"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast" -Oscar Wilde |
"The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself." -- Proverbs 11:25 |
Anyone who follows the whole H-1B/L-1 visa debate knows that each side of the controversy takes their turn at lobbing reports, charts and statistics back and forth. I personally find the whole routine kind of a time-waster. No one's going to change their minds just because they're looking at a new set of numbers. That said, it's still important to get the facts established to counteract a lot of misinformation put out by deep-pocketed interests who are still trying to pretend that their primary intent is not to hire people at lower wages. So, I've decided to go ahead and promote this fine report prepared for the Center for Immigration Studies by prominent anti-H-1B attorney (and co-founder of The Programmers Guild) John Miano.
The report, H-1B Visa Numbers-No Relationship to Economic Need, only uses publicly available data that can easily be verified by others. Miano drew his sources (as outlined on pages 2 and 3 of the .pdf file) from the Immigration and Naturalization Service (and its successor organization, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service), the Department of Labor's Foreign Labor Certification Data Center, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Since these are government agencies, the data would presumably be from neutral, third-party sources. I wanted to provide direct links to all of the sources, but it would be a somewhat tedious process. I did find that everything can be found quite easily through your favorite search engine.
The Key Findings, as directly quoted from page 1 of the report, are:
On to other matters. I certainly can't ignore this report out of Edison, New Jersey of the naturalized Indian-American citizen who was arrested last Wednesday and charged with visa fraud and conspiracy to commit visa fraud. Nilesh Dasondi, who is a member of his township's zoning board, owns CyGate Software and Consulting. This company has offices in New Jersey, Canada and (of course) India. According to the Department of Labor's Foreign Labor Certification Data Center, for Fiscal Year 2007 alone, his company filed for, and had approved, 59 Labor Certification Applications for approximately 150 H-1B workers.
It seems that not everyone he has brought into the country has rare computer skills that are in low supply in the United States. Some of the men he brought in have outstanding talents in running greeting card stores, while all of them were falsely put onto his CyGate payroll through a "running the payroll" scheme.
What boggles my mind is that, assuming these men did not have master's degrees or above, they were all subject to the H-1B visa cap of 65,000 per year. Since the number of applications is far higher than the number of visas that are granted, these 6 men were chosen through a random lottery process. What are the odds that all of Dasondi's people would have won the lottery? We can only logically assume that he had filed applications for a much higher number of people than just the six who were ultimately chosen at random.
Update: InfoWorld's Ephraim Schwartz published an excellent Reality Check blog post about Miano's study.
(Cross-posted at Carrie's Nation.)
Labels: H-1B