Sacramento News10/KXTV Reporting On H-1Bs—Which They Seem To Have Never Heard Of Before
03/02/2015
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The very existence of the H-1B Visa seems to be news to Sacramento-area TV station News10/KXTV. The first words out of the anchorlady's mouth in this video are "Right now there are hundreds of thousands of foreign workers in good-paying jobs thanks to a special visa called "an H-1B."

Working for VDARE.com, I tend to forget how little most Americans—including the press—know about the immigration issue.

Foreign workers fill hundreds of Sacramento-area IT jobs

A U.S. visa allows people to come to this country for high-tech jobs, News10/KXTV, February 24, 2015.

The story is an exceptionally egregious one, though—the state of California is using  H-1Bs to process unemployment claims.

It's nearly 8 p.m., and inside a state office building two dozen computer experts design and troubleshoot a system that will take and process millions of unemployment claims each year.

It's a $200 million Employment Development Department project, but with the exception of two managers, everyone inside the office is from outside of the U.S. They are employed by Deloitte, a major U.S. IT company hired by the state to create and manage its Unemployment Insurance Modernization project. The mostly Indian nationals are allowed to work here under a visa program called H-1B.

Tech companies like Microsoft, Intel, Google and Facebook say they need hundreds of thousands of foreign workers to fill jobs here because American colleges can't crank out computer science grads fast enough. In 2013, the industry lobbied Congress on the issue to the tune of almost $14 million.

Those companies, who need workers with highly specialized knowledge like computer expertise, are awarded the visas through a lottery process. It's allowed under the Immigration and Nationality Act and administered by the U.S. Department of Labor.The visas can be valid as long as six years.

News10 reached out to several H-1B workers over the past three months, and they all declined to comment for this story.

"The program is going unfettered, unchecked, without bounds, and it's all in the interest of profit," Computer Database Administrator Chris Brown said. He said was displaced by one of the special visa workers in 1996, and he has been following the issue for the past 18 years. [More]

It's a good story, featuring quotes from Dr. Norm Matloff, and with immigration enthusiast Giovanni Peri being invited to give the Treason Lobby side—saying that "giving visas to certain foreign workers leads to job growth". To the extent that it does, it does so for other immigrants.

The article ends with a quote from Chris Brown of  Hire Americans First: "Americans will continue to suffer at the expense of this program, and lobbyists and senators will continue to get more wealthy."

As I say, a good story, but one that at VDARE.com I've been not only reading but writing for about 15 years.

 

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