The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“U.S. WORKERS NEED MORE PROTECTION UNDER OUR IMMIGRATION LAWS” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Labor was published in the Senate section on pages S15570-S15572 on Oct. 24, 1995.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
U.S. WORKERS NEED MORE PROTECTION UNDER OUR IMMIGRATION LAWS
Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, legal immigration within the limits and rules of our immigration laws has served America well throughout our history, and is one of the most important elements of our national strength and character.
Clearly, Congress and the American people today are rightly concerned about illegal immigration. There is broad bipartisan support for effective measures to crack down on this festering problem. But we must be careful to ensure that attitudes toward illegal immigrants do not create a backlash against legal immigrants.
In general, the current laws and policies on legal immigration work well, and we must be hesitant to change them, especially those that give high priority to encouraging family reunification and enabling U.S. citizens to bring their spouses, children, parents and siblings to this country.
But one area of legal immigration that needs reform is in the rules protecting American workers. It has become clear that protections for U.S. workers under current law have not kept pace with changes in the American labor market and the world labor market.
This problem is particularly serious in our laws permitting the entry of temporary foreign workers--the so-called nonimmigrants. Hearings conducted earlier this month by the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration, under the able chairmanship of Senator Simpson, have revealed the depth of this problem.
U.S. companies are increasingly out-sourcing activities previously performed by permanent employees. More firms are resorting more often to the use of temporary workers or independent contractors as a way of increasing profits and reducing wages and benefits, even though the result is less in-house expertise for the firms.
Often, the workers brought in from outside are U.S. citizens. But increasingly, U.S. firms are also turning to temporary foreign workers. Yet, this little known aspect of our immigration laws includes few protections for U.S. workers.
Current laws governing permanent immigrant workers require employers to try to recruit U.S. workers first. The Department of Labor must certify that efforts for such recruitment have been carried out before an employer can sponsor an immigrant worker. This process has some shortcomings, but it is intended to guarantee that immigrant workers do not displace American workers.
A serious problem is that our laws governing temporary foreign workers contain no such requirement. They are based on the outdated view that because they enter only temporarily, few protections for U.S. workers are required. Current law does not require employers to try to recruit U.S. workers first, and the Department of Labor has little authority to investigate and remedy abuses that arise, such as the underpayment of wages or the use of inadequate working conditions.
As a result, a U.S. firm can lay off permanent U.S. workers and fill their jobs with temporary foreign workers--either by hiring them directly or by using outside contractors.
In one case, a major U.S. computer firm laid off many of its U.S. computer programmers, then entered into a joint venture with an Indian computer firm that supplied replacement programmers--most of whom were temporary workers from India.
While reforms are needed in this area, we must be careful not to throw the baby out with the bath water. Many temporary workers who come here provide unique skills that help the United States to stay competitive in the global marketplace. For example, such workers can bring unique knowledge and expertise to university research programs developing new medical advances and new technologies.
As Congress takes up far-reaching reforms in legal immigration, it is vitally important that we recognize these basic distinctions. Stronger protections for American workers are needed. But they are not inconsistent with preserving an appropriate role for foreign workers with unique skills.
In our subcommittee hearings earlier this month, Secretary of Labor Robert Reich proposed three important changes to our immigration laws on temporary foreign workers. I believe these should receive serious consideration by Congress.
Secretary Reich proposed, first, that these employers should be required to make good faith efforts to recruit U.S. workers first--
before seeking the entry of a foreign worker. Second, he proposed that employers who lay off U.S. workers should be precluded from seeking foreign workers in that field for at least 6 months. Third, he proposed that the length of time that temporary foreign workers may remain in the United States be reduced from 6 years under current law to no more than 3 years, in order to reduce the overall number of temporary foreign workers in the country at a given time.
In addition to these three thoughtful proposals by Secretary Reich, the bipartisan Commission on Immigration Reform, chaired by former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, has recommended that employers who request immigrants also be required to contribute to the training of American workers. As the Commission stated in its report last June,
To demonstrate the bona fide need for a foreign worker and to increase the competitiveness of U.S. workers, an employer should be required to pay a substantial fee, that is, make a substantial financial investment into a certified private sector initiative dedicated to increasing the competitiveness of U.S. workers.
Each of these proposals is worth serious consideration by Congress--
both for permanent immigrant workers and for temporary foreign workers. As Congress moves forward in the coming months on far-reaching immigration reform legislation, it is essential that we enact stronger safeguards against unscrupulous resorting to foreign workers at the expense of American workers, and I look forward to working closely with my colleagues in the Senate and the House to achieve this important goal.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that a recent article from the Washington Post--``White-Collar Visas: Importing Needed Skills or Cheap Labor?''--be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:
White-Collar Visas: Importing Needed Skills or Cheap Labor?
