Send your congress person and senator's this letter!

The H1-B program, which Congress created in 1990 to ease the claimed temporary shortage of skilled workers in the high technology field, has failed the American worker. In 1998, as a temporary remedy for a claimed desperate labor shortage in the high technology field, Congress nearly doubled the number of H1B visas available for the following three years, and imposed a fee on employers that was meant to fund training programs to improve the skills of U.S. workers.



If we are indeed collecting fees to train American workers then how could we need nearly double the number of H1-B visas?



More than fifteen years after the inception of the H1-B program, employers continue to call for more H1B visas, while little effective training of U.S. workers has been accomplished, and wages and other conditions in the industry have deteriorated.



Where can the American worker go to request training which should be paid for by these fees?





One of the fundamental flaws in the H1-B program is that it does not test the U.S. labor market. As the DOL acknowledges on its own website, ???H1-B workers may be hired even when a qualified United States worker wants the job, and a United States worker can be displaced from the job in favor of the foreign worker.???



Why as my Federal Representative would you allow this to happen?





Employers are simply required to file an attestation of the wages and working conditions offered to the H1-B workers with the Department of Labor???s Employment and Training Administration.

The Department of Labor has no authority to verify the authenticity or truthfulness of the information; the Department can only review the application for omissions and obvious inaccuracies.



Again as my Federal Representative would you allow this to happen?





The United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded last year that the DOL was failing even in that minimal task. For example, from January 2002 through September 2005, DOL electronically reviewed more than 960,000 applications and certified almost all of them. Moreover, GAO found over 3,000 applications that were certified even though the prevailing wage rate for the application was lower than what is required by statute, in some cases, more than $20,000 lower than what is required by law.



This says to me the laws you helped create are being broken, yet you are not taking any steps to fix them. Would you agree with me when I say there are enough unemployed people here in Michigan that we could train to fill these jobs?





The H1-B program was enacted to fill a spot labor shortage, while workers in the U.S. obtained adequate training and education in high tech and professional jobs. In reality, the poor design of the H1-B program has failed to meet the training objectives, and instead has facilitated and accelerated the outsourcing and off-shoring of jobs.



I fail to understand how you could allow legislation to become enacted that helps ensure my job will be outsourced, after all I???m helping to pay your salary!





The largest users of the H1-B program are outsourcing firms, whose business is to move jobs overseas. These firms import H1-B workers, train them in U.S. companies, and then send the workers back home, taking with them the jobs that they were previously doing in the United States. In fact, in many instances, U.S. workers were forced to train their H1-B replacements.



How is it than you can take your pay while passing or allowing programs to remain in place that ensure your constituents have to train an immigrant to do their job? I mean really wasn???t the H1-B program developed to bring over HIGHLY Skilled workers for shortages? If they are so highly skilled why does the American worker have to train them?



Your immediate reply and focus on correcting this degrading and critically ignorant program would be greatly appreciated!





Thanks,

Andy