A bipartisan duo in the Senate has drafted an unprecedented bill to curb the little-known but huge L-1 visa program, which allows multinationals to import hundreds of thousands of white collar workers while paying them home country wages.
The L-1 reform is combined with a reform of the H-1B visa, which keeps roughly one million foreign white collar workers in the Fortune 500 jobs that are needed by skilled American graduates and innovative professionals.
“Congress created the H-1B and L-1 visa programs as limited pathways for businesses to acquire top talent when it can’t be found at home,” said a Monday statement from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He added:
Over the years, many employers have used them to cut out American workers in favor of cheap foreign labor. Congress must step in again to bring integrity back to these programs and restore dignity for American and foreign workers. There’s bipartisan acknowledgement that these programs ought to be returned to their intended purpose. Our bill would make that shared goal a reality.”
“Major companies are laying off thousands of American workers while filing thousands of visa petitions for foreign workers at depressed wages and poor working conditions,” said a statement from Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL), the top-ranking Democrat on the judiciary committee. “Congress must step in to protect American workers and fix our broken immigration system.”
The bill sets new wage rules, time limits, and approval procedures for L-1 visa and H-1B workers.
The move is backed by a bipartisan, left-to-right alliance of Sens. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
Americans are increasingly recognizing the damage done by the various programs, said Rosemary Jenks, cofounder and policy director of the Immigration Accountability Project. Tech professionals are “definitely speaking up… they’re coming out of the woodwork,” she told Breitbart News.
The L-1 Visa Program
The L-1 program receives almost no coverage in the mainstream media, partly because the federal government provides limited information about its scope and impact.
It allows multinational companies to import skilled workers and managers if their claim to have “specialized knowledge” is approved by embassy officials. Those permissions were readily granted under President Joe Biden. Companies also used to win “blanket visas” to import many migrants with minimal review by the embassies.
From 2019 to 2023, the U.S. embassy in India approved L visas for at least 176,006 people, including the children and working spouses of the L-1 workers.
However, Donald Trump’s deputies are now restricting the award of L-1 visas.
In theory, the program was established to help international companies set up operations in other countries, for example, setting up production lines or complex machines. But that useful goal is often disregarded by companies when embassy officials are under orders to let more L-1a employees and L-1b managers.
The program is now mostly used by Indian outsourcing companies to import very cheap workers for U.S. contracts, and to reward favored employees with the promise of fast-track green cards and U.S. citizenship.
“The L-1 visa is largely a black box,” said a May report by the AFL-CIO’s Department for Professional Employees. “There is no publicly available data showing how much L-1 workers are paid or the duration of their stays,” said the report, which estimated the L-1 workforce to be roughly 315,000 foreign workers.
The workforce is large because the L-1 migrants can stay for 5 or 7 years. This means that many foreigners have a huge incentive to pay their foreign managers for L-1 visas in the hope of migrating to the United States.
The report noted:
For example, in late 2013, tech company Electronics for Imaging was fined by DOL and ordered to pay back wages to nonimmigrant workers who were paid just $1.21 per hour to work 120 hours per week installing computer systems in California. The employees were likely on L-1 visas. Since there is no prevailing wage requirement, the company was only required to pay its foreign employees the state minimum wage
The business-backed Cato Institute, unsurprisingly, defends the wage-cutting outsourcing program: “Eliminating the L‑1 visa program would harm job and [total] wage growth in the United States by making it much more difficult to expand businesses here.”
Many of the imported L-1 workers work alongside the roughly 750,000 H-1B workers, plus roughly 250,000 spouses of H-1B workers, and at least 200.000 recent foreign graduates of U.S. universities.
The L-1 reform bill joins the rush of other reform plans being pushed by Sen. Jim Banks (R-OH), Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO), Grassley, and by President Donald Trump.
“The large-scale replacement of American workers through systemic abuse of the program has undermined both our economic and national security,” said a September 19 proclamation by Trump establishing modest curbs on the H-1B program:
The number of foreign STEM workers in the United States has more than doubled between 2000 and 2019, increasing from 1.2 million to almost 2.5 million, while overall STEM employment has only increased 44.5 percent during that time. Among computer and math occupations, the foreign share of the workforce grew from 17.7 percent in 2000 to 26.1 percent in 2019. And the key facilitator for this influx of foreign STEM labor has been the abuse of the H-1B visa.
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The abuse of the H-1B program is also a national security threat. Domestic law enforcement agencies have identified and investigated H-1B-reliant outsourcing companies for engaging in visa fraud, conspiracy to launder money, conspiracy under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, and other illicit activities to encourage foreign workers to come to the United States.