(By William Branigin)
A large New York insurance company lays off 250 computer programmers in three states and replaces them with lower-wage temporary workers from India. A Michigan firm sends underpaid physical therapists from Poland to work at health care facilities in Texas. A company in California advertises that it can supply employers with ``technical workers'' from the Philippines at low pay.
Even the White House resorts to cheap technical help, using a company that imports most of its workers from India to upgrade the president's correspondence-tracking computer system.
As Congress considers major changes in immigration law, the Department of Labor and a number of professional associations and private citizens are citing cases such as these in urging an overhaul of a little-known immigration program designed to meet shortages of highly skilled workers in certain
``specialty occupations.'' The debate highlights much broader dilemmas that the nation faces as it tries to decide how many foreigners to admit and what qualifications to demand of them.
Each year, tens of thousands of such workers from around the world are brought into the United States under the H-1B visa program, which admits computer programmers, engineers, scientists, health care workers and fashion models under
``nonimmigrant'' status.
Businesses say they need the program to obtain quick, temporary professional help that cannot be found in the U.S. work force. They say the visa category enables them to hire people with ``unique'' skills--the ``best and brightest'' that the world has to offer--and to compete in an increasingly tough global market.
Advocates of this and other employment-based visa programs cite numerous cases in which foreign professionals with special expertise have made valuable contributions to American science and technology and have helped create jobs in the American economy. But the Labor Department says the H-1B program also has been widely exploited to bring in thousands of foreign professionals and technicians whose chief attraction is that they are willing to work for much lower salaries than their U.S. counterparts. Many are imported by job-contracting firms known as ``body shops,'' which recruit the foreign professionals and hire them out to major U.S. companies at a profit.
In many cases, ``employment-based immigration is used not to obtain unique skills, but cheap, compliant labor,'' said Lawrence Richards, a former IBM computer programmer who formed the Software Professionals' Political Action Committee last year after colleagues were laid off and replaced by lower-paid programmers from India.
Richards and other critics of the H-1B visa program described the imported professionals as ``techno-braceros,'' the high-tech equivalent of migrant farm workers.
They charged that the program is driving down wages in certain sectors, displacing American workers and bringing in foreigners who often are effectively ``indentured'' to their employers. In the long run, they predicted, it will accelerate the flight of high-tech jobs overseas, discourage American students from studying for those occupations and produce the very shortages it was designed to alleviate.
In addition, some immigrants have used the program to set up lucrative job-contracting concerns that discriminate against Americans in hiring, sometimes even as they receive federal assistance for minority-owned businesses.
To remedy what he says is a situation ``fraught with abuse,'' Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich is seeking major reforms under immigration legislation now being debated in both chambers of Congress.
``We have seen numerous instances in which American businesses have brought in foreign skilled workers after having laid off skilled American workers, simply because they can get the foreign workers more cheaply,'' Reich said in an interview. The program ``has become a major means of circumventing the costs of paying skilled American workers or the costs of training them,'' he added.
``There is abuse of the current nonimmigrant system, but it is by no means overwhelming,'' argued Austin T. Fragomen, an immigration lawyer who represents major U.S. corporations,
``To the extent there is abuse, [it] occurs among small, relatively unknown companies'' and should be ``controlled through more effective enforcement,'' he said in written Senate testimony last month.
``It is minimally widespread,'' said Charles A. Billingsley, of the Information Technology Association of America, a pro-immigration group. ``Are U.S. workers being put out of work by foreign workers? Probably. But the occurrence is minuscule.'' In any case, he said, H-1B visa holders account for only `` a fraction of the U.S. work force.''
Such arguments are not much comfort to John Morris, who owns a computer consulting firm in Houston. He said he lost his largest customer, a major oil company, when he refused to supply it with cheap foreign programmers.
``Greed is the reason they're doing this,'' Morris said.
``Anybody who says it ain't greed is smoking rope.''
He said he also has turned down a Chinese company's offer to provide programmers for placement at $500 a month in jobs that usually would pay $5,000 a month.
``The Chinese are desperate to get in here,'' Morris said.
``This is economic warfare.''
In 1990, Congress passed an immigration act that raised a cap on permanent employment-based immigration from 54,000 to 140,000 a year in response to fears of an imminent shortage of scientists, engineers and other highly skilled professionals. A separate provision created the H--1B visa category, which lets in as many as 65,000 professionals a year for stays of up to six years. These workers are supposed to be paid ``prevailing wages'' and not used to break strikes.
