Grassley: High-Skilled American Workers Struggling to Find Jobs [ Edited ]

[IAmNumber813]

U.S. Senator Charles E. Grassley has sent a compelling letter to President Obama in the aftermath of Obama's interview on January 30, 2012 with Jennifer Weddell (whose husband, like many other Americans, has been out of work for several years while U.S. corporations continue to import foreign workers).

January 30, 2012 Obama/ Weddell interview:

"Why does the government continue to issue and extend H-1B visas when there are tons of Americans just like my husband with no job?", Jennifer Weddell asked.

"The H-1Bs should be reserved only for those companies who say they cannot find somebody in that particular field. So that wouldn't necessarily apply if in fact there are a lot of highly skilled American engineers in that position.", President Barack Obama replied (in part).

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/30/obama-google-plus_n_1242816.html

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9223847/Obama_confronted_on_H_1B_use_during_Google_hangout_?s...

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February 7, 2012

Grassley: High-Skilled American Workers Struggling to Find Jobs

WASHINGTON– Senator Chuck Grassley said today that he is concerned that President Obama doesn’t understand the difficulty that many high-skilled American workers are facing as they look for employment.

In a letter to the President, Grassley notes that the President seemed surprised about the employment struggles of high-skilled Americans when he learned during an online conversation with Jennifer Wedel whose husband, a semiconductor engineer, had been out of work for three years.

Grassley said the administration’s recent policy changes affecting foreign students and spouses of H-1B visa holders puts American workers at a disadvantage.  Instead, Grassley said that President Obama should support his H-1B reform legislation that will help ensure high-skilled Americans are given the first opportunity to compete for jobs.

Grassley’s H-1B visa reform legislation would help to root out fraud and abuse in the program.  The legislation makes reforms to increase enforcement, modify wage requirements and ensure protection for visa holders and American workers.  The bill does not eliminate the program or change the numerical cap of visas available to petitioning employers.  The legislation has been introduced in previous congresses by Grassley and Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois.

Here’s a copy of the text of Grassley’s letter to the President.  A signed copy can be found here.

February 7, 2012

President Barack Obama

The White House

Washington, D.C. 20500

Dear Mr. President:

I read with interest news reports about your Google Plus “hangout” on January 30th, specifically your conversation with Ms. Jennifer Wedel.  Ms. Wedel told of her husband’s personal struggle in trying to find employment despite the fact that he has an engineering degree and over ten years of experience.  She expressed concern that the government continues to distribute H-1B visas at a time of record unemployment.

I was surprised to learn that you responded to Ms. Wedel by saying “industry tells me that they don’t have enough highly skilled engineers.”  You also said that “the word we’re getting is that somebody in that kind of high-tech field, that kind of engineer, should be able to find something right away.”  You said there’s a huge demand for engineers across the country, with which Ms. Wedel seemed to take issue.  Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) would also suggest otherwise.  According to the BLS, the unemployment rate for electrical engineers rose 3.7% from 2006 to 2010.

Your response to Ms. Wedel leads me to believe that you don’t understand the plight of many unemployed high-skill Americans. Mr. Wedel’s situation is all too common.  Thousands of qualified Americans remain out of work while companies are incentivized to import foreign workers.  I’m concerned that you’re hearing only one side of the story -- from businesses who claim that there are better and brighter people abroad.

Despite your online chat and interest in investigating the problem, just last week, your administration proposed rules to “attract and retain highly skilled immigrants.”  The Department of Homeland Security will expand the eligibility for foreign students to stay in the U.S. under the Optional Practical Training program.  This program does not have U.S. worker protections, nor does it require that employers pay prevailing wages to these foreign students/employees.  Your administration will also provide work authorizations to spouses of H-1B visa holders, thus increasing the competition for many Americans who are looking for work.   It’s astonishing that, at this time of record unemployment, your administration’s solution is to grant more work authorizations to foreign workers.  These initiatives will do very little to boost our economy or increase our competitiveness. 

Nevertheless, I’m encouraged by your statement that “The H1-B should be reserved only for those companies who say they cannot find somebody in that particular field.”  I have long believed that it’s not unreasonable to ask businesses to first determine if there are qualified Americans to fill vacant positions.  It seems you may agree with this premise.

Therefore, I strongly encourage you to endorse legislation that I have cosponsored with Senator Durbin in the past.  Our bill, which has been included in various comprehensive immigration reform proposals, warrants your leadership.  With your help, we can reform the H-1B visa program and ensure that Americans like Mr. Wedel are on equal footing with foreign workers who are flooding the market.

While I’m glad that Mr. Wedel has been contacted by many employers since your online discussion took place, there are many more highly skilled Americans that need our help and attention.  I hope you’ll work with me to make changes to the H-1B visa program on behalf of all these Americans.

