“The simplest, quickest, easiest fix out there is the Durbin-Grassley bill, I think, but the tech community has been dead set against it,” says Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute. The I Squared bill, says Costa, is a gift to the tech industry, offering “many more numbers and no real reforms.” He says that while Trump’s proposal calls for stronger enforcement, it isn’t very specific, and that deeper reform is needed. “What we’re all talking about here is really just sort of minimum basic standards to make this thing not be a total corporate scam.” In the current system, Costa believes that “US workers are getting screwed and migrant workers who come here are getting screwed as well.” (Ron Hira quoted throughout too)
The Verge
April 21, 2017
Outsourcing companies have acted as middlemen, finding foreign talent then shopping it to companies as a cost savings. Some such companies have broken rules, exploiting the foreign workers while displacing Americans. Two, Infosys and Tata, have been fined millions for such violations, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
The Modesto Bee
April 21, 2017
Marketplace
April 20, 2017
“The union contract in D.C. was awful,” says Mark Simon, an Economic Policy Institute research associate and a former president of the Montgomery County (Maryland) teachers union. “It was an example of the kind of contract that existed in some school districts where the limitations placed on teachers’ time and the specificity of what administrators had to do [for] an evaluation [to] hold weight was so rigid that more often than not, teachers could not be evaluated out of the school system.” Simon added, “If a principal did not get the right documents filled out the right way on just the right line, then the whole thing was thrown out by an arbitrator.”
The American Prospect
April 20, 2017
President Donald Trump signed his “Buy American, Hire American” executive order on Tuesday in an effort to prevent companies from choosing low-wage foreign workers over Americans. The order takes aim at the federal government’s H-1B visa program, which is supposed to help businesses hire highly-skilled, temporary workers from other countries. But critics of the program say it undercuts American workers and that most H-1B visas simply go to IT workers. But supporters say the program is vital to the tech industry, and argue that President Trump’s changes could hurt innovation. In this hour, we discuss President Trump’s order and how it could affect Silicon Valley.
Guests:
Sam Harnett, reporter, KQED
Anastasia Tonello, first vice president American Immigration Lawyers Association; managing partner, Laura Devine Attorneys
Ron Hira, associate professor of political science, Howard University; research associate, Economic Policy Institute; author, “Outsourcing America”
Gokul Gunasekaran, software engineer
KQED
April 20, 2017
The chart below, from Ron Hira of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, lists the top 10 H-1B employers:
All of these companies are, in Hira’s words, “leaders in using the offshore outsourcing business model to sell information technology (IT) services.” There’s quite a bit of evidence to suggest that at least some of these companies are using these visas in a way that doesn’t align with the program’s intent. If the recipients of H-1B visas were indeed highly skilled, we would expect them to be well-paid. But as this chart (also from the EPI) shows, Infosys and Tata Consultancy, consistently two of the biggest users of the program, pay H-1B visa workers less than we’d expect:
Pacific Standard
April 20, 2017
President Trump called on Tuesday for U.S. agencies to “buy American and hire American” and signed an executive order targeting H-1B guest worker visas, which help find foreign labor to fill technical jobs. Critics say the visa system is being abused. William Brangham talks to Economic Policy Institute’s Daniel Costa and Vivek Wadhwa of Carnegie Mellon University Engineering at Silicon Valley.
PBS News Hour
April 19, 2017
En declaraciones a este diario, Daniel Costa, analista del Instituto de Política Económica (EPI, en inglés), dijo que el sistema de visas tiene grandes “defectos” y requiere reformas pero, a su juicio, los empleadores no tienen culpa porque, hasta ahora, la ley les ha permitido “reemplazar a trabajadores estadounidenses” por extranjeros con menos salario. Es el caso en empresas como Disney y Southern California Edison, “y también es legal pagar menos a través de las visas H-1B, en comparación con otros trabajadores estadounidenses debido a los reglamentos de salarios”, explicó el experto. “A través de las agencias federales se puede mejorar el programa, pero la verdadera solución tendrá que salir del Congreso”, agregó. Trumka coincidió con Costa en que, para lograr amplios cambios y una economía “más inclusiva y más justa” para los trabajadores, se requiere la intervención del Congreso. (Daniel’s tweet featured too)
La Opinion
April 19, 2017
ELYUKH: Well, as we just heard Scott say earlier, the majority of H-1B workers across tech and other professions, I have to say – they are paid less than an American worker would get in the same job. And we often hear that there’s a shortage of skilled tech workers in the country, but then what does it mean when H-1B workers are paid less than American workers would get paid? Here’s how Daniel Costa put it. He’s an immigration expert at the Economic Policy Institute which focuses on low- and middle-income workers. DANIEL COSTA: What that tells me is that either employers are using the H-1B program to hire many, many skilled workers and then underpaying them when they’re here, or they’re using it to hire entry-level workers.
NPR
April 19, 2017
“There’s some things that the Trump administration could do at the margins that might help clean up some of the worst abuses in the [H-1B] program,” Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, told NPR’s Scott Horsley. But “legislation is going to be required to really fix the program.”
NPR
April 19, 2017