The H-1B provision requires no test of the U.S. labor market for the availability of qualified American workers, and it does not bar businesses from replacing U.S. workers with ``temporary'' nonimmigrants.
In practice, critics say, ``prevailing wages'' have been defined too broadly to prevent many job contractors from significantly undercutting the salaries usually paid to Americans. Moreover, the anticipated shortages did not materialize, in part because defense industry cuts after the end of the Cold War added to the ranks of an estimated 2.3 million Americans who have been laid off so far this decade.
In Senate testimony last month, Reich called on Congress to prohibit employers from hiring nonimmigrant workers in place of Americans who were laid off. He said companies should be required to show they had tried to ``recruit and retain U.S. workers' in the occupations for which nonimmigrants were sought. He also recommended that the permitted stay of these workers be reduced to three years.
``Hiring foreign over domestic workers should be the rare exception, not the rule,'' Reich said.
The labor secretary noted that although nonimmigrant workers are admitted on a ``temporary'' basis, many stay for years, sometimes illegally. More than half of foreigners granted permanent resident status in fiscal 1994 originally came in as nonimmigrant students or ``temporary'' workers, Reich said.
In response to ``abuse'' of the nonimmigrant programs, over the past three years the Labor Department has charged 33 employers with wage violations involving more than 400 workers in physical therapy and computer-related occupations.
In one case, the department found that an Indian-owned firm in Michigan called Syntel Inc. had ``willfully underpaid'' its Indian computer programmers, who came to the United States under H-1B visas and made up more than 80 percent of the company's work force.
In November last year, American International Group, a large Manhattan-based insurer, paid off 250 American programmers in New York, New Jersey and New Hampshire and transferred the work to Syntel. Syntel assigned some of the work to about 200 Indians it had brought in, reportedly at about half the American's salaries, and gave the rest to much to much lower-paid employees at its home office in Bombay. During their last weeks of employment, the laid-off U.S. workers were even required to train their replacements, Reich said.
``It was clear that Syntel did not bring in any special skills that we did not have,'' said Linda Kilcrease, one of the full-time programmers who lost their jobs.
Another Michigan company, Rehab One, was found by the Labor Department to have underpaid physical therapists it brought in from Poland. The workers, who came in with H-1B visas, were assigned to U.S. health care facilities, primarily in Texas, and were paid as little as $500 a month, the department found.
In New Jersey, a major shipping company, Sea-Land Services, laid off 325 computer programmers this year and replaced them with Filipinos supplied by Manila-based Software Ventures International. The Americans. who were paid about $50,000 a year on average, also had to train the lower-paid Filipinos, most of whom eventually returned to Manila to carry out the work even more cheaply there.
``I was outraged,'' said Jessie Lindsay, one of the former Sea-Land programmers. ``There were highly paid technical jobs leaving the country. . . . What's the point of getting an education and technical training if companies can get away with hiring at slave wages?''
Mastech Corp., of Oakdale, Pa., a company owned by two Indian immigrants that has won millions of dollars in consulting contracts with the federal government, has brought in about 900 of its 1,300 workers from India under the H-1B program. From 1991 until Sept. 30, one of its contracts, obtained under a set-aside program for minority-owned businesses, involved ``computer system integration, installation, maintenance and operational support for the White House correspondence system,'' the presidential press office said.
``We have been lumped in with some other companies that allegedly underpay their foreign workers,'' a Mastech executive said. ``We are not a low-paying company.''
One of the latest controversies over the H-1B program erupted last month after it was reported that the National Association of Securities Dealers had laid off 30 contract computer programmers and hired an Indian firm, Tata Consultancy Services, to do the work. The government-chartered association, based in Rockville, Md., owns, operates and regulates the Nasdaq Stock Market. Tata, which has a regional office in Silver Spring, is part of a huge Indian conglomerate that company officials say produces everything from tea to computer software.
An NASD spokesman, Marc Beauchamp, said Tata would employ about 40 people on the project, half of them working here on H-1B visas and half at Tata's home office in Bombay. He denied that any full-time NASD employees were fired and said that ``fewer than 20 outside contractors could possibly be affected'' by the move.
The Indians essentially would be maintaining ``outmoded technology'' so that regular NASD programmers could ``focus on new technologies'' and perform ``more challenging work,'' Beauchamp said. ``We found it made no business sense to hire programmers that we would have to pay more than, or as much as, the people we have on staff,'' he said.
Neither NASD nor Tata would disclose details of the contract. However, Tata insisted that it follows all U.S. regulations and wage requirements.
``We are not a body shop,'' said A. Sruthi Sagar, the firm's personnel manager. ``We are not in the business of providing cheap labor to the United States.''
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