I appreciate your consideration of my views.

Sincerely,

Charles E. Grassley

United States Senator

http://www.grassley.senate.gov/news/Article.cfm?customel_dataPageID_1502=38933

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Boycott Companies That Boycott American STEM Professionals

[pitz]

I guess the question that begs to be asked is why should American workers only be on an equal footing with the foreigners?  Shouldn't there be a clear preference for....heaven forbid....Americans?  In their own country? 

Guys like CodeCorrector like to point out that he's more skilled than most Americans in the tech sector.  And he's mostly right.  The problem is -- had the letter and the spirit of the law been followed, he would have never been admitted to the United States, and an American (or heaven forbid, a Canadian) would have been hired to the position(s) he occupied, would have gained the experience, and would now have a resume like his.  Tech labour wasn't cheap in 1999, but there were a lot of fairly useless projects (can you say "3com Audrey"!  "Pets.com") that were occupying valuable engineering talents' time that might have been better rationed elsewhere.

Will there ever be redress for the travesty of destroying the careers of more than the past decades worth of grads?  Or the 50+-year olds laid off in droves in the overall industry for no reason other than the top managers felt like expanding the bonus pool?  Its a real quagmire the 'leaders' have put us into -- essentially being treasonous towards the domestic "best and brightest", even, like Obama, spreading industry lies and propoganda about the availability of qualified workers.

[bg6638]

If Grassley's letter even made it to Obama, it probably is sitting in his trash can! Obama could CARE LESS about US STEM workers! He only cares about the blue collar union worker only to the point where he has enough "sheep" brainwashed to get him re-elected! You don't elect a person with strong Marxist beliefs President of a country with a struggling economy based upon capitalism and expect that it will become vibrant again with their leadership! End of story ...............................

[JCPOPESCU]

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pitz wrote:

I guess the question that begs to be asked is why should American workers only be on an equal footing with the foreigners?  Shouldn't there be a clear preference for....heaven forbid....Americans?  In their own country? 

Yes there should be and righteously so.  Look what happened to Germany prior to and during  World War 2, the fall of the Roman Empire, and how nations crumbled due to lax immigration .   Language, borders, and culture is what defines a nation and the USA stands to lose it's sum total existence should there not be substantially and signficiantly more stringent immigration requirements.

Guys like CodeCorrector like to point out that he's more skilled than most Americans in the tech sector.  And he's mostly right.  The problem is -- had the letter and the spirit of the law been followed, he would have never been admitted to the United States, and an American (or heaven forbid, a Canadian) would have been hired to the position(s) he occupied, would have gained the experience, and would now have a resume like his.  Tech labour wasn't cheap in 1999, but there were a lot of fairly useless projects (can you say "3com Audrey"!  "Pets.com") that were occupying valuable engineering talents' time that might have been better rationed elsewhere.

The attraction of H-1B candidates over the domestic talent stock boils down to a question of wages and indentured servitude.  An H-1B can't move freely in the employment marketplace as can a US citizen. The very fact an H-1B and most "skilled guest worker" visas require industry sponsorship should raise some serious questions about working conditions, wages, and workplace rules.   

There's none, zip, zero, zilch, nada, credible standard metrics , much less measuring critereon and objective studies that even begin to suggest "skilled guest workers" are superior to the US domestic talent stock. 

There's however, plenty of misinformation, biased studies, and just crap research done by the East Indian IT firms and their acolytes claiming there is .  And the **bleep** is a reputable authority on race relations...

Will there ever be redress for the travesty of destroying the careers of more than the past decades worth of grads?  Or the 50+-year olds laid off in droves in the overall industry for no reason other than the top managers felt like expanding the bonus pool?  Its a real quagmire the 'leaders' have put us into -- essentially being treasonous towards the domestic "best and brightest", even, like Obama, spreading industry lies and propoganda about the availability of qualified workers.

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Obama, Clinton, Bush, and every last US President since, roughly, 1981 pretty much drank the industry Kool Aid of a broken K:12 education system and the old saw of a lack of "Science and Math" education, and the economic health of the USA being contingent upon how many guest workers the US Imports annually.

[usa49]

Please kick out every H1b and L1. They are eating American IT alive. They are no better than American IT workers.They are lowering wages and working conditions. The operate in a gang at work place and boss around American workers.Kick them out as soon  as possible.

[pitz]

Ummm, was this thread just heavily censored??? 

[jblocks]

Grassley or numbersusa or someone should tell Ross Douthat  that, writing in the NY Times Op Ed page today

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/opinion/sunday/douthat-can-the-working-class-be-saved.html?_r=1&re...

