudsters who are stealing from taxpayers and Americans in need.

[U.S. Tech Workers @USTechWorkers]

@coastallife22 @DHSgov Again, low hanging fruit

[U.S. Tech Workers @USTechWorkers]

@Victory202151 The main issue here is that policymakers want to give every foreign national who earns a PhD in the United States a virtually automatic path to a green card, without considering the job market facing Americans with those same degrees.

[Jobs.Now @JobsNowPR]

Jobs Now has had a banner year!
DOJ has been getting millions in settlements from hidden PERM jobs we exposed - $5M from Instacart yesterday, over $3M from OpenAI in August, and JD Vance's fraud task force banning Microsoft & Adobe from the PERM process.
We are so excited to finally see action to protect American jobs for Americans!

We run the site on a shoe-string budget supported entirely by users. We have decided to finish our crowd-funding campaign this October- if you have been considering supporting our work, now is the time!

If we can raise $10k, this will fully fund Jobs Now through the end of the Trump administration.
On Halloween, we will be turning off our crowdfunding campaigns.

Please consider donating below!
https://t.co/Nn4BXTLMQv

[U.S. Tech Workers @USTechWorkers]

Link to Epoch Times article: https://t.co/6JCJFPqmfM

[U.S. Tech Workers @USTechWorkers]

"Locke said that, in the current process, employers advertising jobs “have to drill down into what they really need in their offered role.”

Lynn questioned that specificity, saying that employers tailor the requirements to disqualify everyone but the worker they want."

(Link to Epoch Times article in replies.)

[John Miano, JD @BjsUiw32692]

If you're looking for an explanation, the DOJ is just bunging. They submitted a brief calling for ad discrimination to be actionable. DHS was posting here a couple of weeks ago about how they were going after ads. Now the AG says ads looking for H-1B are OK. Typical of the admin

[U.S. Tech Workers @USTechWorkers]

@CommonSince46 @AAGDhillon @andrealucasEEOC Congress wrote the law. Only Congress can change it.

[U.S. Tech Workers @USTechWorkers]

Congratulations to @JobsNowPR for exposing Instacart’s discriminatory practices aimed at discouraging U.S. citizens from applying for these jobs. @TheJusticeDept has reached a settlement with the company that will compensate U.S. job applicants who were discriminated against.

[EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas @andrealucasEEOC]

🚨 $5 MILLION SETTLEMENT: @USEEOC and @theJusticeDept @CivilRights secure major action against @Instacart for allegedly discriminating against American workers. Thank you to @AAGDhillon for your partnership in achieving this great result for a class of American workers, comprised of affected applicants and deterred applicants to Instacart.

The agencies found evidence that Instacart’s PERM recruitment practices favored temporary visa holders and created unlawful barriers for U.S. and American workers applying for jobs.

Up to $4 million will be available for affected applicants and deterred applicants, with an additional $1 million in civil penalties.

[AAGHarmeetDhillon @AAGDhillon]

Major win for protecting U.S. workers! Instacart has agreed to a $5 million settlement for discrimination during PERM recruitment. Thank you @andrealucasEEOC for your partnership in getting a great result and sending a message that this administration holds companies accountable.
https://t.co/PCTPAdR2Up

[Lindsay Ellis @lindsayaellis]

I met Jack, an out-of-work chemical engineering PhD, while interviewing job-seekers in all 50 states. Over the past year, we’ve talked AI, Mercor and labor market oddities. His story is a window into a job market many haven’t seen firsthand.

[U.S. Tech Workers @USTechWorkers]

@thevyom Perhaps you should have read the tweet carefully because it mentions it.

[U.S. Tech Workers @USTechWorkers]

https://t.co/hzOIkGTJyu

[U.S. Tech Workers @USTechWorkers]

Rubbish. Understand there are extremely low standards when it comes to where those degrees are obtained. In addition, H-1Bs are handed out by chance, in a lottery. It doesn't matter if the applicant had a B-Tech degree or a PhD from India Institute of Technology.

Moreover, each year 20,000 H-1Bs are set aside for foreigners who attained a master's degree or higher from a U.S. institution. This has created a huge demand for foreigners (the largest population of foreign students in the U.S. come from India.) to enroll in advance degree programs in the U.S. Our universities love this because the foreign students pay out-of-state tuition and to accommodate them, these colleges have created poor quality master's programs - specifically for foreign students to get work permits.