The Christian Science Monitor reported in June:
In a recent Tallo survey of more than 2,000 people ages 18 to 30, 62% of respondents said that they were not working in a field that they intended to … Additionally, the same survey found that 1 in 4 said that they couldn’t find a job in their intended field.
Bloomberg News reported on September 29:
It’s not just recent college graduates who are struggling to find entry-level positions. Out-of-work mid-career employees are taking part-time jobs, and hiring has stalled in industries from professional services to manufacturing. More than a quarter of the jobless have been out of work more than a half-year — the highest share since the mid-2010s excluding the pandemic-era years.
Industry leaders blame the tight job market in Artificial Intelligence technology, but that technology has had little impact on job numbers so far.
Instead, critics of the visa worker programs say early-career job opportunities are being blocked off by the huge flood of visa workers, mostly from India. The migrants are eager to take any job at low wages, because life in the United States is better than back in India, and every job offers the hope of getting a green card.
In February, Bloomberg reported on a lawsuit that claimed that many L-1 workers were improperly imported by an Indian-run subcontractor for Fortune 500 companies. The lawsuit was filed by Anil Kini, who was brought to the United States to manage other Indian workers doing tasks subcontracted by Denver-based Western Union Co., Bloomberg reported:
Kini supervised 37 employees. All but two of his team were from India, and they had replaced Western Union’s previous [American] staff, according to Kini … In all, Kini said that of the 22 L-1A visa employees on the Western Union account, only eight performed managerial roles [as required by the visa].
The lawsuits described by Bloomberg say that executives directed low-level managers to justify the L-1A visa requests by claiming the requested ordinary Indian workers were actually managers:
Indian national Vinod Govindharajan says that TCS obtained his L-1A visa in 2013 by falsely stating on his visa application that he was a manager in a business development role when in fact he had no subordinates. He says that securing his L-1A visa allowed the company to circumvent tighter H-1B rules and bring him to Edison, New Jersey, where he alleges he was paid half of what his US counterparts in the same job made. Angry at TCS and struggling to pay his bills, he filed a complaint in 2018 with the EEOC, which enforces federal laws prohibiting workplace discrimination.
The EEOC investigated the matter and found “credible documentary evidence” that TCS “frequently falsifies documents in support of L-1 visa applications,” according to a “final determination” letter the agency sent to Govindharajan, his attorney and TCS in 2019. The letter also said the agency determined visa workers from India are paid at much lower rates than their American colleagues, and that TCS had retaliated against Govindharajan for raising his concerns.
Many critics say the “AI” threat cited by corporate executives actually refers to “All Indian.”
A recent survey showed that a large majority of Democrat-leaning tech professionals see the H-1B visa program as a threat to their careers. The survey reported 56 percent of the Americans polled said “they view H-1B visa holders as direct competitors for jobs.” Sixty percent of U.S. citizens said that “U.S. citizens and green card holders should be given hiring priority.”
But the vast white-collar migration has already pushed millions of American graduates out of white-collar jobs, so contributing to Kamala Harris’ defeat in 2024. A February 10 article in the Washington Post outlined one example of a displaced American software manager who is learning to become a farmer:
Since being laid off from Indeed last year, [Daelynn] Moyer has applied to more than 140 jobs but received no offers. She and her wife are considering selling their house near Portland, Oregon, and buying land to farm instead — worried whatever job she finds won’t cover her mortgage. “It would be a meager existence, but it would be fulfilling,” Moyer said.
“Eliot Lee, 52, a project manager at a Utah software company, said after losing his job [that] Recruiters told him they would often receive more than 1,000 applications for a single position,” the Post added.
So far, Trump and his deputies are zig-zagging towards an industrial polices that downplays immigration and promotes the alternative policy of reliance on skilled American citizens, automation, robots, and trade.
“We’re going to need robots … to make our economy run because we do not have enough people,” he told Breitbart News. “So we have to get efficient … we’ll probably add to [the existing workforce] through robotically—it’s going to be robotically … Then somebody is going to have to make the robots. The whole thing, it feeds on itself .”
The promise of cheap labor is ” a drug that too many American firms got addicted to … [and] globalization’s hunger for cheap labor is a problem precisely because it’s been bad for innovation,” Vice President JD Vance told an audience of Silicon Valley investors in May. He added:
And whether we’re offshoring factories to cheap labor economies or importing cheap labor through our immigration system, cheap labor became the drug of Western economies. And I’d say that if you look in nearly every country, from Canada to the UK that imported large amounts of cheap labor, you’ve seen productivity stagnate.
“That’s not a total happenstance — think that the connection is very direct,” Vance added.
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