Can the Working Class Be Saved? By ROSS DOUTHAT

CHARLES MURRAY’S “Coming Apart,” the book that’s launched a thousand arguments this winter, is a brilliant work with an exasperating conclusion. What’s brilliant is Murray’s portrait, rich in data and anecdote, of the steady breakdown of what he calls America’s “founding virtues” — thrift and industriousness, fidelity and parental responsibility, piety and civic engagement — within America’s working class, and the personal and communal wreckage that’s ensued.

What’s exasperating is what the author suggests policy makers can do about the social crisis: in essence, nothing.

Or at least nothing realistic. Instead, Murray argues that our leaders should embrace his own libertarian convictions, scrap all existing government programs (and the dependency and perverse incentives they create) and replace them with a universal guaranteed income. This is a fascinating idea; it’s also fantastically impractical, and entirely divorced from American political realities. Which means that it’s divorced from any possibility of actually addressing the crisis that Murray so vividly describes.

That said, much of the criticism that “Coming Apart” has received from liberals is exasperating as well. Murray’s critics accuse him of essentially blaming the victim: the social breakdown he described may be real enough, they allow, but it’s an inevitable consequence of an economic system that Republicans have rigged to benefit the rich. In the liberal view, there’s nothing wrong with America’s working class that can’t be solved by taxing the wealthy and using the revenue to weave a stronger safety net.

If Murray’s prescription for the social crisis is an exercise in libertarian wishful thinking, this liberal alternative is a mix of partisan demonization and budgetary fantasy. It was globalization, not Republicans, that killed the private-sector union and reduced the returns to blue-collar work. It’s arithmetic, not plutocracy, that’s standing between the left and its dream of a much more activist government. Even if liberals get the higher tax rates on the rich they so ardently desire, the money won’t be adequate to finance our existing entitlements, let alone a New Deal 2.0.

So let’s step back. The crisis in working-class life Murray describes is arguably our most pressing domestic problem. But we are not going to address it by gut-renovating our welfare state to fit a libertarian ideal, or by dramatically expanding the same state in pursuit of an unattainable social democratic dream.

What we can do instead is take modest steps, in areas where culture and economics intersect, to make it easier for working-class Americans to cultivate the virtues that foster resilience and self-sufficiency. Here are four such steps:

First, if we want the poor to be industrious, we should do everything possible to make their industry pay off. The current tax-and-transfer system imposes a tax on work — the payroll tax — that falls heavily on low-wage labor, and poor Americans face steep marginal tax rates because of how their benefits phase out as their wages increase. Both burdens can and should be lightened. There are ways to finance Social Security besides a regressive tax on work, and ways to structure benefits and tax credits that don’t reduce the incentives to take a better-paying job.

Second, if we want lower-income Americans to have stable family lives, our political system should take family policy seriously, and look for ways to make it easier for parents to manage work-life balance when their kids are young. There are left-wing approaches to this issue (European-style family-leave requirements) and right-wing approaches (a larger child tax credit). Neither is currently on the national agenda; both should be.

Third, if we expect less-educated Americans to compete with low-wage workers in Asia and Latin America, we shouldn’t be welcoming millions of immigrants who compete with them domestically as well. Immigration benefits the economy over all, but it can lower wages and disrupt communities, and there’s no reason to ask an already-burdened working class to bear these costs alone. Here the leading Republican candidates have the right idea: We should welcome more high-skilled immigrants, while making it as hard as possible for employers to hire low-skilled workers off the books.

Finally, if we want low-income men to be marriageable, employable and law-abiding, we should work to reduce incarceration rates. Prison is a school for crime and an anchor on advancement, and there’s a large body of research — from scholars like U.C.L.A.’s Mark Kleiman and Berkeley’s Franklin E. Zimring — suggesting that swift, certain punishment and larger police forces can do as much to keep crime low as the more draconian approach to sentencing that our justice system often takes.

This agenda would not require the kind of radical (and implausible) transformations of government that both libertarians and liberals often pine for. Neither, admittedly, would it radically transform the lives of the people it aims to help. But it would do good at the margins of a large and growing problem, and that is no small thing.

[lesleyp]

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pitz wrote:

Ummm, was this thread just heavily censored??? 

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Nothing has been removed or edited from this thread, according to the audit logs.

[IAmNumber813]

Feb 10, 2012 - Grassley Weekly Video Address: H-1B Reform

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=8IyZ4fLsmws

"During his weekly video address, Senator Chuck Grassley presses President Obama to support his legislation to root out fraud and abuse from the H-1B visa program and ensure qualified Americans have the first opportunity to compete for jobs. Grassley highlights a discussion between the President and Jennifer Wedel who called attention to the difficulty many high-skilled Americans are having finding employment in this area."

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Boycott Companies That Boycott American STEM Professionals

[twins.fan]

We need to contribute money to Senator Grassley's campaign.  We have no stronger ally in Congress than Senator Grassley!!