The knock on effects are proving to be catastrophic for our insitutions of higher learning. For instance:
✔️ Universites love this set up because they view foreign graduate students as cheap labor and prefer to hire them rather than Americans.
✔️ Science and math jobs have gotten worse over the last thirty-five years because of legal immigration and guest workers.
✔️ It has led to over-credentialization for jobs. In the workplace this has led to the replacement of competence with proxy.
✔️ It has hollowed out learning because curriculum is now optimized for the credential while practical, tacit and apprenticeship-style knowledge loses status.
✔️ Foreign students are 5X more likely to cheat than Americans.
✔️ American student classroom experience drops when foreign students reach 30 - 80% of the class.
✔️ U.S. colleges are now actively scouting abroad rather than for Americans.

In the end, all these employment visas have done is depress the wages and deny employment opportunities for our college graduates.

[Hoover Institution @HooverInst]

H-1B is the visa US employers use to hire skilled workers from abroad. Workers approved in the FY2021–24 lotteries were far more credentialed than the US workforce overall: 58 percent held a master's degree or higher, compared with 14 percent of US native-born and 15 percent of total foreign-born in the US.

Most earned those degrees here — 71 percent of master's-and-higher petitions went to someone already in the US on a student visa.

Hoover Policy Fellow Sarah Alla @Iagudaeva has the full analysis of what these workers studied and where they ended up working: https://t.co/vFk3WyohpY

[Mark Krikorian @MarkSKrikorian]

Congress Is Fully Aware of Problems in the H-1B program, but Doesn’t Want To Offend Big Tech https://t.co/dVTlsObsqr via @CIS_org

[More Births @MoreBirths]

It is an astonishing fact that half of all births in several Canadian provinces are to mothers not born in Canada. Immigration is 4-7 times native births.

Canada is witnessing one of the fastest demographic transformation in history and will soon be less European than Mexico.

[U.S. Tech Workers @USTechWorkers]

Spot on.

The $60,000 wage figure in H-1B is part of the definition of an “Exempt H-1B non-immigrant.” An Exempt H-1B Nonimmigrant is one who has a master’s degree or higher or earns more than $60,000. All other H-1B nonimmigrants are “Non-Exempt H-1B Nonimmigrants.”
The exempt H-1B nonimmigrant classification appears to two places:
1. Displacement of Americans.
2. Recruitment of Americans
It is unlawful to replace an American with an H-1B worker when:
1. The employer is H-1B dependent (has more than 15% of total employees on H-1B); AND
2. The replacement is a Non-exempt H-1B nonimmigrant; AND
3. The replacement takes place within 90 days of making the visa petition.
Because #3 sets up an impossibility on its own, raising the $60,000 does nothing.

Employers must check a box on the LCA form saying they recruited U.S. workers in good faith for and hired any more qualified Americans when:
1. The LCA specifies Non-Exempt H-1B Workers
2. The employer is H-1B dependent.
The LCA is filed in a vacuum with no job or worker identified. Plus DOL is required to certify the LCA within 7 days as long as the form is filled out correctly. Even if DOL could check, there is no way to verify the anything because there is no worker identified to ensure he is exempt. There is no job, so there is no way to say a U.S. workers was not hired.
Raising the $60,000 does nothing here either.
Even if DOL has some means of checking, the rule only applies to H-1B dependent employers. And about 1/3 of the visas would be exempt anyway.
Congress could raise the $60,000 to $60,000,000,000,000,000,000 and it would have no effect on H-1B.

[Messenger | Exile @Aethelleas]

“Newsweek reports that “Republicans have introduced legislation that would raise a key salary threshold in the H-1B visa program from $60,000 to almost $140,000, a change that could significantly affect some companies that rely heavily on foreign workers.” Under current law, heavy users of H-1B visas ("H-1B-dependent employers", those with 15 percent or more of the workforce on the visas) have to make certain non-displacement and recruitment attestations -- unless they pay the visa workers at least $60,000 or the workers have a master's degree or higher.
In reality the bill (S. 5638) does not represent a meaningful change. Because the lobbyist-written text of the H-1B program has redundancies, Congress could raise the $60,000 figure to $600 trillion and it would have no effect on the program because of the master's degree loophole.
This bill illustrates that Congress is fully aware of the problems in the H-1B program, but does not want to do anything that would offend big tech.”