 he government’s “guest worker” program that allows companies to temporarily hire foreign workers is bringing in more workers than is justified by real economic demand, according to a new study.
The program grants special visas known as “H-1B visas” to foreigners allowing them to live and work in the U.S. up to six years. Workers in the computer and engineering professions receive the majority of H-1B visas, thanks to heavy lobbying in Congress by hi-tech businesses who want to bring in foreigners.
But economic reality doesn’t justify letting so many foreigners compete with American workers, says a report from the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C.
In the study, CIS researcher John Miano found that since 1999, the U.S. experienced a net loss of 76,000 engineering jobs, but since then, the government has approved an average of 16,000 new H-1B visas each year for foreign engineers to enter the U.S.
He also found that since 1999, the U.S. has approved enough H-1B visas for computer workers to fill 87 percent of net computer industry job growth since then. That means American computer industry workers are forced to compete unnecessarily in their own country’s job market with imported foreign workers.
Miano discovered that if current trends continue in the computer industry, the federal government will grant enough foreign worker visas to fill 79 percent of all new computer jobs created in the U.S. every year.
Current law allows as many as 85,000 foreigners to get H-1B visas for private industry, but there is no limit on the number of H-1B visas issued to foreigners who work at non-profit organizations, universities, or government labs.
Corporate advocates of increasing foreign populations in the U.S., such as the Wall Street Journal and The Economist, have argued that each foreign worker with an H-1B visa is so efficient that five new jobs are created in the U.S.
“If that kind of relationship existed, the H-1B program should be creating 500,000 to 1,000,000 new jobs a year,” objects Miano. He says the relationship doesn’t show up in economic data. “It simply is not there. Statistically, there is no linear correlation whatsoever between H-1B visas and job growth.”
But America’s corporate leaders want more H-1B visas. So Sen. John Cornyn, R-TX, a close political associate of President George Bush, has introduced a bill (S. 1083) to increase the number of visas by 50,000 a year, and to grant an unlimited number to foreigners who have graduate degrees from American universities.
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